Steve Nash

Client: Leighton Contractors
Brief: Tablet based survey app
Format: Multiple choice and free response

Employees found the GCU Survey easy to use, intuitive and enjoyable. The survey provided an opportunity to demonstrate new tablet technology.

Who: Vodafone
Where: Myer Sydney/Melbourne Shop Window
Integration: Megaphone API / Flash
Result: 6000+ plays

Who: New Age Nappies
What: Branding, Deisgn and development, SEO
Technologies: ZenCart

Who: Inside Our PR
What: Logo, website strategy, design and project management
When: Due Sept 2011

Who: Ignite Brand Communications
What: Website design, CSS/HTML, build
When: Feb 2011

Who: Equity Story
What: Design, Project Management, SEO & SEM
When: Mid 2010

Twirt.me (visit site)

Who: Social Media pet project by Steve Nash
What: Twitter based dating site (web / mobile)
How: Twitter API / PHP

Praise

• Thrillist
• Visionwiz
• Killer Startups
•  Fresh Startups
• WebDev2.0

Visit Site (requires mobile device)

Agency: BigMobile
Who: RealEstateView
What: Mobile Property Search
When: Jan 2010

Agency: BigMobile
Who: Vodafone Warriors
What: iPhone Fan WebApp
When: March 2010

onetribe.mobi

Who: Winners Circle
What: CMS, Flash
When: Early 09

Visit Site

Who: Travelworld
When: August 2010
What: WordPress driven eStore, P&O Cruise Liner integration, SEO
Result:  Site paid itself off in three months

Agency: Interactory
Who: Local coffee vendor
What: Totally customised Flash shopping cart. Built from ground up.
What’s cool: Buy your coffee within 4 clicks

Visit this site

Client: Big Mobile
Campaign: Beat the Clock and Win!
Prize: Five iPad2s
Technologies: Flash, HTML EDM, PHP

Results

5000+ plays
2500 emails sent
500 industry opt-ins (registrations)
5 slightly heavier Christmas stockings

Who: Vodafone
Where: Myer Sydney/Melbourne Shop Window
Integration: Megaphone API / Flash
Result: 6000+ plays

Twirt.me (visit site)

Who: Social Media pet project by Steve Nash
What: Twitter based dating site (web / mobile)
How: Twitter API / PHP

Praise

• Thrillist
• Visionwiz
• Killer Startups
•  Fresh Startups
• WebDev2.0

Steve is a rare breed- he is both a talented creative though also possesses a deep understanding of technology. Steve’s passion for both, hard working nature and positive approach mean that working with Steve is a pleasure; and one I look forward to repeating in the future.

Chris Gross
Business Development Manager
Vodafone Australia

Steve has assisted me greatly throughout my career. From career advice to hands on tips, Steve is my go-to man. He is a perfectionist at his trade whose expertise I value and trust immensely.

Basten Val
SEO Analyst, NetRegistry

Steve has a natural ability to working with others. He endeavours to make clients feel comfortable with approach and ultimately deliver a successful project to brief and value. His ideas are plentiful and his multi-skilled experience helped channel some great ideas within my own project. I found him to be passionate, dedicated and of great knowledge in the digital space.

Michelle Geller
Director
BabyDate

Steve and his business do fantastic work. They punch well above their weight both in terms of economies of scale and creativity. From the outset you know that you’re in capable hands and that you can trust you will get a top quality product on time and on budget.

Rob Hall
National Sales Manager
BigMobile

Steve is not only a great creative, but his project management prowess and high communication levels made for product that was on time and outperformed our expectations

Shane Andrews
Freelance Sports Jounalist

Steve and his team provided the creative edge I was looking for, coming up with innovative design focused ways to overcome the technical problems I put before them. I’d highly recommend their efficient services.

Mark Jason
Director
SydneyBrokerage

Steve always delivers great quality work, is extremely personable and very reliable. I highly recommend his work and he is always my first choice of web designer for any project

Marianne Fessl
Director – Marketing
Ignite Brand Communications

We have been working with Steve for approximately 12 months and during this time I have been very impressed with his service, ideas and overall their ability to ensure we not only meet our objectives but also take our objectives to the next level.

Meryl McDonald
Business Owner
CruiseWorldHolidays

Steve is a rare but valuable designer/developer to have in any production team. His creative mind combined with his css skills, ability to code for flash applications, extensive knowledge of anything ‘mobile’ and his upkeep of emerging techhnologies, makes Steve rise above other designers who are only able to design when given specific instructions and creative direction

Lori Rodriguez
Project Manager
BigMobile

Bootstrap is a toolkit from Twitter designed to kick-start development of webapps and sites. It includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more.

Bootstrap isn’t just a great tool to rapidly build webapps, its great ground-work for UX professionals too. The elements within are all best practice, cross browser compatible and accessible. Wireframes designed completely with these elements are not only produced faster but a great deal easier to then build.

It’s all thoroughly documented, available for download free of charge and personally recommended by me.
Bootstrap from Twitter info page. Github (download).

I recently went to a Web Apps versus Native Mobile Apps conference. The discussion took the usual route: web apps do a, b, c and native apps do x, y, z.

Surprisingly, no one brought up what I believe to be the most important consideration – app discovery – or how a user gets to the application.

So I thought I’d document my thoughts on why it’s important and why app discovery solidifies web apps as my typical weapon of choice for mobile solutions.

What is a native app? A native app runs only on a particular make of phone – say iPhone or Android. They can typically only be installed through the phone’s Application store. The app owner has to channel all marketing into driving users to a link in the app store to download the app.

Now, here’s where web apps cut through. Unlike mobile apps, web apps are accessed by a URL. A user can even be deep-linked and jump right in. No logins or multi-megabyte downloads necessary. Why is this awesome? Because the possibilities are endless.

For example we could:

• Embed the app URL into an SMS 
  “Check out Vodafone’s new pre-paid plans! mylink.com/plans”
• Let users click through from pre-existing email campaigns 
  “This job is recommended for you mylink.com/job”
• Run mobile AdWords or AdMob campaigns to drive users to a mobile app
• Let users share the app via social networks 
  “Check out this car I’m buying mylink.com/car”

A friend who runs a successful deal-of-the-day site was recently contemplating whether to create a web or native app, and was leaning towards a native app. However, after discussing the above, he quickly changed his mind. A large portion of his traffic was coming through social networks and email marketing, and there was no way to channel this mobile traffic into a native app.

So, before getting your heart set on a native app – remember to consider how you want people to access your app.

My approach to SEO and SEM for small business.

I field a lot of new client calls about SEO and SEM. In most cases these calls are from clients who feel they have to ‘get on board with this SEO stuff’, but don’t understand what they’re being told by the experts, or want a second opinion to a pricey quote.

I’ve noticed that all the players in the SEO game do a number of things:

TECHNICAL TERMS AND BAFFLING LINGO

The experts tend to talk in technical terms and use confusing lingo – never breaking down what they’re actually doing for you.

REPRESENTING YOUR BRAND

These experts are getting online and representing your business – making statements about your brand without your input.

THE PROMISE OF RESULTS

The experts always focus on results or the promise of the number one spot – instead of creating a sound strategy to get there.

QUANTITY OVER QUALITY

They don’t check the quality of additional traffic that they generate. Are 2,000 visitors from India really useful to your business?

It seems like these SEO ‘experts’ bank on their clients not knowing any better.

I see it very differently. I try not to attract clients to pay me $500 a month to do shifty things behind a curtain. I believe this approach is misleading, a betrayal of trust and a complete waste of money in most instances.

Instead, I offer a four step solution that my clients can understand, approve of and love.

STEP ONE: REVIEW

First, I review the site in question. I look at how it has been designed, sliced and coded and print out Google’s SEO starter guide
(find it here). I give both the review and my guide to the client – it’s completely transparent. In most cases, at this stage a number of structure changes are recommended to improve the site for SEO purposes.

STEP TWO: CONTENT

Next we look at your content. As they say – content is king. By using Google’s research tools we can figure out the terms and phrases people are searching for – and then incorporate them into your copy.

STEP THREE: BACKLINKS

You wouldn’t let your PR consultant link your brand with dodgy businesses, places or people – so why put your brand and reputation at stake by letting an SEO consultant create links with dodgy sites?

I introduce my clients to the concepts behind generating quality backlinks.

STEP FOUR: SEM TOOLS

Finally, I empower my clients by providing the tools to create, monitor, measure and extend their AdWords (SEM) campaigns.

Instead of paying an SEO consultant a monthly fee to do back-linking, a much better investment is to use the money to run an SEM campaign that you can manage and measure yourself.

When it comes to SEO and small business, I believe the only way is empowerment. Who knows your business? Who knows exactly what to say to your clients and the right time to say it? You – not some IT guy.

So, before you engage a bunch of shifty IT guys who are promising the world – read one PDF for me. It’ll take less than 10 minutes. And it’s not even mine. [Download the Google SEO Starter Guide].

And, if your SEO guy tells you he’ll run an ongoing back-linking campaign for only $500 a month – run for the hills.

Building for the web is an artform, with hundreds of competing ideas, technologies and requirements all fighting for the spotlight. As we enter 2011 with the emergence of HTML5, the gap created by Apple, and the shift from desktop devices to mobile, tablet and TV – where does Flash fit in? Does it even fit in at all?

Firstly, it’s important to consider Flash’s key weaknesses. As a designer and developer with a range of clients, three key weaknesses immediately spring to mind: SEO, accessibility and install base.

Flash typography, whilst stylishly sexy, is not indexed by Google. Whilst there are a number of SEO techniques that still apply outside the actual content, invisible content is an instant inhibitor to gaining that coveted number one spot.

Then there’s accessibility issues: designers often create entire interfaces in Flash, with no options for increasing text size, keyboard tabbing or general online consistency. Web users should seamlessly flow through online systems – not work through complex animated navigation puzzles – regardless of how cool they look.

But then, it doesn’t even matter how cool it looks if you can’t even see it. While Adobe touts some fairly impressive figures, devices increasingly appearing sans-Flash. You may have heard about Apple’s public no-Flash stance, and seen some very ordinary performance on mobile devices – so it’s likely Flash support will continue to trend downwards in future.

So with all this doom and gloom, is it ever appropriate to use Flash?

Well, yes.

There are times when SEO doesn’t matter. With advertisers competing and paying big bucks for ad placements, Flash, with it’s ability to create rich, interactive and animated experiences, can be the ticket to gaining attention and interest.

Product galleries and online showrooms offer another excellent opportunity to use Flash, to create a rich customer experience – far beyond that of traditional HTML and images alone. Flash also presents itself as an exciting opportunity to creative campaign-based sites, more focused on creating an intensive brand experience than a functional website.

When it comes to online video players, Flash is still king. It offers developers the chance to completely customise visual streaming media solutions – like ABC iView. We’re also starting to see Flash media platforms becoming accessible from internet-enabled TVs.

So – what’s the verdict? Well, while the average developer will have fewer interactions with Flash in 2011, it still has its place. It’s still out there, and still appropriate for a range of projects. It’s a tool that should remain in the toolbelt of any worthy designer. But unless it’s appropriate – keep it in your pants