Talk to people about online casual games and you inevitably end up talking about creativity. How beautifully designed / surreal / different / surprising / mindbendingly frustrating / just plain addicting a particular game format is, whether it's Doodlejump on iPhone or Bejewelled on PC.

For the last few years we've been using Amazon's Mechanical Turk for a variety of different tasks. One such example is gathering content for newsletters and blog post posts. The number of willing volunteers on the Mechanical Turk website is enormous so if you are looking to spice up your emails, blogs or other user facing content - there is a vast amount of people there who, for example, know all the best jokes which could help you increase click through rates for your emails. Clearly - careful moderation is required!

When you are growing a business focus is a word that keeps coming up. It's easy with hindsight but in practice it can be difficult to distiguish between focus, missed opportunity and derisking your business. It is particularly confusing in a sector which is growing fast, hit driven and where people are making money several different ways. Online casual games is just such a sector.

27 Minutes, that’s the average time returning visitors hang out on our trivia website www.braindash.com.  Surely that’s enough to make anyone envious! 27 minutes to show off your products and advertising. Next time you look at your Google analytics account check out what the average number of minutes is your visitors stay on your site and image what you can do to increase it.

Simplicity continues to matter greatly in website and mobile phone application design. People make split second judgments when they land on a site. They experience it first as a single "gestalt" view i.e. they see one whole picture in itself before any processing of individual elements takes place. Too many elements without any obvious design hierarchy and many people simply won't give it the time before bouncing off again.

What's that old adage, that if it looks too good to be true then it probably is? In most cases I would agree with that but if you are looking to launch an ecommerce or online publishing business then the choice between open source solutions and other proprietary licensed platforms is increasingly becoming a no brainer.

The conversion of our corporate site from a traditional Dreamweaver/template based website to one based on Drupal, is now complete, and what a powerful tool it is too.  Having done the groundwork, we can go from a paper design to a framework site in record time. 

This was actually quite a challenging site, which required technology that we hadn't used in Drupal before.  As is often the case with Drupal, the Open Source Community came to the rescue and a module was available which provided 95% of the functionality we required, leaving only a tiny amount of Drupal development work left to do by us. 

Whilst privacy concerns remain order of the day for Facebook users the opportunities which Facebook provides to site owners are often underestimated. Take for example the recent enhancements made to the Facebook like button which when placed on your site can provide you with significant opportunities for viral traffic to your website.