I’ve been working with BBC Worldwide again, this time on some web marketing to support the TV advertising of new Top Gear Turbo Challenge magazine. The magazine provides children with information on the world’s top cars and the BBC Top Gear TV show, as well as featuring some great free gifts with the first five issues; top gear trading cards, stig stationery, stickers, a top gear rucksack and beanie hat.  (more…)

On Monday night I attended an HP and AMD sponsored event ‘HP On the Rocks‘ with my graphic designer wife. The function was at at the Natural History Museum’s outdoor ice rink bar in London. Guest star at the event, fresh from a previous night’s singing on the X Factor results show, was Jamie ‘Afro’ Archer (right with my wife Sue).  We had a great night, and I managed to give the new Hewlett Packard DM3 laptop a test drive on Windows 7 – probably one of their better looking machines, quite dinky and funky without being flimsy, not the sort of thing I usually associate with HP at all. (more…)

With Christmas approaching the folks at RacingPost.com asked Firetop to design and build an interactive gift suggestion tool. The single page tool at http://gifts.racingpost.com lets people identify their preferred RacingPost.com product and compose a personalised HTML email message to a friend or relative highlighting their Christmas gift selection. The page contains a dynamic data capture form which populates an HTML email with a relevant image and text… and can also be previewed live as it is composed by the user! (more…)

For a month or so we’ve been working with the folks at Letts Filofax Group Ltd on their new personalisedproduct.com website. It’s a service which enables customers to print their Letts branded diary, calendar, notebook or Filofax refills with their own photographs and personalised dates – perfect Christmas gifts. Powered by the personalised publishing technology of Penwizard Ltd, Firetop have been overseeing the search engine marketing (PPC) – looking at all the usual elements of keyword research, targeting, budgets and day-parting/scheduling to increase margins on sales. (more…)

With modern technology evolving as fast as it is, it’s always useful to get the opinion of the younger generation on what’s up and coming in the digital environment. Our young apprentice web designer (aged a little under two and a half) is getting to grips with web usability and layout, today she came to work (late grr!) for two minutes to lay out a basic website design – a 2 columned content area, left menu and horizontal banner… take a look at her handy work, we were fairly impressed: (more…)

This week we’ve put the finishing touches to a site redesign for one of our long standing clients in estate agency recruitment – Property People Recruitment (PPR).

PPR came to us back in 2004 and we built them a site and Content Management System (CMS) to enable them to post jobs and manage candidate applications / CV uploads. This time round they had a new template designed by a chap called Jason Shoffman and Firetop were tasked with cutting Jason’s PSD  files into SEO friendly HTML and populating the content via the existing recruitment CMS (see right). (more…)

It was with much sadness that I learned today of the recent passing of a former employer Jim Tappenden – Chairman and joint founder of the Spearhead Training Group. There are always significant points of our lives which shape the path that we take in life and the people that we evolve into, often these moments involve key individuals, in my own case Jim was one of these vital people. (more…)

This month the Firetop designers have been hard at work in creating a new optimised website design for William Reed Business Media and the Federation of Wholesale Distributors (FWD). Their rebranded magazine Wholesale News (formerly ProWholesaler) now has a shiny new website design at www.wholesalenews.co.uk (right) incorporating their content and news headlines from thegrocer.co.uk.

The site sits on a PHP/MYSQL based Content Management System (CMS) powered by Hungarian web development company Pressflex. The folks at Pressflex have been super efficient and managed to tweak our HTML to fit their needs for all browsers (including the dreaded IE6). We like their CMS, it works very nicely indeed for publishers and enables traditional print-based publishers to upload XML files for each printed issue whilst also editing and tagging the content themselves.

In 1987 I picked up a second-hand copy of a Fighting Fantasy adventure game book called The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and was completely hooked. The idea of the book was (and still is) simple, you read a paragraph and choose which path/action to take next by browsing to relevant numbered paragraphs – attempting to complete the book in the process. For a 10 year old boy this level of pre-video game escapism was very addictive. I seem to recall that the book cost me a mere 10 pence, a small sum that lead me to  read nothing else but the entire Fighting Fantasy range for the whole of that school year. Today whilst Googling I discovered that 22 years on The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is being released as a Nintendo DS game in October 2009!

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In this, Firetop Limited’s sixth year in business as a Limited company, we finally made some time to rebrand and produce a new website to go with it! I hope that this new website – which is a hybrid of a blog and a corporate website – provides a more insight into what Firetop has become and those that are involved in client projects, as well as more regular news and a return to blogging! (more…)