Wednesday 20 January 2010

Pycon Constructions website

The team at Pycon Constructions have gone interstate in looking to develop their website and gave us a call. The Port Macquarie based construction company are looking towards a big 2010 and required a website that will assist in driving new sales and provide potential customers wih the information required to assist with their decision making.

http://www.pycon.com.au

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Tuesday 19 January 2010

Redstar - 'simple and clean'

A peek at some branding for a new company we were commsioned to undertake. Having worked with this client on a range of other projects, they trusted us to take hold of a simple brief and deliver. "Keep it simple, clean and incoporate a red star". The challenge here was to develop a logo and branding in a way that delivered on the client's brief but could also be easily distinguished from the numrous other company logos using a red star as the dominant element.

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Monday 18 January 2010

Death to Internet Explorer 6

In-light of recent media coverage involving suspected Chinese attacks on Google and various other companies I thought I'd take the opportunity to discuss the continued use of Internet Explorer and specifically IE6.

I personally think that most people still using IE6 are unaware of the security risk they are taking. Internet Explorer has been subjected to many security vulnerabilities and concerns: Much of the spyware, adware, and computer viruses across the Internet are made possible by exploitable bugs and flaws in the security architecture of Internet Explorer, sometimes requiring nothing more than viewing of a malicious web page in order to install themselves.

The "Aurora" IE Exploit recently used against Google users is the perfect example of a security flaw used in Internet Explorer. The link below contains an example video showing just how easy it is for this type of attack to occur. http://praetorianprefect.com/archives/2010/01/the-aurora-ie-exploit-in-action/

I know that may of our clients are forced to use IE6 because of company / corporate security policies setup by their system administrators. What I don't understand though is the continued use of IE6 by system admin's when other options are available.

System admin's will argue that undertaking an upgrade is a expensive exercise and that they are better of delaying upgrades and saving money until they can undertake a full system upgrade. My response to these remarks are, "What is more expensive… the lose of company data (sensitive or financial) or having a virus run through the company network?"

There are other reasons for not using IE6 which are related to web development, basically IE6 is holding things back. There are many new tools available in modern web browsers but unfortunately some of these simply cannot be used because of the existence of IE6. Another problem is the development time used to get websites and web applications compatible with IE6, this can sometimes account for up to 20% of development time.

So if you have the option to upgrade or change web browsers, you can find a list of modern web browsers below.


Google Chrome - http://www.google.com/chrome/
Firefox - http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
Safari - http://www.apple.com/safari/
Opera - http://www.opera.com/

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Sunday 17 January 2010

Action sports / music event illustrations

We've teamed up with an international events management company who are putting together a 2 day action sports / music event on the Gold Coast in April this year. As part of the proposals to secure event sponsors, we have created some illustrations providing a glimpse into how the event setup could look. With the event yet to be officially launched, stay tuned for more details to what is looking like shaping up as a pretty cool couple of days.

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