It’s a very exciting time at Strawberrysoup right now. As the title suggests, we have been asked to help judge the .net magazine awards 2010.

As regular contributors to the magazine and other publications, we were really pleased to be asked by Future Publishing to help judge their coveted awards

The .net Awards website (http://www.thenetawards.com) – in association with Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 – is open now for votes in sixteen categories; Awards include ‘web personality of the year’ and ‘innovation of the year’, which sees the controversial Wikileaks (http://www.wikileaks.com) competing against nominees including Google’s Android 2.2 OS and Adobe’s Flash Player for Mobile.

Held annually since 1998, the long-running .net Awards mix public opinion with those of a leading panel of 100 industry experts, including the likes of Jeffrey Zeldman, Paul Boag and Molly Holzschlag, who deliberate on the final shortlist.

Winners of the prestigious .net Awards 2010 are announced on Thursday, 18th November at a special event in London.

The award categories for this year are as follows:

• Design agency of the year
• Interactive site of the year
• Blog of the year
• Mobile site of the year
• Mobile app of the year
• Innovation of the year
• Web personality of the year
• Redesign of the year
• Podcast of the year
• Video podcast of the year
• Web app of the year
• Open source app of the year
• Standards champion
• Best API use
• Community site of the year
• Viral campaign of the year

The awards are heavily promoted across Future’s portfolio of magazines and websites, with editorial and adverts running across 16 titles including T3, MacFormat and the fast-growing TechRadar.com (http://www.techradar.com), which now attracts over 3m unique users worldwide each month.   Influential online magazine, A List Apart – which explores the design, development and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices, becomes the first-ever .net Award’s media partner. The British Interactive Media Association (BIMA) will be promoting to their members as official industry partner, while Sitecore, Fasthosts and Basekit are category sponsors.

Editor of .net, Dan Oliver said:

“.net magazine is read by thousands of professional web designers and developers from around the world, and winning one of our coveted Awards is a great achievement, made even more special by the fact that both the general public and industry peers take part in the decision process. We work in one of the most dynamic and creative industries on the planet, and these Awards showcase the talent, creativity, and passion that help make the web what it is today.”

Volkswagon have recently had much success with their Fun Theory viral campaign, and they have developed it further with their Fast Lane campaign. We love this slide on the underground video – just goes to show that people on public transport can have fun and enjoy themselves.

The concept of the slides was taken to the extreme by Carsten Holler when he created slides in the Tate Modern.

“The slides changed the daily routine of those who experienced them, altering their modes of traveling and their conception of social appropriateness. In the midst of a public space, traveling down a slide like a child in a playground, one loses all sense of control, exactly what one fears in a collective environment”

We *love* the recent campaign by VW and think it’s just another great way of encouraging you to think fun and slightly different every once and a while!

This video shows another video from VW which relates to improving/speeding up the supermarket shopping experience! (Not sure if this would work for real though!)

We have been working closely with Tennyson Insurance to design and build their new website http://www.tennysoninsurance.co.uk. The new website has been designed with the core aim of making their charity insurance products easier to understand and buy. Embedded video has been used to improve usability and guide users through there journey on the Tennyson website.

Tennyson Insurance were keen to help and assist their charity based customers and decided to design and develop an information based website to support not-for-profit groups to become compliant quickly, easily and free of charge.

Charity Builder UK guides charities through key areas from Human Resources to Health & Safety and helps them produce documents such as contracts, policies, job descriptions as well as practical guides to insurance, governance and volunteering.

If you need help setting your your charity why not take a look at http://www.charitybuilderuk.com/

This is the first website from a series of projects that we have been working really hard on lately!

We won the project after tendering and pitching against 160 other agencies from across the country and we are really pleased with the end result, which is fully content managed and controlled by StrawberrySystem, our very own content management system.

Derby Homes Limited is an arm’s length management organisation – ALMO created by Derby City Council to manage, maintain and improve its council houses and estates.  The organisation is non-profit making and it does not pay dividends to any shareholders.  It is 100% owned and controlled by Derby City Council.

In April 2002 responsibility for managing council homes in Derby moved from Derby City Council over to Derby Homes, along with over 300 staff from the then Council’s Housing Services Department.

If you would like to find out more, why not visit the website here: http://www.derbyhomes.org

Wind Creations is part of the JVR Portfolio, an exciting & innovative group of retail brands based in the heart of Buckinghamshire. In addition to their Wind Creations brand, they also have Mister Juggles, RC Wonders & Sky High Kites all of which are based in Aylesbury.

We were asked to design and develop their 4th website following the same structure as their other websites. By using StrawberrySystem as their base, this task was easy and we created a new, exciting and unique design which further improves sales conversions.

The team at Wind Creations have over 15 years experience in retail and we want to assure all our customers, old and new, that Customer Service is our Number 1 priority. They have supplied many large organisations, such as the Channel 5 Gadget Show, Channel 4 Big BrotherHouse, Caledonian Airways, and many local schools, clubs and event organisers.

To view this project in more detail, why not check out their website: http://www.windcreations.co.uk

We were really pleased to be asked to join in and help organise the latest Meetdraw event. We had enjoyed the previous events and felt that it was a great opportunity to get some London-style, Thursday night networking between the creative agencies in Dorset and the surrounding areas.

Having designed and developed the Meetdraw.com, we understood the ethos behind the event and really fancied working with some other agencies too to organise the best Meetdraw possible. Experience Solutions, PixelFish, 3SidedCube and MindTank stepped in to offer their support, so we had our event team!

The month running up to the evening was spent discussing ideas, deciding who was going to do what and was a great opportunity to understand how each of us would work together. Experience Solutions came up with the idea for the bingo which Pixelfish and 3SidedCube helped develop into Ballsh*t bingo as well as designing posters and the materials for the actual evening (beer tokens, badges etc..) We were responsible for the Twitter/Google map API and MindTank opted to be responsible for the beer tokens on the night – a wise move!!

The evening was the most successful Meetdraw to date, drawing in many new faces and over 160 people attended. It was held at Bar So in Bournemouth who were more than accommodating and gave us drinks offers throughout the evening.

We were really proud of our team, as they all came along from Chichester to show their support and meet new people. You can see more photos from the event here.

We love the design community and the people, agencies and places that everyone works. With this in mind, we launched WhereWeDesign in January 2010 – a new community whereby creative people can share where they work.

The response to date has been fantastic. We have had submissions from graphic designers, architects, web designers, musicians, interior designers and various other creative people who wanted to share their spaces as inspiration to others. There has been lots of activity on social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter.

At the peak of its traffic to date, the website attracted 10,000 visits in one day following a featured on @smashingmag whereby the server crashed due to the levels of traffic that the website received! We are also really proud of the response the website has received from the blogging community, with many personal blogs featuring the website and recommending users to submit their workspaces.

Some of our personal favourites include Parliament, Bark Design and APFEL. Thanks so much for everyone’s support so far, and keep submitting your design workspaces!!

We love working with brands we admire, and we are pleased to announce that The AA has chosen Strawberrysoup to help them design a series of email campaigns for their various divisions.

This exciting project involves both our design and technical team, who are responsible for designing new and innovative ways of displaying information and special offers via emails which are sent direct to The AA’s customers. The emails will be sent to hundred of thousands of subscribers, so ensuring they are easy to read, navigate and that calls-to-action are obvious is very important to the overall campaign success.

You may have noticed that our blog doesn’t receive many comments or retweets. This is mainly due to the fact that we have been using it as a method of publicising our recent website launches, news from within the team and any information from a business perspective that we found useful.

What’s the problem with this? Our target market are not really interested. Its fair enough to be honest – not many people are going to actively think “I wonder what exciting things have happened at Strawberrysoup recently” – unless you are a competitor or friend. People are much more likely to use our blog and subscribe to our RSS feed if we have valuable advice or free tips/content.

With this in mind, we are going to be changing the way that we use our blog from now on with an aim of helping the our online community, giving advice to business owners and helping to grow our Strawberrysoup community. If there is anything that you feel would help you understand a little more about what we do, the process we use, how we charge, what to look for when selecting a web design agency – please let us know, we would love to hear from you!

We have created a new Get Satisfaction account to help us foster comments, thoughts and recommendations, so feel free to use the feedback tab on the left of the screen or comment here. As always, you can keep up to date on Twitter or send us a lovely email.

We have been working with Mike and Ike for the past 3 years and we are really proud of our achievements online to date. We have built up a strong UK following for the brand whilst staying in touch with the consumers with competitions, Twitter feeds and competitions.

The website needed a refresh to keep it inline with International websites such as the US and Canadian versions of the website, so we were asked by Just Born Inc to design and develop the new UK website.

We are really pleased with the end result which both matches the global branding of the sites whilst keeping certain areas unique to the UK such as the blog and competition areas.

Feel free to check out the new Mike and Ike website by clicking here – why not let us know your thoughts?