Welcome to the Access blog

We like to help people out. Wherever possible, we always try to give a helping hand.
Here is a quick update of our recent good deeds!

Simon Landi

Simon set off with his wife, two other intrepid walkers and the dog, completing the 34-mile Sandstone Trail in Cheshire, taking almost 12 hours and raising over £1,100 for The Christie.

Mark Hope

Mark, together with five others from Northern Digitals, embarked on a ‘Manchester to Blackpool’ 62-mile charity bike ride, raising over £1,400 for The Christie. To give himself an extra challenge, Mark rode an additional 38 miles home, making a total of 100 miles!

Kirstie Fisher

Kirstie took part in the 13-mile Shine Manchester night walk for Cancer Research, raising over £200 to bring light to the lives of those affected by cancer.

Helen Holmes

Helen put on her dancing shoes in Singing in the Rain at the Oldham Coliseum, in aid of Francis House Children’s Hospice, raising £2,000. Francis House Children’s Hospice, based in Didsbury, provides care for children and young adults with life threatening conditions.

Access

We’ve created a website “pro bono” for Children Today, a charity that provides grants for vital, life-changing equipment for children and young people with sickness and disability across the UK. The website is due to go live later this month.

At Access, we are proud of our commitment to supporting worthwhile causes and community-based projects. So far this year, Access have contributed to raising over £4,700 for numerous charities and counting!

It’s the unavoidable catch 22. Finances are tight so the last thing you want to do is spend more, but people still need to know about your products and services. The secret to surviving any budget crisis is not to stop spending altogether, but to spend smarter. Find new ways to communicate with your audience and your campaign will pay for itself. We’ve pulled together a few tips that will stretch your imagination, not your budget.

Join the digital revolution…

Online advertising is the most accountable medium available. Once you’ve got a great campaign idea, replicate it across the formats that are most relevant to your consumers and use the marketing intelligence it provides to build your brand.

Poke, Blog and Tweet…

Make use of the vast array of social media platforms to get your message across. Create your own Facebook page, start your own tweets on Twitter or run a regular blog to tell people about your brand. It’s a quick and easy way to get free publicity.

Access Twitter Page

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30 seconds in Wales
(17 hours behind the scenes of our Welsh TV commercial)

We all met up in a dark underpass in Cardiff one chilly evening in May. Our star actress, the lovely Ffion, had to walk back and forth for about 5 hours with a scary guy stalking her and we soon attracted a row of onlookers gathering to watch what was going on. We were all very impressed by the girl who turned up at 8pm and stayed all night long watching, she almost felt like one of the crew in the end! I was glad I’d invested in some new gloves earlier that day as it did get rather cold, but our 11pm pizzas kept us going till about 1am before we packed up all our equipment and went back to the hotel.

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Ladies and gentlemen,

Did you know that these lovely chaps are blowing into a Vuvuzela?

The Vuvuzela

It’s a large horn-type instrument used to create a cacophony of monotone rumblings during African sporting events. If you’re planning to watch any of the World Cup, chances are you’ll be familiar with the sound it makes in a few days time. Unlike Samba drums which are used sporadically during games in South America, these things are used constantly for the full 90 minutes.

It’s certainly making shockwaves. Massive amounts of pressure have been put on FIFA to ban the instrument, not only because of the annoyance factor but also in light of recent reports which claim it can ‘permanently damage hearing’. FIFA duly responded by giving the Vuvuzela its seal of approval.

Fair play I say. It may be excruciating on the ears (fact) but how wrong would it have been to finally give the World Cup to an African nation, only to tell them not to host it in their true spirit and tradition? Plus, if it drowns out some of the dross we’re forced to listen to from the commentary box, I say ‘hoorah for the Vuvuzela!!’

Experience the sound of a Vuvuzela for yourself…

“One word, one look, one gesture…..To you it’s nothing but it all adds up.”

Access were recently featured in the Manchester Evening News for our latest campaign for the Welsh Assembly Government. This is high profile campaign that tackles sexist behavior and violence against women.

For more information visit the “One step too far” website.

Where does harmless end and abusive begin?

We’re just  in the process of rolling out our summer of events programme for Visit Chester and Cheshire. Mia’s created some lovely looking artwork including press ads, leaflets and city dressing.

Eventful Escapes with Visit Chester & Cheshire

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Wolf whistles, horn beeps and pub jeers may seem like innocent behaviour to most people, but it all adds up for women on the end of abusive behaviour. If left unchecked, it can fuel the acceptance of other controlling actions towards women such as emotional and even physical abuse.

The Welsh Assembly Government (WAG) wanted to create a powerful regional TV campaign to get people talking about gender discrimination and highlight the problems of going ‘one step too far’. Access have produced 2 x 30’ commercials, a series of outdoor ads and website visuals for www.onesteptoofar.org

The shoot went without a hitch and the campaign is due to air in Wales in June.

A Typekit Example of Web Font use

In the world of web design, using typefaces other than the very limited list of cross platform system fonts has meant using images, flash or some other piece of webtrickery, often resulting in content being difficult to update, format or index in search engines. This has meant that most web designers have simply stuck to the usual stack of well known and safe options – Arial, Georgia, Comic Sans [gasp -not really] etc and avoided alternative fonts in body of their designs, unless absolutely necessary. However, at a time when the web is moving forward rapidly in so many other ways, is avoidance your only option? I personally think we may have just quietly turned a rather lovely and fruitful corner…

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Over the past 3 years, the Digital team at Access has grown dramatically in number and in work load.  With the steep increase in number and complexity of projects, our Monday morning work-in-progress notes were becoming unworkable. Within hours the sheets were out of date and scribbled on, things were getting forgotten about and there was far too much pinging of emails back and forth. It was becoming evident that we needed a better way of managing tasks within the department.

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I’ve already written about our requirement for a web-based task management system for the digital department. Here you can download our Task Manager code that we ended up using so you can try it out for yourself!

Screen shot of the main task list (currently displaying one open task)

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