Apple’s iOS browser Safari dominates the mobile market with 61.5% share as of Nov 2012, with default Android browser at just 26% share:
Browsing from smartphones and tablets now accounts for 10.4% of the entire browsing market, however users still prefer traditional desktop and laptop computers, which account for 89.3% of all browsing.
From this data we now support building mobile-versions of our website in Safari for iOS 5+ and Android browser 4.0+.
We have 3 months of a free Dropbox Pro account to the first person who asks.
What is Dropbox you may ask? Its the best damn backup system alive, any files inside your Dropbox folder on your computer are automatically synced to ‘the cloud’, and shared on your other computers, or friends & colleagues if you allow them access to a certain folder.
What’s best is Dropbox lets you undelete, yes UNDELETE, any file for a month. It also saves versions of your files, so you can go back a version or two, anytime. Not just docs, images, pdfs, whatever.
Even better, once you’ve uploaded a file, you can simply ‘Get Link’ for that massive 80mb Photoshop file and email the link, no big files to send and no full inboxes on the other end. We use this daily.
All this while you work, save, edit your files, silently (and quickly) in the background.
Checkout www.dropbox.com, you won’t regret it.
Do you backup your computer? Is it ‘off site’, i.e you keep a copy not at home or work in case of a fire, theft or flood?
We are starting Backup Buddies, where you backup your stuff (encrypted of course) on a hard drive, and hand it to a buddy for safe keeping in case your house burns down / is robbed / flooded.
Get a cheap 1Tb Harddrive for $78, and you’ll save hundreds when your computer dies.
Yes, WHEN it dies, its a matter of time, not if, as the IT geeks like to say ‘there are those who have lost data, and those who will’.
Email market share from May 2012 shows iPhone is second most used client after outlook. Time to make mobile emails… thanks to the guys at Litmus.
Email client usage worldwide, collected from 101 million email opens.
Yes you can get Photoshop for $15.
Pixelmator is a Mac only Photoshop alternative, its absolutely brilliant and does 95% of what most people do with Photoshop… I’ve been using it professionally for 2 years and don’t have Photoshop installed anymore.
$15 bucks from the App Store:
http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/pixelmator/id407963104?mt=12
On top of that, they have genuinely useful Tutorials (and a gorgeous website). Yes I like them very much.
http://www.pixelmator.com/tutorials/#basic-tutorials
This is a huge one for everyone here at Evolved Websites, finally our Evolved CMS can auto-update itself to the latest version, with just 1 click.
We made a little video to celebrate:
From v9.6 upwards.
Our eNewsletters area of the online manual for Evolved CMS has had an overhaul, we’ve added 5 new video tutorials on Creating, Editing, Sending and Reports for eNewsletters, view here (or click on the image below):
We believe in testing all our clients websites in the major browsers in use today, as of Jan 2012 our list includes:
To speed up testing and development, we use a number of online browser testing services we thought we’d share, in order of brilliance.
These guys do an awesome job of email and website previews (even if they are limited to static images of each website so you can’t scroll around or test Javascript like slideshows etc).
We have been using this UK based outfit for years and heartily recommend them:
You can also share any results with clients, such as this sample of a new Home page and slideshow for Brookfarm:
https://evolvedwebsites.litmus.com/pub/e38bf7e
View their full offerings at http://litmus.com
We’ve only just discovered this service which lets you browse any website using actual browsers, not emulators, so far so good, and we’ll likely signup for their professional account at $19 per month (unlimited testing).
An older service which lets you take a screenshot using just one IE browser at a time, since using Litmus I have to admit we don’t use this anymore. It can be quite slow, but is free and still useful if you can’t afford to pay for a one-off testing session:
Seems like everyone is on Facebook these days, so we’ve decided to make it so much easier to share your website updates on your Facebook Page.
If, like us, you have a Website, a Facebook Page and a Twitter account it can be a nightmare to keep all three updated, with our new ‘Share on Facebook / Twitter’ feature its a simple 3 step process:
1. Add new information on your website:
2. ‘Share on Facebook’
3. Review what’s about to be shared (above)
..and edit as you please, then press Save, and its instantly sent to your Facebook Page:
A lovely new feature, give us a shout if you want to upgrade…
Next up, Twitter integration in a week or so.
(available for CMS v9)
Not only can you now see what your customers are searching for, right in the CMS Admin and on the public website as Top Weekly Searches, these searches also become new, highly focussed pages in Google and other search engines for the search terms.
E.g. a search on Ask A Naturopath for ‘tea tree‘ shows a range of treatments for blackheads, candida and others.
Here’s a little video we made explaining how it work:
This is the blog of Evolved Websites, written by owner and founder Yari McGauley.
We write monthly on new technology that our clients can use in their businesses, without being tech-savvy.