December 9, 2011
The New Year is almost upon us with new thoughts, new actions and new projections for what should be achieved. So what should your organisation or charity be focusing on? Finding a fundraising manager? Establishing more events to program into the year so you bring in more funding…does it always have to be just about funding?
We think not.
Sharing, photos, reality and new forms of innovation will be the key trend to hit the world of branding within the third sector. If you’re not utilising it, then it’s about time you did. It will effect the bottom line at the end of the year, improve the balance sheet in the annual accounts, and impart the truest form of advocacy from your benefactors. Just because you cared enough to think about them.
Applying a process
The immense scene of social media within the landscape of presentation has grown exponentially. Strategies are driven behind activity through Facebook and Twitter, Search Engine Optimisation techniques develop almost every month with new algorithms from the engines powering search, requiring a skill set only a few company’s care about, and the management of the social network that you’ve created, is a full time job in itself.
How do you cope with the new workload? How can you automate relevant tasks so you don’t have to micromanage your social presence? How can you measure all this activity so it doesn’t take a whole day or a whole week to gauge the activity?
Simple, share the workload with people who care enough about your benefactors and the balance sheet. Most people I know can do this in their sleep, but then again most people I know do nothing else but think about design, SEO and measure efficiency rates of the tools at their disposal. Just so their clients get a better understanding of who their customers are.
Streaming your way through 2012
As we tag our way through our lives, adding meta data to our visual experiences and simplifying all our uploads, we get a clearer picture as to what it all means for the organisation that utilises this form of sharing. New marketing language has been formed and digital startups like Pinterest, are changing the face of how we share our digital visual language with people around us.
Visual social networks are going to bring endless opportunities to charities that want to provide a new form of message delivery. Photography, once again, will become a wordless and powerful driver for brand delivery to global audiences, not just to the home market. It will allow you to build story streams of the work you do, harness social behaviours and make sure you have a narrative that expresses your brand perfectly.
Keeping it real
Bring yourself to life. It’s as simple as that. The world has gone from being connected to being so hard wired into the fabric of activity that everything is in the now. Organisations that wait for the ‘right time’, will ponder at their suffering, further increasing its lagging nature by not taking the risk of acting in the present.
Technology will aid in the process of effective and immediate delivery of everything you want to say. Even to the smallest charity or organisation, globalisation is a force that can be used deftly with creative thinking and entrepreneurial spirit.
Innovation in-house
Fostering creative work practices will also become more common in organisations. Innovation has long been seen at the core of disruptive technologies and new product launches or service deliveries. Becoming more people-centric will be the new in road into adding value to your brand. Risk taking will be the heart of innovation and boldness of thought with empathetic customer insights, at the forefront of any new campaign.
Staff will have more fun when organisations approach this new way of thinking internally. Happy employees mean they become owners of everything the organisation does, empowering and driving new processes to the development of it. Value is increased and ultimately recognition of a brand that stands out in the customers’ mind, is the end result.
The job of being creative is everybody’s so that everyone can share the benefits of good. Good is new, new is now and your brand has a story to tell.
We look forward to helping you read well in 2012.
March 31, 2011
Acumen’s technical director, Leo Brown, and lead designer, Hash Varsani, are raising funds for Peace Direct running the Brighton Marathon on April 10th.
A marathon is a tremendous task but the first Brighton Marathon (in which Leo raised over £1,000 for Peace Direct) was a fantastic turnout which made the task much more bearable.
Leo’s training for this year’s marathon started on January 1st 2011 and with 1 week to go, the payoff is almost palpable.
Any donations will be gratefully received by Peace Direct – just follow the link below!
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Total Distance |
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Peak Distance |
http://www.justgiving.com/aculeo
http://www.peacedirect.org
http://www.brightonmarathon.co.uk
February 26, 2011
Being the most popular CMS in the world, and a superb back end system, WordPress still has a lot to be ashamed of behind the scenes: messy code, inconsistent naming schemes, an obscure library system and awful database schemas.
A lot of this contributes to very poorly performing code – and not in the way that many of the “well designed” CMSs perform poorly (because they’ve been over-thought), but because scalability and caching has not been built in at all levels.
This article will take you through the steps of optimising an existing WordPress install to purr again, either after many years of service which have bought it to it’s knees, or a massive jump in content that’s exposed parts of your template that really slow things down.
1. Keep WordPress Up to Date
On the whole, whist adding features, the WordPress team is also is working on optimisations which you can take advantage of by moving to the latest version available. Typically we use the Subversion repositories so that it’s only a single command to bring everything in line with the latest release. You’ll also benefit from having a greater number of plugins available that can help optimise your CMS – your plugins can also be kept up to date via Subversion or the back-end system. See more on this in my post on WordPress and Subersion.
2. Use Caching Plugins
This isn’t the place to go into detail on all the WordPress caching plugins available – but many of them will get the performance you need. At Acumen we typically use W3 Total Cache due to the advanced caching options and cache database engines (it supports Disk, Memcache, APC, etc)
3. Use PHP Optimisers
Again, there are many explorations of speeding up PHP on the web. At Acumen we use APC due to its simplicity to install on Linux.
4. Tune your template
First, turn off any and all caching plugins, and use Firebug or Google Page Speed to inspect page load time. This is important because it reflects the loading time of content that may at any point become uncached (after it’s been edited, after a cache expiry, etc). If you’re finding that some of your pages are loading slowly, you’ll need to look at the exact code you’re using and see if a simpler alternative can be written. In extreme cases you might need to write your own SQL to work around WordPress’s lack of recursivity options in the available system queries, or even add your own caching to your template’s queries.
Another template “gotcha” is out-of-date resources you might be linking to. If WordPress doesn’t find a page that’s been requested, rather than generating a simple 404, it spends time analysing what content it could serve instead – using expensive algorithms like Levenstein it will search for similar pages and still not find that Javascript file you deleted. This can visually really slow down the load of your template, so make sure there are no red (40X) lines in Firebug’s “Net” window.
Note that browser-based analysers aren’t the only approach to analysing the performance of your template. If your server is struggling to serve your user’s requests, it’s likely the nominal load will be greater than 0 (we’re talking UNIX here, obviously). In this case, you can set a target to bring your server back into a 15-minute average of no more that 0.3.
If you’re really struggling to identify where code issues are coming from, you can consider the MySQL –log option, which will write a list of all queries it’s supporting.
5. Clean Stale WordPress Files
One great new feature of WordPress 2.6+ was that it keeps a revision of every page. You may want to remove existing revisions by deleting all `posts` with `post_type`=’revision’, and setting a template variable like the below:
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS',3);
That’s it for now- if you’ve any other suggestions for speeding up WordPress, leave them below and we’ll work them into this article!
