Blog
Kyan Interviewed
Posted by Piers H Palmer on October 22, 2009
Recently an admirer from afar, Morocco in fact, got in touch for an interview to publish on their website cssbit.com. We thought it was worth posting the interview here in full english.
Incidently if you have a question you’d like us to answer feel free to get in touch at info@kyanmedia.com.
Cool new website for climate control specialists (and penguins)
Posted by Piers H Palmer on October 15, 2009
Quantum Cooling provide a range of equipment and services for the drinks dispense, refrigeration and air conditioning industries. They needed an appealing new site to explain their range of products/services to potential customers. Penguins would be a bonus!
We’ve built Quantum a bespoke content management system (CMS) to allow them to keep the site content fresh and relevant without them having to come back to us to make updates on their behalf. Whether it’s managing their product portfolio, writing news posts or adding happy stories about their clients, they can do it themsleves without the need for any web programming skills — it’s a cinch!
The new site is clearly laid out with a simple navigation system, a heavy dose of white space and allows Quantum’s unique service philosophy to shine through. Oh yes, and did I mention it’s got penguins?
Kyan vs. HTML5
Posted by Robin Whittleton on October 12, 2009
Here at Kyan we like to keep up to date, so new technologies regularly come under the spotlight. This week’s focus: HTML5. Jumping straight into an unknown is rarely a good idea for a client project, but with no such qualms about internal projects I elected to rework our intranet.
Yammer-Dama-Hang-On ... What did you just say?
Posted by Phil Balchin on October 12, 2009
As some of you may know, we use yammer here at Kyan. We’ve been using it for about a year now, and it’s still as popular now, as when we first started using it to blabbering on about pretty pointless bits’n’things.
Google does not use the keywords meta tag
Posted by Paul Sturgess on October 09, 2009
The majority of the web industry had, over time, come to the consensus that the keywords meta tag is not used by Google in ranking web search results. However, we’d never heard it from Google itself; that is until now.
Recently on the official Google blog they posted an article on just this issue and clearly stated that they do not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking.
It’s worth pointing out that while this is only Google and other search engines may well use the meta keyword tags, it only serves to enforce our own approach to search engine optimisation that meaningful content is key.
Mame Arcade Cabinet
Posted by Joel Richards on October 07, 2009
A recent lunchtime project of ours at Kyan has been refurbishing and upgrading an old Arcade Machine.
After finding an old and broken RM Video cabinet on eBay, originally running Football Champ, we removed the old components and put in some new controls attached to a Mini-PAC USB controller. Once the various cosmetic upgrades were finished, we attached the Mini-PAC to the Linux machine running MAME.
More photos can be found in the Arcade Machine Flickr Set.
You can follow @kyanarcade on twitter to see new highscores.
Antique browser still has 25% market share
Posted by Gavin Shinfield on October 02, 2009
Unbeliveably, Internet Explorer 6 (IE6 — released August 2001) still has 25% market share according to Net Applications (via Mashable). Come on people, this thing is 8 years old, that’s antique in internet years.
Are you one of the refuseniks? Upgrades to good, Standards-compliant browsers are free and will greatly improve your online experience: Firefox 3 or Google chrome or IE8
How do you rate?
Posted by Paul Sturgess on October 01, 2009
I’ve posted recently about our office jukebox and the music we play on it. What I didn’t mention, however, is that the most hotly contested aspect surrounding it is not the music that gets played, but the way in which we can all vote on the tracks. Well if Pete’s going to be dropping Christmas covers in October then we all need to let him know it’s not right!
Recently I came across an article on the Youtube official blog that detailed some interesting insight into the way users vote for videos on their site. In a nutshell Youtube has a 1-5 rating system in which overwhelming majority of videos have a rating of 5 stars, some do get 1 star but there’s not much inbetween. Their conclusion…
“When it comes to ratings it’s pretty much all or nothing. Great videos prompt action; anything less prompts indifference.”
We actually started off with a system much like the Youtube rating model, but we quickly found the same pattern emerged. So we dropped it for a simple thumbs up/down and we’ve never looked back.
It’s interesting debate though as rating systems are often contentious issues when building websites but when a site like Youtube, with that many users, publishes those kind of results you have to consider if it’s the definitive word on the matter.