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After a little blip last year, I’m really pleased that we’re able to bring our series of advent tips for smart digital communicators  back for 2013. Helpful Technology was a freelance business when I first started the tips, but now we’ve grown to a gargantuan four people, so this year there are tips coming up…

25 Dec: Happy Christmas! Here’s a little get-it-while-you-can Christmas bonus tip. Even in this day and age, plenty of sites don’t make it easy to grab RSS feeds of listings of news, articles, speeches, publications, consultations or whatever. The creators of Dapper decided this was a shame, and built a neat little app to enable…

24 Dec: in the rush to build apps for everything, it’s easy to lose sight of the easier, simpler and cheaper approach to making your content accessible to mobile users: a mobile version of your site. Huh – isn’t that an app? Not necessarily: with a bit of inspiration and tweaking of your templates, you…

23 Dec: if you’re in the business of mocking up sites or designs for other people to comment on, you’ll have encountered the challenge of making a layout look realistic without having much content to play with. The conventional approach is to use ‘Lorem Ipsum’ or a special chunk of faux-Latin text designed to show…

22 Dec: so, you’ve got your site looking nice. But what happens when lots of people come and look at it? The truth is, most of the time nobody really knows, and the accurate answer is ‘it depends’. But if your site falls over easily or becomes really slow under moderate traffic, The Man will…

21 Dec: digital strategies are meaty things to write, taking into account all the domains of digital and the ever changing environment in which it sits. Here’s a little visualisation I’ve used a couple of times now to help illustrate the direction of travel in a digital strategy: (click to enlarge) There are four key…

20 Dec: the biggest challenge in a web project is getting everyone’s expectations in roughly the same place. The big boss thinks it will engage thousands (but is actually happy with it looking shiny), the (internal) client says it needs to have functions X, Y and Z (but actually doesn’t mind, as long as it…

19 Dec: Ah, the mighty Google. You type in the keyword you want, hit return, and chances are the result you want is at the top. That’s it, right? Here’s a lovely list of some little-known power-user tricks you can use to supercharge your Googling, including some I knew and some I didn’t: The NCR…

18 Dec: Google Analytics is such a good free web analytics package, it’s hard to think of a really good reason why it’s worth paying for something to do that kind of job. Web analytics is a brilliant source of insight into what’s happening with your site, but too often it’s left as another job…

17 Dec: there’s an awful lot of stuff talked about search engine optimisation, much of it peddled by people who make a good living out of making it a dark art. The truth is, some clever copywriting and lateral thinking gets you a long way in search, and there are some simple ways to do…