The new version of s1jobs has won the Online Excellence category at the prestigious Marketing Society Star Awards in Glasgow.   The site, which was designed and built by my technical team last year, beat strong competition from Blonde, BigMouthMedia, Story UK and Whitespace to take the award.  

The win recognises the talent and dedication of everyone involved in the build.  It was a real team effort with sales and marketing staff playing a key role in the design and development process.   Full credit to everyone involved in the build, especially Colin Clark and David McLaughlin who did the majority of the design, HTML and programming work on the project. 

David Craik, Head of Marketing for s1 accepting the award

It seems one of the key factors in ’s1jobs 2.0′ winning the category was the measurable effectiveness of the new site.   The improved job seeker interface — including a personalised homepage, improved job alerts and AJAX-powered search results — combined with an improved recruiter offering — JobCasts, personalised CRM, and automatic applicant screening — led to a direct improvement in all our key metrics.  Visitor numbers were up, the average application rate soared while the number of page impressions actually decreased*.   

* While a drop in page impressions would be bad news for some sites it isn’t an issue for s1jobs, which generates revenue through job listings.   A drop in page impressions (coupled with an increase in applications) simply means users are getting to the content they want more easily — a great result.

s1jobs has been shortlisted in the category of Online Excellence at the 2009 Marketing Excellence awards in Scotland.  The nomination covers the story of the development and marketing of the new site, which was the last major project I was involved with as Web Producer in s1.

The winners will be announced on May 29 — fingers crossed!

The Evening Times community sites – based on the ‘s1local’ content platform I developed over the past couple of years – have just been nominated for the 2009 Newspaper Awards.  

They’re in the category of Best Use of New Media:
http://www.newspaperawards.co.uk/markup/nominations.htm

My original ET community sites post is here: http://www.grantgibson.co.uk/blog/index.php/2008/03/04/evening-times-local/

I’ve always been a fan of developing desktop and kiosk applications in Flash.  Many people see it as a web-only technology, but over the years it has matured into a very capable programming language.  And if you add on a third party extension such as Zinc or mProjector, Flash has all the file/registry/device capabilities of any other language.

My latest kiosk app is a re-working of GSC’s News Editor.   This time the client was the Scottish Crop Research Institute and the subject was the GM debate.   The original plan had been to create a kiosk-only application, but in the end we decided to export a web version too.  Because everything was based on web technologies (Flash, JPEG, PNG, etc) the only thing that had to change was the compression level of the video files.  The web export added just a few hours to the overall project, but resulted in a far wider reach for the application.  

You can try it out here: http://www.scri.ac.uk/knowledge/games/youchoosethenews

s1jobs has been named as a finalist in the 2009 Onrec Awards in the category of Best Technical Innovation. The nomination — which is the first ever technical award nomination for s1 – recognises the huge technical advances made with the new site. 

From a UI point of view, we ripped the site up and started again in 2008.  Making use of the latest web techniques such as image sprites, ajax, streaming video recording and drag & drop personalisation, we developed a site which had far more functionality than the old site, while at the same time being a lot faster and more efficient (there are more details on the original launch post here).

The full list of Onrec finalists is available here: http://www.onrec.com/conferences/250309A/finalists.html

My final freelance project of the year is another educational game for Glasgow Science Centre.   Pixelated Pix explains some of the technology behind digital imaging, from CCD capture through to LCD display. 

The aim of the game is to correctly identify images that have been ‘pixelated’ in one way or another.  The game also sees the return of cheesy gameshow host Charlie Smiles, who last made an appearance in Bang or no bang.

The completion of this game ends a hectic year of freelance work which saw the development of:

• Four educational games: Epidemic Emergency, Forces at the Funfair, Glasgow Science Investigation and Pixelated Pix
• A viral game: Penguin Knockout for the Falkirk Wheel
• An e-commerce shopping site: Ruth Ruthven Jewellery

These projects have been a lot of fun, but have taken up a huge amount of my free time this year, probably around an extra 50 days on top of my day job.  So I’m going to take a wee break in early 2009 and turn my attention to some home improvements.   Tool time!