As we develop a third preset for Lucid One and continue development of a new Shopify theme, we are contemplating how theme settings should best be laid out. We've put together a little tiny survey to gather feedback from Shopify store owners and designers to try to get an idea of what people feel is the most logical structure. Give us your input—it should take less than a minute.

When revising the design of a website, it is important to experiment with different versions rather than simply constantly changing the look-and-feel of the site. Making regular changes is good but it's advisable to do it in such a way that you can track the results between the different versions. If you just go ahead and make a big change, it can be difficult to measure the results as changes in buying habits from one month to the next can influence sales just as much as the changes you might make to the site. This can make it difficult to ascertain whether it was the revisions that made the difference or simply that it's a busier or quieter period than usual. A/B testing allows you to test different versions at the same time by serving up your different versions randomly to different users. We are currently running some homepage tests on the Monocle Order (you can see versions A—the original—B, and C in the images above). Our goal here is to see if, B, images of more "real" people will lead to better site interaction and, C, whether removing the emphasis on membership entirely from the homepage will draw more people in. The interesting thing is that, rather than simply making some big changes and checking back in a month or two to see how they've gone, we're testing all three versions right now in unison. 33% of visitors see each version so we get valuable insight into which ones work better. It's worth noting that this only works on relatively high-traffic sites as you need a reasonable number of clicks to be able to measure the differences and determine a winning version. We will post a follow up with some results from this experiment.

We're super excited to announce that LightSpeed for iPad brings the LightSpeed Point of Sale experience to Apple’s acclaimed tablet platform, allowing retailers to showcase their products with Show & Tell and process transactions anywhere. LightSpeed for iPad is retail's first interactive point of sale system, combining next-level personalized selling with inventory scanning, wireless payments and the powerful retail workflows of LightSpeed. Find out more: http://www.macpos.co.nz/blogs/news/4899112-lightspeed-retail-point-of-sale-pos-now-on-ipad

The Monocle Order had their official launch party on June 30th in New York City and had this fantastic video made. Pretty impressive for being made at a live event with lest than two weeks of editing. Impressive. And love the soundtrack. If anyone knows who it is, please let us know in the comments.

We are extremely saddened to hear of the major earthquake that has struck Christchurch, New Zealand. Lucid Design is based in Nelson and we are all ok but everyone in our team have friends and family down there so it's a pretty tense time for all of us.

In support of Petite Fleur's recent rebrand, we are offering three lucky people a $25 lunch voucher each—that's three vouchers in total. All you need to do is tweet the reason why you think you deserve a free lunch mentioning @luciddesign and @petitefleurnz and we will give a $25 voucher for the three best tweets. Be sure to follow @luciddesign so we can DM you. If you're not on Twitter, you can leave a comment on Lucid Design's Facebook wall at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Lucid-Design/95129958238 If you miss out, you have 13 hours, 30 minutes, and a few seconds to buy a $25 voucher for just $10 from GrabOne…. Starting… now!* Conditions: This competition is open to anyone however you will need to be in Nelson by April 16th to redeem your voucher at Petite Fleur at Seifried Estate. Tweets must be received by NZT 5pm today (Monday, January 17th) and must include @luciddesign and @petitefleurnz to be eligible for the draw. Full conditions of voucher available at http://www.grabone.co.nz/nelson-marlborough/petite-fleur-at-seifried-est. Voucher not redeemable for cash. (*GrabOne deal finishes at midnight I believe)

We do quite a lot of work with Mat at Think Packaging including designing their new logo and branding so it's really cool to see this on two of our favourite packaging blogs: The Dieline » www.thedieline.com/blog/2011/1/10/think-packaging.html Lovely Package® » lovelypackage.com/think-business-card-holder If you're looking for an incredibly talented packaging designer, check out Think Packaging.

e-waste is the fastest growing type of waste in the world and is more toxic than normal household rubbish. The purpose of eDay is to increase community awareness of the benefits of recycling computers and the hazardous nature of electronic equipment, making it clear that disposal in landfills is not a sustainable option. The aim is to encourage communities to work together to collect their neighbourhood e-waste. This year eDay in Nelson and Tasman will be held on Saturday the 6th of November. More information can be found on the eDay website

We're running a little special over at www.macpos.co.nz. Enter the promo code LAUNCH on checkout to get 10% off orders over $500. Valid until 30/08/10.

I received an email this morning from someone asking if I knew how to contact PayPal from New Zealand because they have been locked out of their account and can't get back in. I have had this problem before too and their email prompted me to write up a quick article on how to unlock a PayPal account with a New Zealand bank account number. The problem is that PayPal expects your bank account number in a specific format but they don't specify what this format is. I've done some trial-and-error and worked out that, despite the fact they ask for your "full bank account number", you have to exclude the first six digits (bank and branch). So, if your account number is 12-3456-7890123-00, you would need to enter just 789012300. Can't get much more obscure than that! Good luck.

We have today launched Mac POS, a new web store for all POS-related software and hardware for retail shops running Apple Macs. Many small shop owners are Mac users or are switching to Mac and wish to run their stores on a Mac. Whether you run a boutique clothing shop, art gallery, skate shop, florist, shoe shop or computer store, why not run the most elegant point of sale software on the most elegant platform. Using Shopify, we were able to get the online shop up and running in under a week which is pretty exciting as we've realised for some time there is increasing demand for these products in New Zealand. Go check out the new site: www.macpos.co.nz

A couple years ago we did a run of t-shirts and a number of people said they'd love to have been able to buy one so this year we're taking orders. The tees will be printed in white on high quality cotton garments and we have a wide range of colours and styles available including men's and women's (scoop necks and v-necks), children's…. To keep it simple, we're just inviting you to send an email to galen@luciddesign.co.nz with your first and second choice for colour and your size and style (i.e., men's, women's, v-neck etc). We're keeping it pretty relaxed and will contact you if there are any problems with your choice. The price is NZD$35 incl. GST and we'll be happy to send anywhere in New Zealand for no extra charge. For our friends and clients outside NZ, there will be a shipping fee of some kind. We'll let you know when the time is right.

For an iPhone app we are developing for a client, I really wanted to come up with a strong, simple, beatiful, elegant icon. I knew in my mind what I wanted but had trouble describing it so I have come up with this collection of icons that stand out for me for their strength and simplicity. Let me know if there are any you think deserve to be included.

"Lucid Design, a small web development and graphic design studio was founded by Galen King in early 2000 when she was still studying at Canterbury University. The main priority of the business is to make beautiful and elegant designs that truly meet their client’s needs. Their style is minimalist and they put a lot of emphasis on not over designing or over complicating their projects and applications. They are strongly committed to looking after small businesses and helping them grow, which makes them a truly great little innovative kiwi business…." Read the full article here: http://www.etchmagazine.co.nz/Technology/Parcels+the+innovative+new+iphone+app+by+Lucid+Design.html

Well, folks, I thought it would be fun to have a little giveaway to celebrate that we are now able to help our clients sell their music around the world through the likes of the iTunes Music Store. All you have to do is go to http://www.last.fm/label/Lucid+Music and listen to any of the three albums we currently have under our Lucid Music label. Then, send us the name of the album you'd like and a comment about what you like about it either in the comments field below or by following @luciddesign on Twitter and sending us a tweet. On Friday, the 18th of December, we will randomly pick a winner who will receive a copy of their specified album by way of an iTunes music voucher*. *TERMS: Unfortunately, due to the iTunes rules, this gift voucher will only be redeemable on the New Zealand iTunes Music Store. So, I guess, that means this is open to Kiwis only. We'd still love to hear from anyone else if you wish to leave a "shout" on the Lucid Music last.fm page or one of our album's pages or in the comments field below. Multiple comments or tweets will be counted as a single entry. We reserve the right to cancel this little competition and our decision is final in determining the winner.

Lucid Music is a little side project of ours setup to help Kiwi musicians promote their music more widely through digital distribution channels such as the iTunes Music Store, Amazon MP3 and CDs on demand, Napster and many more. For the past 12 months or so, we've been working with Tina Bridgman's three albums refining processes and identifying available markets. While there's an ever increasing number of artists producing music, it's an exciting time for musicians with so many possibilities for worldwide distribution. Our Lucid Music page on the Lucid Design website has a streaming music player which allows playing of all our tracks.

We're very excited to announce that our first app for the Shopify app store has been released. We've simply called it Campaign Monitor because that's what it does—Campaign Monitor integration for Shopify. It's as simple as inputting your Campaign Monitor API Key, choosing which list you wish Shopify to add new buyers' details to and that's it. It only adds those names of people who have implicitly opted-in to receive further emails and it also will update a contact if it's alreay in your Campaign Monitor list. We've set up a discussion topic in our support system and welcome all feedback: http://support.luciddesign.co.nz/discussions/shopify-campaign-monitor

Lucid Design is currently developing a Shopify app that automatically adds a buyer's email address to a Campaign Monitor subscriber list if they have ticked the "keep me updated" checkbox on checkout. So that we can build a nice little app that meets people's needs, we are currently looking for people who are keen to test the app out before it's released. If you are keen, please take a look at the Shopify + Campaign Monitor page in our Goodies section.

We've decided to make Parcels free for a little while as we'd like to get more people using it so we can get feedback on what they'd like to see changed or improved. We created Parcels as an easy way to keep an eye on courier packages en route and we tried to make it as easy and intuitive as possible. So, get it while it's free from the iTunes App Store: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=328228957&mt=8 (iTunes link) Visit the Parcels website or follow @parcelsapp on Twitter.

I've seen Xero's Contact Links feature before but I didn't pay much attention to it as it appears, at first glance, to be rather limited without the ability to define custom "key" fields for contacts. You can access this feature by going to General Settings » Organisation Settings and you'll see Contact Links at the bottom. However, I've discovered that it's actually quite powerful as it is. For example, while you can't easily link to a client's specific record in other systems, you can easily link to search results which means generally two clicks to the client's record. For example, in WorkflowMax (the timetracking and billing system we use, you can link to the search like this: https://my.workflowmax.com/common/search.aspx?search_field={!CONTACTNAME} To show search results in Basecamp that contain the client's name, you can do this (however it's not as reliable due to the fields Basecamp indexes for search results): https://luciddesignnz.clientsection.com/search?global=true&scope=all&terms={!CONTACTNAME} And something else that is very cool is that you can do a Whitepages™ lookup very easily like this: http://yellow.co.nz/whitepages/search/new+zealand/{!CONTACTNAME}-1.html The Whitepages™ one is particularly handy as it gives you a 1-click Whitepages™ lookup for a contact in Xero which I find useful since we don't always store all a client's details. Anyway, I've just touched the surface of what's useful here. If Xero were to add "custom fields" to their contacts interface, it would make this very powerful as you could, for example, put the client_id for a Basecamp record into a custom field so you could link directly to that client in Basecamp. Now that would be great. If you have any tips to share, please do so in the comments below.

To be able to build an iPhone app on a device with OS 3.0.1, you need to paste either of the following into Terminal: 3.1: ln -s /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport/3.1\ \(7C116a\) /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport/3.0.1\ \(7A400\) 3.0: ln -s /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport/3.0 /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport/3.0.1\ \(7A400\) You might need to change the part of the paths highlighted in bold. This should be all it takes to make your device show up in the Xcode organiser as being compatible with your SDK. You might need to restart Xcode for it to take effect.

We have news! After much deliberation, we have made the big decision that Lucid Design will be moving to Nelson towards the end of this year. It has always been a possibility that my family would move to Nelson at some point but one of the big factors that was keeping us in Golden Bay was our team at Lucid Design to whom I have always felt a strong commitment. However, with two of the team moving to the North Island towards the end of the year—from where they will work remotely—our team in Golden Bay is getting smaller. Taking on new designers and developers is going to be hard in Takaka so, along with several other factors, now really feels like the best time to make the move. The decision to move has not been an easy one as Lucid Design has effectively 'grown up' in Golden Bay with a strong connection and commitment to the community here. However, we know that we will still be able to provide the same level of service—if not better—from Nelson. So, from a business perspective, what will change? Well, for most of you there will be no obvious changes at all. Due to the nature of our business, much of our communication is done by email or online so business will run as usual—just from our new Nelson office. For our Golden Bay clients, we will be sad to go but we will continue to give you the full attention you deserve. We will make regular trips to Takaka as needed and, of course, you're welcome to pop in and visit us when you are in Nelson. We look forward to establishing new networks and relationships with Nelson businesses and organisations. We will be in touch again with our new contact information and more specific details of the timing of our move once everything is finalised. For now, if you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

5 August 2009 -- Lucid Design today announced it has become one of the first authorised reseller of the Google Apps™ suite of communication and collaboration tools in New Zealand. The focus will initially be on offering clients highly flexible, robust email to complement their businesses. "Google Apps enables us to offer our clients a solid, robust email solution built on a reliable platform. By bringing all our clients' email services into a single system, we are better able to reliably support any issues that may occur and, with the backing of Google's support team, we feel confident we are now able to offer one of the best email systems available" said Galen King, Creative Director of Lucid Design. Google Apps brings simple, powerful communication and collaboration tools to organisations. With Google Apps, users can use applications such as Gmail™ webmail service, Google Talk™ instant messaging service, Google Calendar™ calendaring service, Google Docs™ program, Google Sites™ web application, and Google Video™ for business on their own domain to work together more effectively. Best of all, it's all hosted by Google, so there's no hardware or software to download, install or maintain. The Google Apps Reseller program includes resellers, consultants and independent software vendors that sell, service and customise Google Apps Premier Edition for their customers. Lucid Design received training, support and deployment services from Google, as well as access to APIs for integrating Google Apps into their customers' business operations. Lucid Design is able to retain a close relationship with their customers in order to provide additional service and support. The businesses receiving Google Apps will benefit from the additional attention to their specific needs. For more information on Lucid Design, please visit www.luciddesign.co.nz. Lucid Design, 23 Motupipi Street, Takaka 7110, New Zealand | www.luciddesign.co.nz ### Google, Google Apps, Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Video are trademarks of Google Inc.

I received a nice little surprise this morning when checking out the new Shopify Theme Gallery website. Clean Earth Soap, one of our first Shopify sites, is featured in the initiall select of "The Best Shopify CSS Designs on the Web". It's always nice to get some recognition—especially when it's totally unexpected. Take a look: shopifythemegallery.com/2009/06/clean-earth-soap/

After working with Tina Bridgman (check out Tina's music on last.fm) to design and produce the artwork and packaging for her third album, In the Company of You, I really wanted to do more to help her to promote her music. I listen to all three of her albums (Hearth and Deep Sun Inside) a lot and, because I really like the music and because I wanted to see her become more sustainable with it, I really wanted to find other avenues for distribution and promotion. Last year I was finally able to set up the networks I needed to effectively promote and sell Tina's music online around the world. Lucid Design now has the means to help musicians get their music onlne and into over a dozen electronic music stores including iTines (NZ, Australia, US, UK etc), Amazon (downloads and CDs on-demand), Napster and more. In an effort to further help Tina bring her music to the world, we have also made all three albums available on last.fm with full track streaming which is pretty cool. This allows people to listen to her music and share it with others who might like it. If users like it, they can purchase one or more tracks from iTunes or Amazon music stores and royalties go to the musician. It's a pretty exciting period for self-produced musician because, while there are more musicians producing more music than ever before, there are also many more really neat ways to get the music out there. I'm really inspired and excited by the options we now have available for our clients and am continuing to expand our networks to make it even easier to help with music sales around the world. Some of the things coming up include: Streaming music players making it really easy to embed tracks (or whole) albums on a web site with links to the iTunes music store to buy and download Further networking and music sharing on the iPhone and iPod touch On-demand CD production (this avoids the hassle and expense of producing large numbers of CDs and packaging; not to mention the shipping and distribution costs to get them around the world) If anyone would like more info on what we can offer, please feel free to get in touch.

A security flaw in the online payment service PayPal means sensitive information is at risk and customers could lose control of their accounts, according to an Auckland software developer. Ewart MacLucas says the flaw means customers who have not registered a credit card or bank account to their PayPal account need only supply a street address or phone number to change their password information that can be easily obtained by others. Once an account is accessed, people can see details of financial transactions and change account settings so a customer could be locked out of their own account, he says. PayPal spokeswoman Kelly Stevens confirmed that for PayPal accounts not tied to a credit card or bank account and which have "little to no remaining balance", customers can reset their password by providing "personal information like a phone number and street address". "This does not put account holders at risk of disclosing sensitive personal or financial account information that can be used to steal their money, so we do not see this as a significant threat. "It's important to note that for PayPal accounts that have bank accounts, credit cards or cash balances tied to them, the password reset process is much more sophisticated." But Mr MacLucas says information in a PayPal account should be protected, regardless of whether it can be used to steal money. "As a paypal customer, I consider a list of who paid, how much and when to be sensitive personal information. "I shouldn't have to give PayPal my credit card or bank account number to protect that information." Many small companies and community organisations use the PayPal donate scheme, in which people can donate money to them via PayPal. "While I don't know how many people could be affected by this, the volume of Paypal users means even if it's only one in every 1000, that's still a big number." By CLAIRE McENTEE - The Dominion Post | Source: http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/2480292/PayPals-security-flawed

A client of ours, Golden Bay Hideaway, was on TV3's Campbell Live at the end of last week showcasing their revolutionary new housing concept, The Little Greenie. With a 9-star HERS energy rating, The Little Green is officially the highest-rated home in New Zealand in terms of its energy-efficiency. Pretty impressive. Watch the five-minute video clip on TV3's website.

Twitter is taking the world by storm and now New Zealanders on Vodafone can send and receive tweets via SMS. The shortcode for Twitter in New Zealand is 8987 or TWTR. I, personally, am not jumping up and down at the possibility of now being able to receive notifications of what those I follow are eating for breakfast, who's stressed, who's relaxed, who can't sleep etc but I am intrigued by the possibilities for web-based community projects piggy-backing on the Twitter service and have some ideas for some useful services. Check out Vodafone's press-release and Twitter's blog post.

A graphic designer friend in Wellington recently showed me some cool stuff they were working on that had been made by Ponoko. I had heard of Ponoko before but hadn't had a chance to check them out. I was immediately inspired by the possibilities and thought a little sign for our building was the perfect excuse to test out what Ponoko does. For those who have never heard of them, Ponoko is a website that enables people to updload vector artwork and they laser-cut and engrave per your design and send it back in the post. It's all very easy. A bit like the painter who never paints his own house, we at Lucid Design have been without any street signage since we moved into our new studio over a year ago. We decided to create something simple and a bit different than the usual vinyl-cut signage. Ponoko turned out to be an inexpensive and fun way to do it. We created the artwork in Illustrator, uploaded it to Ponoko, chose our materials and, about a week later, got a little package by courier. Yippee! The cool thing about Ponoko is that they are actually based right here in New Zealand. Check them out. I've included some photos of the process. Hope you enjoy them.

A while back we got people to take a five second test on our old website. Since we've recently redesigned our website, we thought it might be interesting to run it again and see what people think. » Take the five second test

This article is intended for individuals and small business owners who are—or are considering—embarking on setting up their first website. Please let me know in the comments below if you find it helpful or have any questions. I hope it clarifies a few things rather than making it seem even more complex. Hosting charges Hosting covers the server that runs 24/7 in order to keep your website online and accessible to users around the world. Hosting charges may or may not include email and are likely to be dependant on disk space and monthly bandwidth (i.e., how much traffic your site can deal with) allocated to your website. Most simple websites should be fine on the most basic hosting plans. Email Many hosting providers, ISPs (internet service providers) and web designers provide email as a free add-on. This can be fine if you don't rely heavily on your email but it can also not be the most reliable long term. As your business grows, it's likely that your email will become the most important service you use and therefor it's important to have it set up properly with a reliable provider that is not tied to your designer or ISP. It is also strongly recommended that you do not use an email address @your-isp.co.nz (e.g., @xtra.co.nz, @paradise.net.nz, @ihug.co.nz etc) because when the time comes for you to change providers (and it's likely to happen), you are in the situation where you need to advise all your friends and colleagues that your email has changed. Further, if you have any printed material—such as brochures, business cards, letterheads—you will need to reprint them. It's strongly recommended that you use an email address @yourdomain.co.nz because, as long as you keep your domain name, your email address does not need to change. CMS (content-management system) charges If you are likely to be updating your content regularly (and it is generally advisable to do so to keep your site relevant), it is great if you can make these changes yourself so you don't need to pay your designer for every little change. Many sites now come with the option of a CMS that enables you to manage the content yourself easily and efficiently. If you don't need this, it's worth checking to see if you can avoid paying for it. Domain names You need a domain name in order for users to find your website. These are usually billed annually. Maintenance The internet is a dynamic and rapidly-changing medium. A web designer cannot anticipate all the changes in technology and, while a good web development company should make minor tweaks and changes to your website to keep it running smoothly, things can break or stop working. In this case, there may be ongoing costs involved with fixing a site. Most small sites are so simple in their implementation that there is very little to go wrong. The biggest problem for web designers is all the different web browsers (Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8; Firefox 2, 3; Safari 2, 3, 4; Opera; etc). Web developers should test your website in all the major browsers when they build your site but there is the possibility that, when a new browser comes out, something may break. General upkeep If you have a CMS, you can manage the text and images yourself. However, it's quite likely that, as time goes on, you will want to make little changes to the layout or look-and-feel of your site. Perhaps you've had comments from your readers that things could be a bit easier to read or that navigation is not as clear as it could be. In any case, you need a web designer who will be around in the future to help with these changes and you need to be prepared to pay for these when you're ready for them. Again, with small sites, it's quite possible to have your site online for several years with no ongoing work—if it's been designed well from the start. Growing and changing As your business changes and grows, it's likely that your website will need to change and grow too. It's a good idea to have a site that starts out simple and within your limited startup budget but that has the flexibility and adaptability to grow with you. Of course, if you start with something really really simple, it might be totally realistic to build a completely new site in a year or two if your business really takes off or changes direction. Search engine optimisation (SEO) For small websites, this is often something you can focus on yourself if you choose to dedicate the time to learn the simple basics. There are many things you can do for free to help increase your website's presence in the major search engines. If you need some help, your web designer should be able to give advice and help you to make changes to your site on an ongoing basis. Help when you need it Your web design company should be able to help you with getting up to speed with how your website works, what to expect from it and how everything else associated with it works such as email, etc. If they don't have this capability in their team, they should be able to steer you towards someone who can help you. It's often a good idea, if you're not so computer-savvy, to find a computer tech support outfit nearby who can help you when you need it. At the end of the day, you're probably good at what you do but you don't need to be trying to do everything else in order to keep your computer and website always running smoothly. Conclusion Ask questions. As someone famous said, "there is no such thing as a stupid question."

I noticed a large spike in visits to the Lucid Design website over the last couple of days and have been trying to figure out the cause. My first thought was to check keywords thinking it had something to do with the changes I’ve made recently to my SEO strategy. But, interestingly, I quickly discovered that the increased traffic all came via direct hits (i.e. not through a search engine or as a referral from another site). I then thought perhaps it had to do with recent magazine advertising campaigns we have been running (and I was quietly pleased that they might actually be generating some interest). But, on further investigation, I have discovered an unusally large number of “visitors” from a town in California called Montara (which I’ve never heard of and therefor became suspicious). And, this is when it all becomes clear. It seems there is a spider/robot/something automated hitting our website repeatedly at present from an organisation called kintiskton llc. A quick Google search brings up 966 pages (see http://www.google.com/search?q=kintiskton+llc). It appears this has been going on for at least four months and we’re just falling victim now. I don’t know at this stage how widespread the problem is or how many of our sites it is affecting. I just wanted to give a heads-up to clients and others to check their server stats for traffic from “kintiskton” (in Google analytics, you can do this by viewing stats for Networks: https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/networks and you can filter it down if you wish). I’m curious to hear how many other New Zealand websites have been affected by this.

As your business changes and grows, it’s important to keep your site fresh and up-to-date. With a website from Lucid Design you can manage the content easily! Get started with our new Light Package—now from $785* until the end of April. Check out the full details of the Light Package. *Conditions apply. Prices are in New Zealand dollars and exclude GST and ongoing costs.

We felt it was time to spruce up our website to better showcase the range of work we do. In the past I have focused on web site design in the portfolio mainly because it was the easiest thing to put online. Astra and our team have worked hard to create a wonderful portfolio showcasing each category of work we do including print, photography, web design and application development. This is still a work in progress so please feel free to let us know what you think in the comments below.

Apple has today announced the BETA release of Safari 4.0 for both Mac and PC. New features include— Top Sites A quick way to view at a glance the websites you visit most with markers indicating even which ones have been updated since your last visit. This is fantastic as I often find myself checking and re-checking certain sites to see if anything has changed. I wonder if I might even start using this feature to view blogs instead of using the RSS feeds which basically omit all the creative elements of the website they belong to. Cover Flow It's available in in iTunes, on the iPhone and iPod Touch and in the Finder and now we can browse our bookmarked websites and browsing history in beautiful Cover Flow style. This is pretty cool although I'm not sure how truly useful it will be. Full History Search You can now search through all the past pages you have viewed with full text search as well as a thumbnail of each page you visited to make them easy to find. I often find myself digging through my history or re-searching through Google to find a page I had viewed recently but just cannot locate. Speed Improvements Apple is touting their new "Nitro Engine" to delivery "blazingly fast performance thanks to the industry’s most advanced rendering technologies." I have noticed the use of AJAX in certain sites can really slow down the browser so I'll be curious to see how this improves things. Windows Native Look and Feel Hmm! I wonder how many people saw this coming a few years back—before the iPod. It's interesting to see Apple slowly infiltrating the PC world. Developer Tools This is really cool. I've often used the dev tools in Safari 3.0 but they are pretty incomplete so I'm looking forward to having what Apple calls "the best set of development tools ever included in a browser." If you're interested, full details can be found in the Safari Dev Center. Full Page Zoom It'll be interesting to see how useful this is. With images still generally 72dpi, they don't scale very well but I'm sure we'll begin seeing a trend to using higher resolution images on web pages in the near future. And many more Smart address field, smart search field, phishing and malware protection. 150 features in total—apparently. For me, I'm curious to see how Safari will affect the balance of browser usage—will we see it eat into the Firefox and dreaded IE6 (and 7) userbase. I'm also interested to see how it handles rich text editors like TinyMCE as Safari, to date, has been less than adequate for managing content with WYSIWYG editors in content-management systems.

I've decided to share the results of the markup survey as they come out. You can view the report here—feel free to check back as more people give their feedback.

We are currently in the process of developing a hosted version of Mephisto and would like your feedback. If you would like access to the pre-release BETA, please check out www.mephisto.co.nz where you can register your interest. Sign-up is FREE during this period and there is no obligation to continue so this is a good chance to kick the tires and have a play with Mephisto without the need to install it. We would like your thoughts and suggestions on how this might work well for you and what you'd like to see included in this version of Mephisto. It is based heavily on the open-source project however Lucid Design will be extending it through plug-ins (which we hope to open-source so everyone can use them). We will be releasing the design of the site as the default theme so welcome your feedback there, too.

We've been debating for some time what the best way is to handle markup in an upcoming hosting CMS we're developing in Ruby on Rails (more on that to come!). I've put together a little survey to see what people's preference is when it comes to manipulating text in a content-management system.

We were very early adopters of Adobe CS4 hoping it would reduce some of the headaches we were having with disconnecting from projects in CS3. While CS4 brings some fantastic new features to InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop, Version Cue is virtually unusable and has caused us major problems including: Hours and hours of lost time simply trying to connect to the project through Adobe Drive which resulted in us re-installing CS4 then running the update to 4.0.1. It worked for a while but now, a few weeks later, I can not connect to the "drive" again. Losing files. Staff have been working for days on large projects only to find, when reconnecting, that there are no files saved at all. Vanished! Incredibly slow performance. It somestimes takes 5 to 10 minutes to start up Adobe Drive and/or Bridge. Unfortunately I am not posting this article because I have a solution. I would like to invite readers to contribute their issues, suggestions and/or solutions to this nightmare. And come on Adobe, this really is not good enough. We rely on Creative Suite for our day-to-day work and we depend on it running smoothly. To find such a major bug in Version Cue at shipping time that you needed to disable it in the release version of CS4 just is not acceptable (http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb407015&sliceId=2)!

What grabs you in just five seconds? Take the five second test.

Google has just announced that Street View is now available in New Zealand. Whether or not you're concerned about the privacy implications, there is no denying it is pretty darn cool. My impressions of Street View up until now is that it is mostly available only in more populated areas so I was quite surprised to find that even our little remote town of Takaka is available in Street View—and not just the main street. You can see the Lucid Design offices (see image above) but unfortunately this was taken before the renovations were complete. Anyway, it's worth a look. Check out Commercial Street, Takaka

With LightSpeed 2.7, the latest upgrade from Xsilva, running a retail store can be just as intuitive as using a Mac! Send POS data to QuickBooks® Accounting 2009 for Mac in just a few clicks, manage cash drawers with the new Tills feature, offer customers Quantity Discounts, Import Images in batches, and outfit your POS stations with the latest USB-compatible hardware. Explore and learn why retailers are choosing LightSpeed 2.7 as their preferred Point of Sale solution! Full details available on the Lightspeed website.

For those who have been using Gmail (and/or Google Apps) and have been putting up with Google's rather poor (or odd) implenation of the IMAP protocol, this will come as good news. Google Labs have added a feature that enables you to fine-tune how IMAP is handled. To enable this feature, go to Settings » Labs in Gmail and enable the Advanced IMAP Controls Lab. Read the official Google blog post for full details. Some of the things you can now specify: Choose which labels (folders) to sync—this means you can finally disable the All Mail account to eliminate duplicate emails on your desktop computer! Turn off auto-expunge or trash messages when they're no longer visible through IMAP IMAP allows messages to be marked for deletion where the messages are still present but flagged to be deleted the next time the folder is "expunged" Actually remove a message when you delete it Up until now, Gmail doesn't ever actually delete messages but archives them in the All Mail folder. This might be okay on the webmail but it keeps hundreds (or thousands) of redundant messages to your computer So, this is a very welcome addition and brings Gmail ever closer to being the perfect email system. And, for those who have implemented a hack as in our article, How to set up Apple Mail for better Gmail IMAP support, you can now go back to accessing your emails normally. Just clear the IMAP Path Prefix field in your Mail account settings and synchronise the account.

Since setting up Lucid Design in Takaka, Golden Bay, I have had a number of ideas on how to help promote businesses and organisations here in the Bay. One of the issues we face here is that tourism is very seasonal and, for many, business in winter is slow. It's interesting also that many people even as close as Nelson may not think to come to Golden Bay for weekend holidays. One of the projects I have wanted to do for some time is to setup a central directory showcases as many local businesses and organisations as possible (even if they don't have a website). This is how the Golden Bay website came about. The idea behind the Golden Bay website is to raise awareness of the wonderful range of attractions, things to do, services, eateries, events etc there are in the Bay. I am certain that as people become more aware of what they can do when they come to Golden Bay, the more likely they are to add it to their travel itinerary whether they're from just 'over the Hill' in Nelson or from the other side of the world. The site incorporates a dynamic Google map which contains markers for all the places in Golden Bay. We will look to expand on this as more listings are added. Check it out: www.goldenbay.org.nz If you're a local Golden Bay business and would like to get some additional exposure for your business, click add a listing the bottom of the site.

I do find it sad that we are not taught Māori in schools in New Zealand. I think we are very lucky to have two languages but the reality is that most people simply have little or no grasp of the our indigenous language. Perhaps this changing as people become more aware. Even Google now has a Māori version which is pretty cool. I'd be curious to know how much use it gets. Te Reo Māori distinguishes between long and short vowels. It is common to see the long vowels marked with an umlaut (which is simply wrong). The correct way is to use a macron. This can be tricky as macrons are not available in ASCII or extended ASCII. They do appear in unicode, however, so it's not so difficult to use them correctly on the web. Here's a list of the unicode equivalents for lower and uppercase vowels: ā   ā ē   ē ī   ī ō   ō ū   ū Ā   Ā Ē   Ē Ī   Ī Ō   Ō Ū   Ū

I have discovered the hard way that Google doesn't like it if you click on ads on your own site. Perhaps I am naïve but I would have thought they would have systems in place to ignore such clicks. As the host of ads from companies I have no dealings with or have never heard of, it seems natural that I might wish to see a bit more about them, what they're offering etc. It only seems natural that I might want to have an idea of what I am in fact advertising and promoting on my site. I recently set out to find out more about the companies I was promoting and I clicked on all the ads on my site. Uh oh! Alarms bells certainly rang somewhere. Within a few days, I tried to login to Google AdSense only to discover that I had been blocked with no notice, warning, or explanation. Just the rather unhelpful and unfriendly message above. I promptly followed up with an email to their support team. To be honest, I wasn't holding my breath for a reply but I did eventually get one: a computer-generated response saying they were looking into my case. Then nothing. For a good month or more. And finally, after submitting my query again, another computer-generated response to say they've reviewed my case and they had this to say: Hello,Thanks for providing us with additional information. However, after thoroughly reviewing your account data and taking your feedback into consideration, we've re-confirmed that your account poses a significant risk to our advertisers. For this reason, we're unable to reinstate your account. Thank you for your understanding.As a reminder, if you have any questions about your account or the actions we've taken, please do not reply to this email. You can find more information by visitinghttps://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153.Sincerely,The Google AdSense Team "Thank you for your unerstanding." Great. I'm not sure I do understand. In fact, I don't! There must be ways to disregard such click activity. I'm pretty annoyed by the lack of communication, the lack of any personal response and the lack of explanation. Banned. No alternative. And, to cap it off, the money in my AdSense account is never to be seen again. Sure, it wasn't a large amount of money (around $25) but it's the principle. I wonder how much Google makes from closed accounts. Presumably the advertisers have still paid that money but nobody ever received it! So, for those of you who thought it might be cool to check out what you're advertising on your site. Don't.

Google today announced the release of their own web browser, Google Chrome. My first reaction was, do we need another web browser. With several versions each of Safari, Firefox, Internet Explore, Opera and others already making life very complicated for web developers, what's it going to mean for us having yet another browser to test for. However, Google Chrome is built using components from WebKit and Firefox and it apparently renders the same as Safari. If this is the case, Google Chrome could be a good thing. With its vast user base, perhaps Google will help eradicate (ha!) Internet Explorer as more and more users make the switch to Safari, Firefox and now Google Chrome. Perhaps it will, in fact, make life easier for web developers. Will this mean a renewed browser war? I doubt it but it will certainly put the pressure on Microsoft. Google Chrome is available for Windows first but a Mac (and Linux) version is on its way. I look forward to checking it out.

Wufoo strives to be the easiest way to collect information over the Internet.Their HTML form builder helps you create contact forms, online surveys, and invitations so you can collect the data, registrations and online payments you need without writing a single line of code. It's truly awesome. Check it out: www.wufoo.com

From Charles Tongue, Soca Gallery… I use Macs because I enjoy simple systems that make my life easier. Lightspeed POS is one of these. I found myself with databases for stock, suppliers, customers, mail and email all built in different systems, and it was time to stop double handling and bring them all together. Now, nothing to do with databases is quick or easy, but with the help of Galen from Lucid Design we transfered the majority of the information and we have been manually filling the gaps. I do not use all the features offered within Lightspeed, but it covers all the areas important to my business. Of course I am looking forward to future updates, specifically the option to change the design of quotes and invoices. I do not consider that I have a thorough knowledge of database systems, but I am happy with choosing Lightspeed POS. Check them out if you're in Auckland: SOCA gallery, 74 France Street, Newton, Auckland, New Zealand. Phone +64 9 529 0533. Or visit their website: www.soca.co.nz More on Lightspeed can be found on our Lightspeed page.

Google Analytics makes it easy to view comprehensive website statistics including how people find a site, what keywords they use, where the came from, which pages they visit, how many times the view a page and much much more. It ties in tightly with Google AdWords making it easy to track ad campaigns and measure how successful a campaign is. Google Analytics is a hosted solution meaning no ongoing maintenance or upgrading. And, best of all, it's free. One of the great features for us as a web design company with many sites is that we can manage them all in one place with a single login. For clients who also have multiple sites, we can set them up to also be able to view all their sites with a single login. More info can be found at www.google.com/analytics

The biggest survey of its kind by the great folks over at A List Apart. If you're in the web design industry—be it dabbling or seriously immersed—check it out: alistapart.com/articles/survey2008

One of the hardest things for startups (and small businesses in general) is the accounting side of things. Over the years we have used spreadsheets, self-built Filemaker-based systems, MoneyWorks, and other small Mac-based accounting packages. None worked very well for our needs and you need a degree in accounting to understand or appreciate their complexity. Earlier this year we finally made the change to Xero (www.xero.co.nz). Xero is a web-based accounting system that is simple, intuitive and downright beautiful. It makes bookkeeping for us non-accountants really pretty simple. As a web-based application, users can login from anywhere in the world to view the state of things, fiddle with the books, etc. It has multi-user access with various user-levels so staff don't have to see everything that the boss does! With the recent addition of the Xero Network, there is a rapidly expanding collection of other systems that integrate tightly with Xero to syncronise information such as contacts, payroll information, invoices etc. All our job, staff and client management is handled online through systems that integrate with Xero. More about that in another post. I highly recommend taking a look at Xero and giving it a test drive: www.xero.co.nz

Shopify has recently added two great new features: shipping confirmation emails and shipping update emails. By default, for some reason, the emails generated show a link to www.google.com/?q={{ fulfillment.tracking_number }} which, of course, doesn't work. However, it's not very hard to change this for New Zealand Post (including CourierPost) so it does work. New Zealand parcel tracking If you want to give your customers a link directly to the tracking information for their parcel, you can use this in the two email templates for shipping: http://www.nzpost.co.nz/Cultures/en-NZ/OnlineTools/TrackAndTrace/?trackid={{ fulfillment.tracking_number }} Update 12/05/11: http://nzpost.co.nz/tools/tracking?trackid={{ fulfillment.tracking_number }}

LightSpeed's Web Store module is a tightly integrated, low-maintenance e-commerce solution, allowing business owners to generate and maintain a fully-customizable online storefront from their LightSpeed database. Upload product information, stock levels and photos directly from your LightSpeed database with a single click. The product Matrix enables all size and color combinations to have their own pictures, descriptions and prices, while on-screen tax and shipping calculators provide your shoppers with accurate totals. Download web orders with a single-click, and flow any out-of-stock products directly into LightSpeed's purchasing system. Web Store comes equipped with professionally-designed templates that can be modified to suit any business. Easily drag and drop new header and sub-header graphics into LightSpeed, or redesign your Web Store completely. New in Web Store 1.3: Zoom capability for product photos UPS shipping calculator U.S.P.S first class & Flat rate shipping Country/state selector for tax & shipping calculations 'Newest products' for main store page Search by price range capability Improved order e-mails Default currency auto-sync 'Upload current products only' option

A problem we encounter in our small development team is that different Ruby on Rails projects use different versions of gems. Generally, most of our local development computers are up to date with the latest or close to the latest gem versions but, due to server constraints etc, a project is often lagging behind. This means, when it's installed and setup locally, it doesn't run and throws a series of errors. We don't, of course, want to roll-back the version of a particular gem on each local development machine so it can be a bit tricky. Another great article from Err the Blog gives what appears to be a very simple, robust and straightforward solution to this problem. Haven't fully tested it in-house but plan to do so this week. Check it out: errtheblog.com/posts/50-vendor-everything

We've pushed through some minor changes to the content management system: Thumbnails throughout the back-end are now proportional when down-sized. Normal users can now delete articles The Publish on this date menu now goes back as far as the year 2000. Currently working on: Ability for normal users to sort articles/pages in sections Better asset management in the content editor Ability to sort attached images and assets within articles Better reformatting of HTML content especially when pasted from Word As always, let us know if there is some functionality you would really like. We put everything on our list of feature requests and prioritise requests based on how many people need them, how crucial they are to the functionality of the system etc.

05/11/2008 - UPDATE: Google Labs have added advanced IMAP controls which means this hack is no longer required. Find out more in our article, Google adds IMAP controls to Gmail and Google Apps We have been using Google Apps (www.google.com/a/) for over seven months now. This should apply the same to Gmail as well. While it's generally been fantastic with few, if any, major problems, there is one frustrating thing about it relating to Google's implementation of the IMAP protocol. Google has a somewhat odd IMAP folder structure with a [Gmail] folder containing "all mail", Starred, Sent, Drafts etc. The problem is that you have no choice in Apple Mail to unsubscribe from the [Gmail] (and therefor "all mail") folder. From what I've read, this may actually be an issue with the way Gmail implements IMAP preventing anyone from subscribing/unsubscribing from folders. The result is that you end up with doubles (or more) of literally every email in your inbox. In my case, I have 12,000+ emails in my email account so this is a lot of extra emails, traffic and disk space. Some have suggested specifying the [Gmail] prefix in IMAP set up however this means you can't actually see your INBOX but can see "all mail" as well as the other folders shown above. Not nice. The solution I have tried this before, I'm sure, but for some reason I don't remember it working. However, I've recently set up half a dozen or so email accounts like this and it seems to be working perfectly. The trick is simply to specify INBOX as the IMAP Path Prefix in your email program (i.e., Apple Mail). What this does is set the "root" of your email access to the inbox meaning all the extra folders such as "all mail" are below the root and thus not shown. If you have any folders that you previously had in your inbox (i.e., INBOX/A Folder), you can still show these inline in your Apple Mail inbox by labelling them INBOX/INBOX/A folder (not so pretty in Gmail but works perfectly in Mail). Suggestions if you send your outgoing emails through the Gmail servers (smtp.gmail.com), which I recommend you do, sent messages are automatically stored in your sent messages folder so it is recommended you set Mail to not store sent messages on the server. This is important and I strongly recommend you uncheck this and save changes to your email settings prior to implementing the INBOX prefix above. If you don't you might find you can't access from Mail any previous sent messages unless you copy them back down which is complicated and time consuming. Conclusion This seems to fix a long-standing problem I have had with Google Apps / Gmail and Apple Mail. I am interested to know if this works for others and, if not, what their experience has been. If everything falls apart, don't stress, your emails on the server have not been affected and the worst-case scenario is that you would have to delete your email account in Mail and set it up again.

I have often said I feel like the painter who doesn't paint his own house. We have had a lot of good feedback and comments on the old Lucid Design website but the reality is it really no longer reflected who we are and what we can do. I had been meaning (for about four years!) to put some of our other work online—not just our websites—but our old site didn't make it easy. Our new website is built using our wonderful CMS and gives us the great flexibility we need to publish articles, add to our portfolio, work with images, and all the things one needs in a good, flexible website. We are still putting on the finishing touches and it will probably remain a work in progress for some time. We welcome your comments in the form below.

Basecamp takes a fresh, novel approach to project collaboration. Projects don't fail from a lack of charts, graphs, stats, or reports, they fail from a lack of clear communication. Basecamp solves this problem by providing tools tailored to improve the communication between people working together on a project. Basecamp is created by 37signals, the creators of Ruby on Rails and several other pretty cool web-based applications. Website: www.basecamphq.com

iStockphoto is the internet’s original member-generated image and design community containing over 3 million photographs, vector illustrations, video footage and Flash files. Lucid Design uses stock photos if we are working on a project that requires high quality, stylish imagery but not the budget to shoot anything specifically. iStockphoto has a vast range of images and, while we have to be careful not to use something that's been used before, we do make use of stock photos from time to time. Website: www.istockphoto.com

The most well-known of all the online credit card systems, PayPal makes it reasonably easy to accept card payments through your website. For full details, take a look at the PayPal website. While PayPal is undeniably the easiest system currently available, it still takes some time to figure out and understand how you can make the most of it's comprehensive (and often complex) systems. Website: www.paypal.co.nz

This was a basic update of the 2004 design with refined layout and a clean-up of the navigation. Font sizes were increased, too! This design has carried us forward until we launched our 2008 site on July 17th. I'm quite fond of the design but have felt for some time that we are ready for a change as we need to showcase our work and better communicate what we do.

The Lucid Design website has two RSS feeds: News: Irregular updates on what's happening at Lucid Design and other news that might be of interest to our clients Journal: The Lucid Design blog. Our virtual online scrapbook where we collect and share things we find on the internet that we like.

You can see the imagery and logo here which remains much the same to this day. The logo has evolved slightly but with only minor changes in the weight and style of the typeface. We still use these images to this day. This is a classic example of the phenomenon many critics commont on of designers using impossibly small typefaces and shades of grey on gray. Beautiful!

Here's our homepage from 2002. Interesting to see the logo has not changed significantly over the years. Don't you love the combination of lowercase and faux smallcaps with italics (and a bit of motion blur!).

One major feature that seems to be missing from Google Analytics is the ability to track out-clicks or clicks on external links. With the Lucid Directory project, we wanted to be able to see which listings are being clicked on so we can provide statistics for this later down the track. We have come up with the following solution to track all external clicks on the site while still linking directly to the sites so they get a link indexed in Google. <script language="Javascript">function lucid_clicks(){ var SiteLinks = document.links; for(var i=0;i < SiteLinks.length;i++) { var thehref = SiteLinks[i].href.toString(); if(thehref.indexOf("www.yourdomain.co.nz") == -1) { SiteLinks[i].setAttribute("onclick","javascript:urchinTracker('/Clicks/' + this.href)"); } }}</script> You can replace www.yourdomain.co.nz with your domain and /Clicks/etc with anything you wish to show in Google Analytics. To use, simple call lucid_clicks() in your <body> tag as follows: <body onload="lucid_clicks()"> Let us know if you have any suggestions on how this can be improved.