View the article and videos here

Here’s an example: Look at the internet browser you’re using. Most of your have decided to use one a while back and have stuck with it. Often they perform well, but we can get used to their quirks and problems all to easily.

But what if there’s something better out there? A better way of getting what you need, a better tool, or a method of speeding up something that takes longer than it should. These are often called “productivity tips”, which you may or may not be familiar with.

I LOVE productivity tips. If there’s a way of doing something quicker, better or just different, I’m on it. Any idle time I have, I look at the way I do things and ask myself – could I be doing this better?

Checking my feeds

Here’s an example: I check a few web pages out throughout the day to checkup on the latest news. Those sites include:

• BBC News
• Flickr
• 9to5Mac (for Apple rumours)
• Facebook

With twitter, I prefer to use Tweetie – another habit – that one is harder to kick!

It can take time to go to each site, let the pages load and often I get sucked in and waste time browsing – not efficient.

But now, I use iGoogle. iGoogle let’s you pull in feeds from your favourite pages and shows you it in a simple, easy to understand way. Here’s what mine currently looks like:

So now, with a glance, I can check my feeds in a way that feels right to me. I’ve used RSS readers in the past, but it just didn’t feel right to me, and I often just bulk “show as read” on my feeds. This is better (for me).

The silly thing is iGoogle has been out for a while, and I’ve certainly heard of it, but I haven’t tried it.

Browsing habits will always be changing. Apple Safari’s latest “Reader” option may be telling us that content will be more important in the future, and the design of how content is shown will be suited to the device you’re using, showing content on an iPad, for example, differently to that of a browser. That’s the right way to do it and it keeps content relevant to the device and user.

I’ll try and share more of my productivity tips in the future. Do you have any that have saved you time or improved your workflow? Please share them in the comments!

We’ve been working with UK Cycling Events since April this year and it’s been a blast. So far we’ve produced 8 videos to date and they’re getting better and better – don’t take our word for it mind – just ask the organiser, Martin Barden:

“Best so far!

Love the music, footage, views, cutting to random stuff like flowers, chickens etc. Good comments at the end… Great!”

See the results for yourselves in our latest video for UK Cycling Events – capturing the South Downs Epic!

Go to our Carbonmade page.

If you haven’t heard of Carbonmade, here’s some info:

With Carbonmade, you can manage your online portfolio with a variety of tools that allow you to change how you display your work. The core idea behind the design of Carbonmade is to keep your images or videos at the forefront. For a better idea on what Carbonmade can do for you browse through our Examples.

We had only just got our own Canon EOS 7D, and were really looking forward to shooting with it and to see exactly what this camera could do.

Here’s a few photos of us shooting behind the scenes, with the finished video below.

We at skysoclear use WordPress in almost all of our websites, because it gives our clients an easy platform for them to add and manage their content, be it news, company infomation, blogs and portfolios.

So what’s in the new version of WordPress?

Improved Admin panel

WordPress now has a toned-down look, so you can focus more on your content. There have also improved the help information on offer, tailored to the section you’re on, in case you get stuck.

A new theme: Twenty Ten

To make use of all the improvements under the hood, there is a new default theme bundled with WordPress, called Twenty Ten.

Each of our bespoke WordPress sites are usually based on a default theme, so we’ll be using Twenty Ten in one form or another quite a bit in the future!

Custom Navigation

When it comes to navigation on a site, we start by drawing up a sitemap, showing what pages we need to link to. Usually we hard-code the navigation, but sometimes our clients want the flexibility of changing what is in their main navigation. Now, it’s a cinch, with the option of having navigation dropdowns – very useful if your site has a lot of pages and categories.

Multi-site

And finally, possibly the most significant new feature. Based on the old WordPress MU, Multi-site has come to WordPress.

What multi site enables you to do is have one installation of WordPress power many sites.

Imagine you’re a online magazine publisher, with many titles in your portfolio. Now, you can install WordPress once and create a website for each title. For a site owner, this means you can share content, media, advertising across all your titles – do once and apply to all your websites – fantastic!

But the real benefit is for the users. Login to one magazine sites, and you now have access to the rest from that publisher, without logging in to each. For social networking alone, WordPress 3 represents a leap at improving user experience.

Have a look at the video for more:

If you’re interested in WordPress 3 and need some expert advice, design or want us to update tour current site, please contact us, we’d be happy to discuss the options available to you.

There are quite a number of services on the market to host your videos, many that are free, but how do they work across a range of platforms, namely on a computer and a phone (namely an iPhone)?

Let’s look at the two main players, YouTube and Vimeo, and see how they fair.

Vimeo

The more creative-concious service, Vimeo attracts a popular niche audience of users who are interested in the arts, music and filmmaking. Their actual terms of service state that they are not here to host your latest video actively promoting your product or service. Let me say that a different way – you can’t use Vimeo for commercially-driven content. Personally, that’s a bit of a turn off – aren’t we all here to promote ourselves?

So how does Vimeo fair cross-platform. Actually, very well. On a computer, it will use Flash as per most video services. Vimeo has one of the sexiest players and high encoding quality, so is the preferred service by many for these reasons.

On an iPhone, we start to have difficulties. The video embed code for Vimeo doesn’t translate and comes up with the missing object icon.

But there’s a solution for that. Instead, use a link or link an image that represents the video – it’s currently the only work around. Once we click the link, we go to Vimeo’s mobile site. Upon clicking that, the playback quality is good and the controls are intuitive to use.

Note: on a recent WordPress project, we installed an iPhone style, for an easy to use user interface. This tailors the website to an iPhone display, and there’s also an option to switch to a normal version of the site as well.

YouTube

Arguably the most popular video service around, YouTube attracts a whole host of users and holds a whole host of content, which no doubt you’re aware of. Pretty much anything goes, ad opposed to Vimeo. Got a product to sell? It can go on YouTube. Doing a product review with seller information at the end? It can go on YouTube.

So how does YouTube fair cross-browser? Very well. On your computer, the player is quite tight and with a variety of video quality playback available on most videos, you can watch low-res up to HD with ease.

On an iPhone, it works in much the same way as Vimeo, but instead skips the part where you go to Vimeo’s mobile site.

A nice touch, but knowing the relationship between Apple and YouTube (or Google), hardly surprising.

Conclusion

So in the choice between YouTube and Vimeo, there are a few key differences, which may help you decide which to go with. Made a film trailer? Probably put it on Vimeo (and even YouTube – viral baby!). Made a product demo? Best to go for YouTube (due to Vimeo’s Terms of Service).

Whichever you go with, you’ll be pretty much assured that when it comes to cross-platform capability, you’ll be well covered.

What video platform have you gone with? Any advice, please share in the comments!

It may seem quite obvious, but the site has had a bit of a shake-up.

The previous design came in around February, and while it did mark a new stage of skysoclear – there were certainly some areas that needed further improvement.

The most notable is the way we show our work. Our work is what truly represents us, and it had taken bit of a backseat. Not anymore! Not only can you flick through our recent projects on the homepage, but on our work page, you can now see a body of work that we’ve been pumping out over the past few years. It should now give you a real sense of what we do: WordPress-powered websites and online video for a captivated audience.

I see our website as a constantly evolving and growing online prescence and we do have plans to grow it further. Our recent post on “How we made VideoDslr.tv” proved very popular, so we’ll be making a big effort in showing you HOW we work. Sharing is caring!

Another big change is in our services, which now include Video for Web. We’ve been producing video content for various organisations over the past few years and it’s high time we embraced our skills and experience by adding video as a core service. Check out our most recent video productions, including videos for UK Cycling Events, Fusion Media and VideoDslr.tv to get a taste of how we use video.

Stay tuned for (more regular) blog posts from skysoclear – what we’re working on, how we do it and more video content!

What’s special about VideoDSLR is that it features original content. There’s little value nowadays in doing what everyone else is doing. Some sites we found while researching the project simply copy a press release, add a few words of opinion and publish. We didn’t want to do what everyone else was doing, so set about finding contributors and subjects/events to film.

What is also special about VideoDSLR is the way it extends to the social web. With feeds on Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, each avenue serves as a channel of the website, reaching out to a whole new audience. Each social network feeds off of the main site, keeping everyone updated to what is on the site..

The site was built in with HTML, PHP and CSS, including some HTML5 and CSS3 elements and is powered by WordPress as a content management system.

While the site has been live for only a couple of weeks, yesterday we received over 1000 hits in one day – a great achievement! We currently have over 200 followers on Twitter, 350 fans on Facebook, over 80 RSS subscribers and over 4000 hits on our YouTube channel. We are now seeking advertisers to help grow the site and infuse it with brand new video content.

Day in day out we complete website projects for clients and we advise how to get the most from the web and succeed online. I’ve realised recently that we can’t fully do that, unless we have experience in running successful websites. So with that in mind, we set about changing that.

If anyone knows much about my background, you’ll know that I actually trained in video production (more specifically – post-production). I’ve had many years experience in creating videos for online and mobile. When we started skysoclear (as a partnership) a couple of years ago, our core service (and still) is web design. Recently, I’ve found that I’m not utilising the skills I’ve learnt in video production and have a keen interest in featuring this more in our work at skysoclear.

Enter Video DSLRs

My keenness to use video in my work has often been long extinguished due to one crucial element – the camera itself. Now, I’m not a workman blaming his tools, but for people who wish to enter video production and buy their first camera, the options have been limited to cameras that produce pretty average pictures – not an encouraging thing.

This all changed about a year ago with the popularization of video dslrs – simply put, DSLR cameras with video recording functionality. The advantages were huge – quality HD images for a fraction of the price of low-cost video cameras (they use them on 24 don’t you know!). My mind was made up and in February we took delivery of a Canon 7D.

Collaborate

Through Twitter, I met Alex Lawrence. Alex runs Clearhead Media, a video production company based in Luton. We talked video dslrs and would often send each other links of video community sites that just didn’t work – either due to poor quality content, or the inability to inspire. I also noticed that all these sites seemed to just copy news releases, add a sentence with their opinon and call it news – where’s the value in that?

We then wondered why we couldn’t change all that. If we produced good content and got it out there and people like it – that would be awesome. It would also serve as a project, something I’ve been itching to do for a while now and something that would justify our claim to help in producing successful websites.

VideoDSLR.tv launched today and will feature original content catered towards people with a vested interest in producing videos with DSLR cameras.

Soon I’ll be sharing with you how we create videodslr.tv, from concept to launch. Grab our RSS feed to make sure you get notified.