Design blog, graphic design blog, web design blog, marketing blog, seo blog, creative

Things have been getting pretty busy around BML HQ just recently and we’re looking to establish a network of talented freelance web designers, freelance web developers and freelance graphic designers to call upon as required.

It’s not often that I am compelled to fill out on an online survey, but having just experienced the new look BBC home page I was immediately spurred into voicing my considerable concerns to the corporation.

Firstly I must impress that in general, I am a staunch fan of the BBC. I think that they provide an exceptional service and they constantly lead the way in innovation and quality of media broadcasting. The BBC home page has been the home page of my work and personal computer for at least the last five years purely because it is the simplest, most attractive and most user friendly way to digest the major information of the day.

Unfortunately the new beta BBC homepage is not.

The first time I heard Lana del Ray’s beautiful voice melt together with the soaring strings on her single ‘Video Games’ I knew this artist had something special. It’s almost impossible not to have an immediate reaction to it’s dark, gritty yet incredibly beautiful sound.

I recently stumbled across an interesting statistic whilst running through the visitor stats for the BML Creative website over the last month. For the first time ever, the top three browsers being used by all visitors to our site did not include Windows Internet Explorer.

It has been a bit of a purple patch for BML recently. We’ve started work on some fantastic projects with some great new clients, so we thought we’d share some of the good news.

Firstly, we are proud to announce that BML Creative have been appointed by Gateways School to design their new school prospectus…

In a historic decision, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) has voted to allow the creation of new website domain suffixes. The change marks the largest shake up of the online world since the introduction of .com in 1985.

From next year, Icann will begin taking applications for Internet address names that can end with almost any word and be in any language. Large corporations and cities expected to be among the first applicants.

I was watching rather uncomfortably as the Friendly Fires lead singer pranced around the stage on Jools Holland this week, when things took a dramatic turn for the better… they introduced the up til then unknown (to me at least) Nathaniel Rateliff…

It’s been a great start to 2011 for BML. We’ve enjoyed success in some major pitches and have been privileged to start working with brilliant organisations of all shapes and sizes – not to mention the exciting work we’ve been tackling for our existing client base.

All this has stretched our space requirements some what, so we’ve now moved to a lovely new home at the prestigious Shine Business Centre in Leeds.

As part of our ongoing commitment to offer the best possible service to our clients, BML Creative are now offering 6 months free* website hosting with any new website design.

In an interesting development, Google has released a new Site Blocker tool that allows the individual to prevent entire domains from displaying results when performing Google searches.

The purpose of the new tool is give users the power to block domains that they believe to be offensive – either due to the site content or the quality of the site. The theory is that this filtering out such sites on a user level will provide a better, more relevant searching experience for the individual.

‘Think’ is a Google initiative providing an open forum for everyone to discuss how it is possible to succeed in a world that is moving faster than ever before.

They have a whole YouTube channel with plenty of interesting videos chaired by some knowledgeable experts which are well worth checking out.

We were particularly grabbed by the following video presented by Matt Brittin – the Managing Director of Google UK. In it, he talks about the ‘Connected Kingdom’…

It’s our philosophy that having a decent soundtrack to the working day helps to get the best creativity out of our team.

So we thought we’d introduce a new regular feature called ‘Music from the BML studio’ where we could help to spread the word about some of the artists that our team have been beavering away to recently.

First up is the cracking new single from Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros frontman Alexander, called ‘The Truth’…

If you’ve visited the BML Creative website before, you might have noticed that we’ve made a few adjustments recently. This was in response to user feedback from developer forums and discussions in-house.

V5 features a fixed width structure rather than the the old ‘floating’ layout. We feel that this helps to contain the box elements better giving the site a much stronger look.

The other major change is to the navigation system…

Well, the battle has heated up over the recent accusation from Google that Bing have been copying (stealing) their search results and serving them up as their own.

Last week, Searchengineland.com published an article by Danny Sullivan announcing that “Google had run a sting operation that it says proves Bing has been watching what people search for on Google, the sites they select from Google’s results, then uses that information to improve Bing’s own search listings.”

There was an interesting article on the BBC at the weekend about the increased number of start-up businesses forming in the Leeds and Yorkshire areas.

This was largely put down to enforced circumstances due to increased unemployment levels, but it also reflects a growing tendency for individuals to invest in their own abilities and take control of their own financial destiny.