The Hitchin-based web consultancy provides website support for both drivers – you can visit Sam’s site here and Duncan’s here.

In 2012 Sam will continue his work as a development driver with the Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula One team. In this role he does considerable simulator work to help develop the car with which Nico Rosberg won his first Grand Prix in China this weekend.

He also attends races in case a reserve driver is needed and is keeping his open-wheel skills sharp by racing in the Formula Renault 3.5 series.

Meanwhile Duncan is driving a McLaren MP4-12C for ART Grand Prix alongside Frenchman Grégoire Demoustier in the Blancpain Endurance Series, an international GT series organised in parallel with the FIA GT3 European Championship and the GT4 European Cup.

The series boasts a Europe-wide calendar on circuits including Silverstone, Monza and the Nurburgring, and its signature event is the 24 Hours of Spa endurance race.

We wish both of them the very best for the 2012 season. To keep up with the careers of other British drivers competing in open-wheel motorsport, please visit our site Brits on Pole.

The Takeover Panel front page

After several years of successful collaboration, it was judged to be time for an overhaul and a new look for the Takeover Panel website.

Onlineability began by carrying out detailed research and data analysis to find out how users engaged with the site.

We then created a new, more modern look, reviewed its information structure and added some improvements to improve its usability.

The result is a clean, modern and intuitive site that continues to perform in the way the that the organisation needs – and which remains flexible enough to respond to future demands.

Visit the National Libraries Day website here

National Libraries Day is a day devoted to promoting the work of libraries in all sectors, including public, school, academic, business or special collections, as well as being a nationwide celebration of libraries, librarians and library staff.

It is backed by a host of national organisations including the Chartered Institute for Library and Information Professionals, the National Literacy Trust, the Reading Agency, the Women’s Institute and the School Library Association.

Our brief was to produce a strong call to action – a site that would encourage people to organise and join in with local events as well as sharing details of National Library Day through as many social media channels as possible.

It needed to be colourful and engaging with lots of clear signposts showing how people could get involved. The finished site therefore includes a range of interactive features including integration with Twitter and Facebook, a Google map for people to add their events and find out what’s happening near them as well as dedicated YouTube and Flickr pages.

It also uses the BuddyPress community platform to add features such as groups, forums and a way for users to make friends and keep track of their activity.

Onlineability director Lisa Hutchins said: “National Libraries Day is an event very close to our hearts. As people working in an information profession ourselves we know just how under-appreciated librarians and library staff can be.

“They do magnificent work helping people get the information and resources they need and, very often, their work is so seamless and efficient that people don’t notice just how important a contribution they make.

“If we forget to appreciate our libraries and library staff we will lose them. That would be a tragedy for communities all around the UK and so we’re very proud to have been asked to build the National Libraries Day website.”

• If you’re a library user in North Herts or Stevenage, don’t forget to check out We Heart Libraries, a campaign to celebrate and champion the public libraries in our area.

The Immersive Writing Lab competition aims to attract writers who can create a storyworld – described as a setting big and encompassing enough to allow the audience to get totally lost and absorbed in it. Popular examples given by the organisers include the films The Matrix and Star Wars, popular TV shows Lost and Doctor Who and comic book publisher Marvel’s story universe.

The winner will see their storyworld developed with a £6,000 fund by Portal Entertainment, a cross-platform production outfit that has worked on Doctor Who. And five runners-up will have their work reviewed by Sarah Clay, Executive Multiplatform Producer at the BBC, whose work includes Becoming Human, E20 and Waterloo Reunited.

The competition involves working through a series of exercises in order to produce, polish and prepare a story treatment for submission, the challenge that Onlineability directors Lisa Hutchins and Andy Darley are now taking on with their own entry.

Update: We got there! You can view our entry on the Circalit site here.

Lisa said: “As soon as we saw this competition was in the offing we knew it was for us. Much of our day-to-day work involves factual writing with strict constraints – so we both love to tackle something a bit more imaginative and genre-busting from time to time.

“We’ve had some great experiences with alternate reality and other kinds of gaming, so this feels made for us. I’m not sure if we’ll hit the target this time but it’s a fantastic opportunity to stretch our boundaries and have some fun doing it.

“If we can come up with a really compelling and exciting storyworld idea in the process, I will be delighted.”

There are still more than five weeks to the competition deadline – so, if you also have a head full of ideas and a bit of spare time, and you fancy a crack at it yourself, use the links above to find out more.

Whether that’s a website that’s clear and easy to use or proper access to a local library service, it all comes down to the same things – accessibility, being user-centred and available when people need it, in ways that they find convenient.

The We Heart Libraries community site

Libraries in the UK are in a lot of trouble right now. Austerity measures have meant less money available for local government and some councils are making huge cuts to their services including closing down branches, cutting mobile rounds or replacing paid staff with volunteers.

Here in Hertfordshire no branches have been closed but opening hours have been cut by a third and Hertfordshire County Council is now exploring ways that voluntary and community organisations can get more involved with the service.

Trouble is, we believe that library cuts are a false economy. You might think of a library as a place to go to borrow books or read newspapers, or maybe to get Internet access, but these days it is so much more.

Libraries provide services that underpin our communities – whether it is information for entrepreneurs and would-be business owners, support for parents, learners and educators, or advice on how to deal with the many different problems that life throws up before they get out of hand.

And that’s without everything they do to make people’s lives richer – by helping them pursue interests, enjoy their leisure, get more involved with their communities or take part in arts, literary or cultural events.

We think that cutting access to libraries will simply mean that calls on other public and voluntary services will become more acute and put them to more stress and expense. And, because we think it is really important that someone is speaking up for libraries locally, we decided to do just that.

Accordingly, we’ve built the We Heart Libraries website with the aim of celebrating everything that’s great about libraries in North Herts and Stevenage – and championing them in times of trouble. This isn’t a project of the company but a separate, voluntary cause that we’re supporting because we think it’s really important and worthwhile.

Onlineability director Andy Darley said of the project: “I grew up in Hitchin and the library was like a second home to me. As a child it was a place of magic and wonder, and it really matters to me that people all across our area – whatever their ages or backgrounds – should have the same opportunities I had.

“Libraries are more than just buildings with books in them. Their combination of resources, facilities and highly-trained staff mean they can act as a hub for a whole town or district. By spreading knowledge, culture and information, a strong library network builds a strong community.”

So, why not pop along, take a look and even sign up to start helping campaign for our local libraries. We’ll be needing all the support we can get to make a big splash for National Libraries Day on February 4. We hope you will join us.

Well, the short answer is that we work with clients to make the web easier to understand and manage. A slightly longer answer has just been given by Onlineability director Lisa Hutchins to the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), of which she is an affiliate member.

Lisa is Onlineability’s information architect – that is, the person that plans how information on a website will be organised and ensures its users can find it as easily as possible.

That’s a relatively new career, and one that has come into being alongside the information and communications technology boom of the last few years. It’s a role with a lot of parallels to librarianship and similar information management jobs, although a very non-traditional one.

If you’d like to find out more, and learn how this helps us create better websites, please follow the link below.

See Lisa’s profile on the CILIP website here >>

Lisa, who is embarking on CILIP’s certification qualification, is also a contributor to the organisation’s members’ blog network, which aggegates members’ writings on a wide variety of information topics. You can check that out here and, if you find it interesting, subscribe via RSS feed.

She said: “Joining CILIP has been a terrific career boost for me with really strong opportunities for professional development. It’s also been tremendously welcoming to me as an information professional even though I work in a very non-traditional role.

“I’m now looking forward to demonstrating the value of my work as an information architect by working towards certification over the next few months.”

Duncan, who hails from West Ewell in Surrey, got a last-minute call-up to the football-themed series in which he has raced several times before. He was asked to take charge of its Japan-branded car and to jump into the cockpit at the Assen circuit in the Netherlands without even having the benefit of a full practice session – the ability to do this is an essential skill for drivers these days.

This led him to qualify close to the back of the grid, however he was able to get the car up to seventh in the first race and then, starting race two in seventh on new tyres, to reach the top step of the podium.

It was a well-deserved victory for Duncan, who has had a wide-ranging career in open-wheel racing, taking in Formula Renault UK, World Series by Renault, Indy Lights and Superleague Formula, as well as being a finalist in the prestigious McLaren Autosport BRDC Young Driver award.

You can read the full story of the weekend on Duncan’s website here.

And it’s not only Duncan – Onlineability client Sam Bird is also at the top of his championship, the prestigious GP2 formula, where he shares the lead with the highly-rated Romain Grosjean after six races.

Sam is holding is own among a group of five or six drivers with a real prospect of winning the title, and he also took part in the Formula One young driver test with Mercedes during the off-season.

With 12 more races taking place on six more race weekends between now and the final event, to be held at Italy’s Monza circuit in September, we’re on the edge of our seats!

Find out more about Sam on his website here, or learn about GP2 here.

However, elsewhere in the north of the county, we are still seeing our library opening hours cut by nearly half – which is a tragedy for all those people who rely on them. This is, clearly, a much better situation than that faced in places where local authorities are threatening up to three quarters of branches. But this is not a situation where our victory would mean someone else’s loss, and we are still seeing a drastic and avoidable reduction in one of our most important community services.

The real battles being fought in this war are the ones to overcome some of the preconceptions that people have about libraries and the people that work in them – and to make the case for the absolutely crucial role of the information professional in modern society. Why do we at Onlineability care, and why do we take the time to do it on our blog? Because we are these information professionals. Everything we do in our working lives is about encouraging good access to good information. Thus, although we have no clients in the library sector or any direct financial stake in it, the libraries debate is right at the heart of what we do. We are absolutely convinced that the skills of people who can curate information, and assist people towards finding reliable facts, or helpful and informed commentary, is the future of information architecture, librarianship and website development as these professions converge over the next couple of decades.

One popular claim is that libraries are some kind of profligate publicly-funded indulgence for the middle classes. Not so. Simply pop along to Stevenage Central or Luton Central if you want to subject this proposition to an empirical test. Leaving aside the basic illogicality of the claim (because presumably if a library serves a predominantly middle- or working-class area, then surely its users will simply reflect its overall demographics) it is a fact that libraries provide a lifeline to the less well-off. Free picture books, reading books and activities for the kids. Facilities if you’re looking for a job. Internet access with a better connection than the one you might be able to afford at home – if you can afford one at all. Information on your rights. Friendly faces. Help. And – perhaps most importantly of all – a welcome in a place where you don’t have to spend money to belong.

The author Philip Pullman gets this absolutely right in his must-read speech on the subject. He says: “But one of the few things that make life bearable for the young mother in [a disadvantaged] community at the moment is a weekly story session in the local library, the one just down the road. She can go there with the toddler and the baby and sit in the warmth, in a place that’s clean and safe and friendly, a place that makes her and the children welcome.” But do check out the whole speech, because it’s as good a manifesto for libraries, and communities, and culture, and all the other things that make life worth living as you will ever read.

Another objection is that libraries exist in a sort of bubble dating back to the 1950s. The people citing this have not been into a branch recently themselves, if ever, and are therefore labouring under the misapprehension that they would be greeted by a stern lady with a her hair in bun and horn-rimmed glasses going: “Sssh!” They picture shelves of dusty old books and not much more and they claim that people evince a kind of nostalgia for the places that is reminiscent of Woolworths – they want to see it on the high street but don’t actually want to shop there.

Wrong, and wrong again. Libraries have a lot of books, and a lot of those are popular fiction – let’s not be too snobbish about that, either. But they also have quite a lot of 21st-century innovations, for example being able to negotiate ebook agreements with publishers that are arguably more advantageous than we can achieve as individual consumers. For instance, I worry about ebooks. If I buy an electronic copy of a book, will I be able to use it on more than one platform or device? Can I legally make a back-up, or pass it on to a friend? Is there some other restriction on how I can use it that I might fall foul of without even knowing about? Is it crippled with digital rights management (DRM) software that means I would be better off with a paper copy about which I understand exactly what I have bought and what that entitles me to do?

But if I borrow an ebook from a library, none of that is my problem. I borrow it, read it and enjoy the level of access and commitment that I would with any other form of library borrowing. That’s something I find very valuable. Also, the possession of a UK library card entitles me, for example, to access to the subscriber-only online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, and there are many other journals and subscription services available depending on the agreements negotiated by different local authorities. All these issues are right up at the forefront of the information revolution that we’ve been living through for the last decade and more.

Libraries are central to their communities. For example, you may have noticed that public space is becoming a bit of an endangered species. These days you might find your local town centre patrolled by security guards who have views on what you can and can’t do there and who aren’t answerable to the same clear rules as police officers are. Also, the government is currently engaged on a project to sell the nation’s publicly-owned forests and woodlands to private owners with the likely consequence that public access to an important recreational facility will be severely limited. There has, in fact, been a very effective move by right-leaning, market-minded types over the last couple of decades to try to portray public space and public services of these kinds as places and services of last resort.

Therefore, if you visit the library instead of a swish bookshop with a café, take public transport instead of using a car, rent from a housing association instead of taking on a mortgage that stretches your finances to the limit, or visit a local authority leisure centre instead of paying for a swanky gym, you are portrayed as a loser, or a selfish individual who expects the state to subsidise them. We need to recognise both these stereotypes for the propaganda that they are and start loudly championing our public services again. Not least because the notion of public space – the place where we meet people who are different from us, and learn that actually our differences are mostly exaggerated – is crucial to the formation of communities. Public libraries are a big component of that public space and we should be fighting tooth and claw to defend them.

Limiting access to libraries is also a very bad idea for local authorities however superficially appealing the chance to make spending cuts might seem – and here’s why. Learning and communities – two things at the heart of what councils are about, and also a pretty good working definition of the underpinnings of libraries. They are almost always housed in accessible town-centre facilities and staffed by knowledgeable, friendly, IT-literate people who understand how to work with information and who generally have excellent customer service training. Councils should be leveraging all this as an advertisement and delivery point for their services, not trying to keep the public away from them.

As information professionals, it’s arguable that we have all been very bad at telling people about what we do. Certainly this is true in web development, with people understanding the role of the coder and the designer but not realising the importance of the professional building a sound structure, navigation and labelling system from the outset, one that is based on an intelligent assessment of what the site’s prospective users actually want and need. This whole libraries debate has reminded us at Onlineability that it’s time for our profession to start blowing its trumpets very loudly. In an information age, the skills of the information professional are invaluable. People are going to start hearing a lot more about us all.

• Find out more about standing up for library services by visiting the campaign website Voices For The Library.

This conference and its associated exhibition is designed to bring together people from a vast number of disciplines, from library management, epublishing and web development to search engine optimisation, content resources and social media.

Held at Kensington Olympia, the conference attracted people from around the world who somehow managed to get to the venue despite a London Underground strike the evening before and the apparent work-to-rule of the Gulf Stream turning London into a fine approximation of Longyearbyen.

The conference is priced at a level that reveals that freelancers and small businesses like ours are really not envisaged as the target audience. For an organisation sending one or two delegates the prices ranged from £617 to £793 per person depending on how early you booked, although there were discounts for subsequent bookings from the same organisation.

There was plenty on the programme we could have benefited from; a key feature of the information industry is its extreme flexibility which means people who adopt all kinds of working structures may find themselves involved in all manner of projects from the very small and focused to implementing the extremely large enterprise-level solution. It is certainly not just employees in big companies or public-sector organisations working at the cutting edge.

However, while the conference was in all honesty priced well out of our range, attendance at the associated exhibition was free, providing a very welcome way for professionals working at our level to benefit from the event.

It provided a packed timetable of seminars and speakers over three days. Business considerations meant that taking more than one day out for an event like this was a luxury so we chose to attend on day one, because there was more than enough on offer for each of us to pursue our particular interests, and for the simple reason that everyone is always at their most engaged and enthusiastic on the first day of an event like this.

Our major reason for attending was undoubtedly professional development. While networking is always a feature of such events, so many people are at it, and your time for meaningful conversations is often so limited, that any contacts you do make or refresh are usually a welcome bonus rather than a reason for attending in their own right.

Several of our areas of interest were represented – content management and social media marketing, which is closely involved with the day-to-day running of our business, and library management, which is of interest to the member of our team that is shortly embarking on a masters degree in information and library management.

The rest of this blog post will be taken up with the seminars we attended. A second blog post will follow with the ones not covered here along with our list of organisations well worth meeting.

So, here’s how we spent our day:

Making money from online conversation – Andy North, Online Media Consultant, SIFT Groups

A useful briefing on some ways of thinking past banner advertising and onto other more effective ways of monetising a website, in this case by providing market intelligence to interested parties through leveraging a community of users. The example given was fortuitous – a closed group for professionals who would welcome the privacy of a login-only environment and the filters so conspicuously absent from most social networks. The trick of this approach is offering people something they can only get by joining – and then treating them with the utmost respect once they have. But the method was definitely promising, and the talk insightful.

The Digital Library Licensing Service: Providing online resources to public libraries in England – Ben Taplin, Licensing Manager, JISC collections

This was chosen for the insight it could give into the way that public libraries are adapting to the digital revolution, and also for a guide to industry practice. The speaker gave an engaging explanation of how using model content licences could provide a means of giving libraries enhanced buying power and the ability to negotiate the terms they need, and also how the movement of academic journals into the online world may help develop good practice for ebooks. More information is available at http://www.librarylicensing.org

Fight Cuts With Stats: How to prove your value and survive – Penny Bailey, Managing Director, Bailey Solutions Ltd

This timely talk focused on the issue of the library enquiry desk – how, in the most extreme library cuts in our lifetime, do managers and librarians justify their staff and the work they do? The speaker suggested some ways of using software for collecting and recording statistics and demographic information from such activities. This was interesting both from a library practice perspective and also with wider applications to information practitioners. Our work so often goes unrecognised, and this is especially true if it involves improving usability, which means that if you’ve done it right your input is invisible.

Career Development Talk: Transitioning from employee to business owner – Margaret King, President, Association of Independent Information Professionals

Having been business owners for more than a decade already, this might not seem the most obvious choice of seminar to attend. But it was a feel-good reiteration of some important points that all of us self-employed information professionals can do with reminding of from time to time – such as the need to know your market and your customer, keep on top of the paperwork and network with other like-minded folk. Also, it was very nice to flock together with some birds of our own feather for a while.

The Next Step: The palette of changes needed – Esben Fjord, Head of Development, Gladsaxe Public Libraries

A really interesting talk about some of the ways in which Denmark’s public libraries have embraced web 2.0 technologies, and the lessons learned. The speaker pointed out that libraries are moving from transactional to relational models and provided examples including a dedicated social networking site for older users, reading groups and arts projects for young adults. He said the online space often works best as an extension of the physical space, with some real-world interaction proving beneficial. He also talked about the ‘cognitive surplus‘ – a concept pioneered by Clay Shirky – and pondered its relevance to libraries.

CMS selection: The process, pitfalls and best practices – Peter Sejersen, Analyst, J Boye

A valuable look at best practices in CMS selection, this talk outlined the process from a client deciding to undertake a website commission or redevelopment through selection of partners and platform. A useful briefing which raised a slightly wry smile when compared to our experiences of some clients who show very little engagement indeed with what happens under the bonnet.

Beyond the Printed Newspaper – Mark Ritchie, Manager, Global Business Development, Newspaper Direct Inc.

A straightforward demonstration of the PressDisplay.com product (complete with promotional graphics) which brokers online access to visually-accurate newspapers and which is used widely by libraries. Perhaps most interesting was the Q&A discussion of the business model – rather than paying to have their product distributed, publishers are charging for their content. 10 years ago we were laughing at a local paper for creating a website by simply making giant JPEGs of its broadsheet pages. Looks like that idea had better legs than we knew…

10 steps towards effortless migration to an open-sorce web content management system – Tjeerd Brenninkmeijer, CCO and co-founder, Hippo

The most controversial seminar we attended, in that it provoked a right royal ‘discussion’ between us. The company is proposing a method of putting all content in a central repository that allows it to be served to any platform, not just a traditional website, and especially mobile ones. That this is the solution in an era of new devices and platforms coming onto the market weekly is unarguable. But to what extent is it a new idea? Is this not a continuation of what we did when we separated content from style using CSS coding, or started storing our content in databases? And what about those organisations – sorry folks, but they ARE out there in huge numbers – who have barely engaged with the web as we’ve known it, never mind anything more risky and radical? Hours of fun have been had already arguing this through – and no doubt hours more are there to be had…

Now we’ll start work on part two of this post, which deals with those seminars not yet covered, and will probably have more of a content management and SEO/social media focus.

Our sites are run on an affiliate marketing model, where we use our online marketing skills to promote the latest products and special offers from major brands and specialist retailers in particular markets, and earn a small commission on sales in return for our efforts.

These costs are not passed on directly to the consumer, rather they are usually part of the promoting organisation’s overall marketing spend, and this approach is often an excellent way for companies to reach users that would otherwise be hard to find.

And we think (and hope) that our sites add considerable value for the consumer by offering a one-stop summary of available special offers as well as more in-depth information on brands and retailers, plus news and features from particularly relevant industry sectors.

Mostly, when working on these sites, we are dealing either with a company’s in-house affiliate or marketing manager, or specialist agency personnel to whom this work has been outsourced. That process has led us to compile this list of the five top things they do that make us happy.

Of course, if you’re an affiliate marketer reading this, your mileage may vary considerably. You may very well love the things we hate, and hate the things we love.

But, from the perspective of people who are working on long-term content sites, here are five simple tips to make us happy – and also keen to keep working with you:

1. Provide accurate, straightforward product links: It’s really thoughtful when an affiliate manager or agency sends us links customised with our affiliate ID and other details. And yet, we find that this isn’t always the most helpful way of doing things. For example, we might need to add a custom clickref. Or, if the URL is long, complex and contains many arguments, creating it through an affiliate network’s custom URL shortener can be a brilliant way of making sure nothing breaks. And, if we just want to check out a particular product to discover if it is suitable for one of our site niches, it’s useful to be able to do that at a click without inflating our tracking and yours. So there you have it – a few reasons why plain-vanilla links that allow us to apply the specific tools we need can often be more useful than the customised ones. Once or twice, they have come ready-supplied with someone else’s details – which is the best reason ever for not just pasting them in unchecked. And, er, sometimes they don’t work at all, get duplicated or link to an unrelated product. Check, check and check again…
2. Liaise well with your web developers: If you send us a great offer that we really want to promote, it always works best when there’s a custom page on the retailer’s website featuring that offer, since that builds customer trust and confidence. Or, at the very least, a mention of the offer, so the promotion’s existence is confirmed independently of us. And it isn’t completely unknown for the affiliate manager to get their offer emailed out, us to prepare our copy promoting it and then for the actual offer to never appear on the merchant’s website, or to appear with different prices to the ones quoted to us. That’s a no-no for so many reasons.
3. Sort out offers that run for a while: There may be very sound marketing reasons for running short, sharp 48-hour campaigns that persuade the customer to buy now, rather than going away and thinking about it. However, we have doubts over whether these are the best offers for content affiliates. If we’re going to write custom copy, do blog posts with attractive images and lots of deeplinks, include you in our latest offers round-ups and even use promotional banners in our featured front-page slot, then we need a little notice, plus an offer that’s not over as soon as it starts. If you’re targeting affiliates running email campaigns, short-notice, short-time offers are also likely to be a big problem. Putting a lot of work into a two-day offer just doesn’t compute, therefore we don’t do it.
4. Write some copy – and write it well: It is definitely worth writing a paragraph or two of copy at the top of promotional emails – it makes the offer look so much more desirable from an affiliate perspective. We take the point that everyone using the same words does not work at all well. However, it can so often be the starting point for our own ideas and inspiration. Also, do pay attention to the spelling, grammar and punctuation – where spending money is involved, people look for professionalism. It’s striking how some companies go to great lengths with classy graphics but spoil the effect with horribly amateurish copywriting – while others omit it altogether and pump out bare lists of product links as if they speak for themselves.
5. Build relationships: When you work in a niche with several similarly-named merchants, or where several offer the same product ranges at broadly the same prices, the merchant that stands out – and gets promoted – is the one that stays in contact. It’s always instructive to talk to people who emphasise their availability and approachability and then see how far that goes in practice – so if you stress that you enjoy working with content affiliates, it’s worth considering if your later actions bear that out and don’t drop off into a lengthy silence. Finally, the liaison people can sometimes only be as good as the support they get, no matter how hard they’re prepared to work on our behalf. We’ve had one excellent former agency member go to great lengths to help us organise a feature only to have the company that commissioned her fail to come through with the necessary expertise, through absolutely no fault of hers.

So – that’s our perspective, what’s yours? Leave a comment and let us know