Welcome to May on the Signals blog! The Signals website has had a bit of a spring clean - the banner for this month's post is just a taster of our new look. Have a browse around for updated content to get a sense of what we have been doing for our clients lately.

Here at Signals, we've been using photographs, illustrations, videos and music for our digital projects for two decades now. We typically need images to support customer presentations, animations, web content or as part of the mix for our online document collateral projects.

Specifically, the royalty free photo marketplace has changed a lot, with plenty of contenders and choices for getting the perfect image for your project. I personally recall using a selection printed catalogues of images from Corbis and the like, and having to order a 35mm slide by post - the cost would be around £100-200 a shot and if you lost the slide you'd be in big trouble - and I did. We now have the beneift of advanced keyword image search tools with colour matching, orientation and budget controls, it's alot easier to find the right image, and to try before you buy and to share lightboxes with customers.

However easy the image seach tools are, price is the biggest factor when purchasing images. If you have budgeted for images in a digital project then you have to be careful to price them right in advance, and if you are happy to absorb the image costs as part of the project materials you will be just as keen to not overspend. Charging for the time it takes to find the right image is also quite hard to justify, so you really need to be quick, and sort out the good from the bad with ease. 

Image libraries are also an excellent resource for vector images - for icons, elearning content etc. Many image libraries are also adding video content into the results, and music too (which was historically always handled via MCPS routes) - remember all those CD's!!!

With the advent of sophisticated online image catalogues a few years back, the premise of cheaper, quicker royalty free images was a real revolution for digital artists, designers and agencies. Istockphoto really stuck out for us a few years back as being good value and having a wide selection for pool from. In the past year or so they've definately got more expensive, and with screen resolutions constantly on the up, the smaller Xsmall size (425 x 282 px) at say 3 credits (£4.50) is by no means cheap.

Bespoke photography and illustration is always another option if you just can't find what you need. We sometimes commission local photographers to do product shots or location shots on behalf of customers. And if you need a special illustration, try Illustration Web  and connect with talented artists.

A couple of tips

• Your image selection has to be right for you and right for your customer - Always use a comp image if in doubt and get approval before you commit to purchase. 
• Re-use images over and over for different projects. 
• Never 'take'images of google search to use in your commercial projects.
• Do not send the purchased image to the customer - you are not allowed to do that!

Our Top 5 favourite photo libraries

www.istockphoto.com
www.gettyimages.co.uk
www.shutterstock.com
www.alamy.com
www.corbisimages.com

Regards,

Richard,

Creative Director 

April has arrived and Spring is only just begining to flourish. It may have been snowing outside, but the Signals studio has been celebrating with a host of staff anniversaries to mark. Happy Anniversary wishes to Gianna, Richard, Debbie, Jo.....and to Anastasia too - we can't believe it's been a year already!

We'll be rustling up some cash for Red Nose Day as always, with a little auction in the studio. The blog will be sniffing out some tips for social SEO and writing quality code.

Ahh quality assurance and standards in the IT industry. They either range from the non-existent to the downright complex. ITIL, ISO 9000/9001 they all seem to be waste paper generators. But there is another crude way. This article on Joel Spolsky's site (him of Stackoverflow fame), gives a simple checklist for developers. It was written a few years ago, but the thrust of his arguments are, in my opinion, still relevant today.

Another way to ensure top quality work is good communication; regular planning poker can help keep you on your Agile toes.

With January's business of welcoming new additions and making new years' preparations done and dusted, we can enter February with a look forward to a very special birthday year for one of our local clients, and some monkey business in the studio......check back later in the month to find out more! 

This year marks the 20th year of the Henley Youth Festival (HYF). This unique festival celebrates the talents and achievements of young people in the Henley and surrounding areas across a wide range of creative and sporting activities. The event is run entirely by dedicated volunteers with the support of local business.

Signals have been sponsors of the HYF for a number of years by providing a their Content Managed web presence. Using the Umbraco CMS platform.

Each year the event carries a theme, and this year the theme is "Back to the Future" - with reference to the 20th Birthday.

The HYF are embracing social media fully and have an active Twitter, Facebook and YouTube presence.

We wish them every success as they make plans in the run up to the event which takes place from the 10th March - 16th March 2013.

Today we thought we outline some simple tips to improve your search engine rankings using social media

1.      Social media is exciting, but get the basics correct first. Your web pages should have well defined page titles, not too long aren’t duplicated and get to the point; make sure your pages have unique content and research your keywords. Google Adwords keyword tool and
 Wordtracker are good free keyword research tools.

2.      Social media provides 2 great things search engines love. Fresh content and inbound links. While search engines like Google don’t count links from twitter these inbound links act like a vote of confidence to Google and will increase your search rankings.

3.      Twitter is popular, but don’t forget blogs. Fresh blogs articles engage your visitors and provide new content for search engines. Constantly refreshed content will increase search rankings by reinforcing relevance. There’s even an http/1.1 status code (304), which translates into “not modified” that search engines will use to evaluate the index of your pages.

4.      Add visible ‘like’ buttons to your pages and make is easy for users to share and like you. Facebook shares are believed to be a great catalyst with regards to search engine popularity and rankings. The Share This site is a great place to find tools to do this, but all social media sites offer these services, such as the LinkedIn plugin.

5.      Grow your Twitter following, share news and useful information tips, links (to your site) and reviews. Re-Tweets are a convincing sign of your web-sites popularity. Your Tweets will also show in real-time search results, increasing online search traffic.

6.      Remember monitor social media, don’t ignore it, you might have to engage a vocal minority.

We are pretty proud of the culture we have cultivated in the Signals studio; one of good communication, considered teamwork and knowledge sharing that benefits every individual here as well as the Company itself.

You can see from past socials how this helps us when we are at play! But most importantly it makes us a more efficient operation and certainly a more harmonious one to be part of.

As it turns out, this isn’t down to the highly developed, collaboratively minded, forward thinking personalities that we are! It is in fact something far more primal, as you can see from this study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in which it is demonstrated that sharing plays an important role in a co-operative chimp society.

Thanks to the BBC for sharing this and putting us in our place.

If you have the innate desire to share as a team but are wondering about how to put it into practice, perhaps think about starting an internal Wiki – a great way to knowledge share within an office and across sites – or try a bit of planning poker to get everyone communicating and sharing expertise.