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!

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

Location, location, location…

If you do go down the digital route, make sure your ads are being seen by the right people, in the best location. Online technology allows us to track user’s movements right down to the last click, so use this information to tighten your targeting.

It’s good to share…

See if you can find any complementary companies or organisations that you could team up with to book advertising space and share campaign messages. It could halve your budget and double your profile.

Be a pillar of the community…

Get involved in pro-bono work, write a piece for the local paper or sponsor your local football team. Positive word-of-mouth is one of the simplest ways to raise your profile regionally.

Don’t kill the radio star

Booking a 30 second spot on a local radio channel can be a relatively inexpensive way of reaching a specific audience. Offer to be interviewed on a hot topic and see if you can negotiate down the rate further.

If you don’t schmooze, you lose…

Networking with other local businesses can give you ideas on how to move forward and help you to understand where your weaknesses and strengths are. Setting up collaborations can also strengthen your business offering.

Choose your agency wisely…

A good advertising agency understands that their success is based on yours.

So they’ll go the extra mile to make things happen for you, making sure you choose the most effective channels to make your budget go further.

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.

The alarm went off early and we headed over to a local bar to start filming the next scene. It’s amazing how many people are involved in the production of a TV commercial – with all the actors, extras, crew and clients we were all in all 48 people! A lot of organising, but a lot of fun! In the bar scene we had the challenge of directing the actors and actress when they were speaking Welsh… Although, for some unknown reason, people often think I’m Welsh myself, this is not the case, so my Welsh vocabulary has never been better than it is now after this little trip. It’s just unfortunate that I won’t get much use of lines such as “I wouldn’t mind a piece of that” or “She’d have it”, so I think I’ll have to stick to speaking English for now. Despite the language barriers this shoot went really well, we even managed to get some shots for our advertising campaign despite the tight schedule.

Next up was the van scene and this was the only time we really needed the weather to stay dry. I’m sure you can guess what happened… just before we headed out onto the busy street it started raining – we must have brought the rain with us from Manchester. But by the time all the camera gear was set up it was only drizzling, so we were quite lucky in the end. People thought we were joking when we told them that the bus stop where they were queuing wasn’t actually a real bus stop, but our very own portable one that we had brought with us… I think even the bus drivers looked a bit confused! We were very happy with our casting of loud builders, but it was almost scary how quickly they got into their characters, shouting and leering at our poor Ffion. The wife of our main “builder” was looking suitably impressed watching her husband hanging out of the window eyeing Ffion up… The director, Adam, and myself were hiding in the back of the van, directing the “builders” whilst the van was being pushed by 5 strong guys… you wouldn’t guess that when you watched the ad would you!?

When we arrived to the office location we were greeted by a whole marching band, which we thought was an extremely friendly welcome to Cardiff Bay! Our sleazy boss didn’t disappoint and the shoot went very smoothly indeed. At this point I think Ffion had had enough of all the men following, commenting, shouting, leering and staring at her during the past 24 hours, but she did extraordinary well putting up with it all. It was about 9pm before we set off to go back to Manchester. I amazed myself staying awake in the car chatting to Simon all the way back to Sale, but I can honestly say that I was a little tired as he dropped me off past midnight. Being a gentleman, Simon went to get my bag out of the boot of the car, leaving the engine running. As he was getting back into the car it had locked itself. With the keys still in the ignition and a door that wouldn’t open, it wasn’t the best end to a great few days in Wales, but after a quick taxi journey back home picking up the spare keys, Simon was on his way home again.

The campaign has been live since the 1st of June and we’re all very pleased with how well it’s been received. With comments not only from Wales and England, but also requests from the USA and Germany to air the commercial there, we can only hope that this will result in a follow-up production in Berlin… that would be Sehr Gut, Jawohl! (better start brushing up on my German!)

Have you not seen the ad? Watch it here…

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…

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?

Eventful Escapes with Visit Chester & Cheshire

And as you can see VCC have been busy bees themselves with a media launch taking place at London’s Euston Station. It all went down very well apparently – and the ‘Eventful Escapes’ branding we created for the campaign has received recognition from Virgin Trains who commented how much they liked our artwork.

Roman Centurions at London's Euston Station

Roman Centurions at London's Euston Station

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…

The advent of the @font-face CSS property was definitely a step in the right direction, allowing designers to include a URL to a font file and have their web pages display the desired typography. The first hurdle was getting the browsers to support it and now, at last, after sitting collecting dust at the back of the CSS2 specification there is full support from all the major browsers and all but a few compatibility issues have been overcome.

So why haven’t we seen a flood of new fonts all over the internet? The problem is that type foundries put a great deal of time and effort into crafting fonts and have rightfully copyrighted their work to prevent them being downloaded or redistributed via the Web. However a number of solutions are now available; I’ll mention only a few.

Typekit is a subscription based service that holds libraries of web-only fonts on superfast servers that, under licence, you can link to. Offering the level of protection that type foundries were looking for and the reliability, choice and ease of use that web designers have been seeking. Not only that, but Small Batch Inc; the producers of Typekit have recently announced iphone and ipad compatablity and only yesterday Google, who opened a new Font API and Directory of open source fonts, have teamed up with Typekit to try to make webfonts even more accessible by combining their libraries and technical platforms. Announcing that they are to make the Typekit font events an open source collaboration project called WebFont Loader giving web designers complete control over the loading and rendering process.

Fontspring offers a very simple pay per download service which is more traditional in that you receive fonts for regular desktop use (Opentype) as well as the web only formats (Truetype & EOT).  Depending on the font, the licence may be available for single or multiple use. Another resource; Fontsquirrel offers a similar service, but it’s libraries hold only free fonts for download.

There are a range of great resources and websites either with their own font libraries and related articles on this subject. Here are a few, but feel free to post some additions if you have any other suggestions.

• Dafont- Archive of freely downloadable fonts. A personal favourite.
  
• Fontex
• Font River
• @font-face – A great resource on the subject
• A definative guide to which fonts are available at Web Fonts.info
• Typetester – The Typetester is an online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen. Its primary role is to make web designer’s life easier.
• Abduzeedo Free font Friday

As a passionate web designer who has seen the web font story slowly evolve over the years, I can’t help but feel this is a massive leap forward for the web, strange thing is, I don’t see it getting the use it now deserves. Old habits die hard, but the corner has definitely been turned and it’s a something I’m now excited to use and feel our digital team here at Access and the Internet as a whole will benefit from a great deal.

What do we really want?

Having given it some thought, what we really wanted was:

• accurate and reactive to updates through the day
• central and web-based – save paper, remote access, same list for everyone
• very easy to use for all members of the business
• simple permissions to allow people to jump in on jobs and make updates
• email notifications when tasks are updated
• suitable for a range of work types like bugs reports, mini development tasks and large web projects
• we may also like to roll it out to different areas of the business like the Design department
• follow a simple logic of clients have projects, projects have tasks

What’s out there already?

We considered all kinds of existing systems like Basecamp, Lighthouse and activeCollab, amongst others. Our main complaint was that most of the systems were too complex and it too time consuming to create jobs on the system; we desperately wanted to make it quick and easy for everyone, otherwise people wouldn’t use it!

Do it with Drupal?

As a very Drupal-focused agency, we started to look at how we could do this with Drupal; the thinking being that we have the know-how to customise a Drupal solution. So we looked at Open Atrium and a whole bunch of modules you can just download and add to Drupal itself (comparison here). Again, we found these just too complicated or geared too much towards IT or Software technical support tickets. But one module stood at as being very close to what we needed  – Case Tracker.

Case Tracker was good (read ’simple’) but needed some tweaking

In Case Tracker, we had found a very good starting point. It is small collection of Drupal 6.0 modules that handles the Project-Task relationship, permissions, updates comments and email notifications. All we needed to do was tweak the views, add in clients via taxonomy, build a theme and make the log-in system more pleasant. The final product is actually very usable!

Is it working in the business?

We gradually phased in what we refer to as ‘Access Task Manager’ to the business over a few weeks. It’s been up and running for two months and so far the feedback has been very positive. Users have found it very intuitive, very little training has been required. All the  ‘can you just do this’ emails disappeared overnight and turned in to well-formatted requests on Task Manager. Follow-up comments and updates to the task are centrally stored – very handy when a key member of the team is out of the office.

Download Task Manager for yourself

We love ‘Task Manager’ so much that we have added the code for you to download here on our blog – Task Manager – Drupal 6 and Case Tracker made better

Screen shot of the main task list. Download and try Task Manager for yourself

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

View more screengrabs on our Flickr account.

What is Task Manager?

Task Manager is a Drupal 6 installation with various contrib modules already installed and setup ready to be used as a task management or ticketing system. The configuration is particularly weighted towards the requirements of a digital agency but with a little configuration change this could be used in other environments where a user needs to raise tasks/tickets against projects for one or more clients.

Requirements

The system requirements are the same as Drupal – the gist being PHP 5 and MySQL 4+.

This is a dump-down of an existing website (files and a SQL dump) and not an installer. To install the database you will need access to MySQL at command line, phpMyAdmin or something like Sequel Pro or SQLyog to import the database file.

Download

Download Access Task Manager v1.0 (.tgz / 5.5mb) »

Legal: There are all kinds of reasons why Access can’t fully support Task Manager as a product and so you are using this release ‘as is’. We accept no responsibilities for the quality of the software or any other problems you have. Feel free to customise Task Manager as much as you like but be aware that it is a combination of code from the Drupal Project, various contributed modules (especially Case Tracker) and the CKEditor. By downloading you are agreeing to respect the individual licenses of the contained code and not to moan at us if this doesn’t work like you expected.

Installation

Just take a look at installation readme inside the download package.

We hope you can make some use of this code. We’d love to see your comments below!