NaturalMotion Ltd is the creator of Dynamic Motion Synthesis (DMS), a break-through in 3D character animation that’s been used on games like Grand Theft Auto IV and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.

The Pixel’s Lychee CMS is a new PHP system designed to be easy to setup and create and manage websites, with a simple to use WYSIWYG editor.

Designed specifically to manage our own content orientated website, TotalVideoGames.com, Lychee has been implemented specifically to cope with an ever changing content environment with a large archive of pages.

Most free to download Content Management Systems cover the basics of content management, offering only limited features and facilities – making them useful for smaller websites with a limited number of pages.

The advantage of Lychee to companies like NaturalMotion is that it can be used for large scale websites where content changes on a high volume basis – making it perfect for TotalVideoGames.com, NaturalMotion.com and more.

For more information on our Lychee CMS please give us a call on 0800 043 1040 or get in contact via The Pixel’s contact form.

2. Don’t go in any pub that has a England flag – it will be full of people that should be at work and that have skived-off for an entire month with a sore throat, to become partial alcoholics in the name of football.

3. Don’t open any tabloid newspaper – particularly the Sun – at any point as it will mostly be about Big Brother. Oh yeah, and football. That goes for after the World Cup also.

4. Do watch Wimbledon. It offers much needed grace and strawberries during a time of belches, chants and farts.

5. Don’t buy anything that’s made by any World Cup sponsor – it will only brainwash you into thinking you like football, with a system of carefully formatted graphics and probably some sort of competition to win a football keychain.

6. Do disrupt the national power grid by turning on as many electric kettles as possible during a pivotal World Cup moment. Which team is playing at that time is entirely up to participants.

7. Do look seriously at the prospect of space travel tourism, as it may be the only place you can’t connect to the BBC iPlayer.

8. Don’t watch Sky Sports News for longer than 10 minutes – it’s a bit like living through a permanently looped, football related ‘Groundhog Day’ without Bill Murray (sadly).

9. Do wear sound isolating earplugs to protect from those annoying horns that sound like a swarm of bees has nested on your face (I know they’re cultural but they hurt).

10. Do hibernate. You can’t avoid it. It’s on for a month, featured on every available media format possible, including ‘the very air we breathe’. Find an old war bunker or pillbox that’s not too gross inside, put some newspaper down and make a home for yourself. And don’t forget your earplugs in case England score.

Hilarious related links…

Angry girlfriend smashes her boyfriend’s TV during the England game:

Anti-World Cup Facebook group:

http://www.facebook.com/editalbum.php?oid=119026334807249&add=1&htmlup=1#!/group.php?gid=119026334807249

Google have revealed that website speed and performance are now going to be prominent factors in their search ranking algorithm that determines website search engine positioning. To accommodate these groundbreaking changes we’ve deployed the Akamai Content Delivery Network (CDN) to provide some of the fastest download speeds on the web.

Page speed is already an important part of the Google AdWords quality score and slow hosting has often resulted in poor crawl rates and poor indexing. But until now the performance of websites has not directly affected Google’s main search page results.

Those days are gone. From now on Google is giving a bonus to faster websites with better performance and in an interview for WebProNews.com, Matt Cutts, Software Engineer at Google Inc. gave the reasoning behind this decision:

“Historically, we haven’t had to use it [website speed] in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus.”

Google’s decision to give extra focus to well-built sites stands The Pixel in good stead. It means that developers putting time and effort into creating a positive end-user experience are finally going to be rewarded.

Google defines website speed as how quickly a website responds to web requests. The page load time is measured by Google to determine speed, as is the ease and speed a website can be accessed by the Googlebot software. Developers can test the speed of their websites and optimise their performance at the Google code website.

Using the Akamai CDN to deliver all content to The Pixel’s websites via a world wide network means that anyone accessing video, large images or music will receive these files faster and more efficiently than with a central sever – dramatically improving the performance of our websites, and from now on, improving the Google rankings.

Instead of loading all traffic in one place, a CDN offloads this traffic by redirecting to servers as close to the users as possible – anywhere around the world. The closer the content the faster the delivery. As a result end users will experience improved stream quality even in remote areas.

Akamai provide CDN services to some of the largest, most demanding websites on the internet. Their clients include Apple who use the network for their iTunes Store and the BBC who use Akamai to stream its recorded and live programs via the BBC iPlayer. Other customers include Amazon, Adobe, Yahoo and now The Pixel.

There are also other optimisations that can help to improve our websites’ performances to accommodate the new Google changes. The page loading order of a website for example, is another useful tactic. Loading large images and files behind the scenes and using serial loading rather than loading items in parallel can all make an impact.

The restructuring of code and the condensing of JavaScript to be less of a drain on resources are also factors that will help to improve performance.

So there we have it – there’s never been a more important time to develop a quality website built by those that actually understand the internet and how best to use it. And by ‘those’ I mean us.

Don’t let your website disappear from Google. If you would like to know more about anything mentioned in this article or how we could help make sure that doesn’t happen, please give us a call on 0800 043 1040 or use The Pixel contact form.

Without further ado, let’s have a gander…

Homepage

The homepage features a picturesque overview of the entire fantasy land, with a cunningly handy signpost that’ll let us direct customers to all the wonderful services we offer. Fairies armed with pixel-dust will draw you into our splendid world of internet design and marketing wizardry, with enchanting SEO sonnets like cyber sirens. Do come in…

The Boat House

Other habitats include ‘The Boat House’. That rather nautical looking fellow stands in this humble abode producing expertly written product descriptions, whilst keeping a look out for other ingenious web developers lurking in dark and cursed cyber space – and shoots them with his cannon.

Balloon Station

Our beloved ‘Balloon Station’ stands proud as the hub of our land, guiding airships in safely, bringing in essential supplies for the web development and internet marketing journey ahead. Extra shipments of Google AdWord’s have been requested.

The Dark Tower

Ominous and domineering, ‘The Dark Tower’ commands a respect throughout this and other distant lands. Riddled with mystery and intrigue, tales of ghosts and legendary Magento development surround this fiery, dark turret. It’s also where we make our tea.

We hope you like the look of our new website and expertly produced concept artwork as much as we do. And if you’re not already, we hope you’ll soon be as excited as we are about The Pixel casting our spell over the web development market by creating a world where anything web related can happen. Keep your eyes on this space for the launch of the new website. You won’t regret it!

Please do give us a call on 0800 043 1040 or use The Pixel’s contact form to find out what we can make happen for you.

We’ve re-launched the Fun4Kids website with a brand new design, navigation and administration system to help accommodate the ever increasing sales demand from the buying public. We’ve taken the branding of the last website and created a brand new design to complement and expand upon that success.

The new website features a new blue and red colour scheme, featuring playful outdoor graphics such as clouds, kites and stars and a whole new host of promotional features and sections to grab users’ attention.

Included are 3 featured products from each of the main categories so customers can get a highlighted glimpse of the best Fun4Kids has to offer.

Also included is a brand new ‘Top Brands’ section that links to Fun4Kids’ most successful and favourite manufacturers such as Razor and Cortez, so customers can view their full range of products.

One of the most significant additions to the site is the introduction of a rewards point system. Customers will now be able to collect reward points every time they make a purchase, leave a review, or sign-up for the newsletter.

The number of points rewarded depends on the amount of money spent or the action taken. Customers will be able to use their reward points to obtain discounts on further purchases – rewarding frequent users and returning customers.

A brand new buying guide section has also been included, covering Scooters, Trampolines, Bicycles, Ride-ons and Bouncy Castles. The guides include handy information about Fun4Kids’ various products to aid in their decision making.

These guides are accessible everywhere, including on the product pages where they appear as pop-up windows so users needn’t surf away from the product they are currently viewing.

The new navigation menu on Fun4Kids has been divided into 6 umbrella categories:  Home, Bikes & Ride-ons, Garden & Sport, Scooters, Accessories & Spares and Special Offers. This new system is designed to help make the menu more concise, faster to navigate and more relevant to the user.

Fun4Kids is now using the Magento Enterprise Edition online ecommerce system. Previously they were using Magento Community Edition – a free to use, open source system that handles orders, stock, content management and more.

The success of this platform has led to Fun4Kids requesting an upgrade to the Magento Enterprise Edition, which offers greater depth of customisation and a whole new host of features that will help expand their potential for growth.

The Magento Enterprise Edition has enabled Fun4Kids to utilise the following facilities: Reward Points System – points are awarded based on a wide range of transactions and customer actions to enhance user experience and increase customer loyalty; Highly Tuned Page Performance – new performance optimisations with full page caching significantly reduces page load times to increase conversions.

These are just 2 of the features now available to Fun4Kids via the Magento Enterprise Edition, and there are countless other features we will no doubt be implementing in the future to further aid their progress.

So there we have it, the measures The Pixel think we help turn one very successful website into an even more successful website with the facilities to expand long into the future. Have a look at the current leading outdoor toy website Fun4Kids and let us know what you think – we’re always keen to hear of anyway we can improve what we do.

If you’d like to know more about what The Pixel can do for you or your company, whether it be design, content or programming, please get in contact via The Pixel contact form or telephone free on 0800 043 1040 and we’ll be happy to help.

Our new abode has walls, a ceiling, desks and even some kind of running water system that lets us wash indoors. It’s bliss. We don’t even need to batten down the hatches when the airship takes off. Tis’ solid and true.

It’s such an exquisite venue that we may even invite our mothers round for a goblet of tea and a mint viscount. Customers can come too if they wipe their clogs and don’t let the trolls out.

We now reside at: The Pixel, 4 Osprey Court, Hawkfield Way, Hawkfield Business Park, Bristol, BS14 0BB.

Which means all pigeons must now go to The Pixel Towers, fifth window on the left, not right! Sorry for any inconvenience or lost prize birds this may cause. So long…

Psdtuts+ is a blog/Photoshop site that features some of the most useful and fascinating Photoshop and design articles on the web, and we’re very pleased they’ve noticed our blog site.

Described as “Simple animation, outstanding artwork, and clever layout; this website has it all”, Psdtuts+ appear to have appreciated all our hard work and effort.

This is the third high profile web design based site to have noticed The Pixel’s efforts: in December we won ‘Site of the Month’ from The CSS Awards and in November we featured on the homepage of Smashing Magazine, when we were selected for their ‘50 Beautiful and Creative Blog Designs’.

With all this attention we’re finding it very hard not to let it go to our heads. We are however doing our utmost to remain grounded enough to provide the same level of creative design excellence to you the general public should you ever wish your website to look as good as ours.

If you do already, why not give us a call on 0800 043 1040 to have a friendly chat about what we can do for you. Alternatively drop us an email via The Pixel’s contact form.

This snazzy little app lets the great movie going public scroll through the 2010 Oscar nominations in all the leading categories, view trailers and even vote thumbs-up or down for their favourite films. Who needs an awards committee?

Folks can then link directly to the purchase screen of each film to buy straight away, or if it’s still hot out of the projector, they can be emailed with a notification of the film’s release date.

Not wasting any opportunity to butter-up the discerning Play.com movie consuming crowd, there’s also a Movies You May Be Interested In section that lists other titles by similar directors, actors and subject.

A Top 5 Customer Rated Movies facility also allows Play.com customers to decide which movies are the real stars of this year’s Oscar show, and which ones were merely poorly dressed extras without any lines.

It’s a great way of tapping into the movie excitement of the moment and capitalising on great publicity. If you thought ‘Avatar’ should have won best picture or that ‘The Hurt Locker’ was aptly named purely because of how it felt to watch, then have your say on the Play.com Movie Awards Widget.

Here at The Pixel we’ve made a range of widget applications for Play.com, helping to create a new way for internet customers to shop, experience and enjoy their purchasing. Other examples include our Clothing Widget Application and a large range of e-Catalogues.

If you’d like any further information on what The Pixel can do for you, widgets and all, please don’t hesitate to contact us via The Pixel contact form or call free on 0800 043 1040 for a bit of a chat.

Video games have slowly become as narrative driven as any movie or TV show, and most now feature an array of leading characters and a big fat storyline to boot – which lends itself perfectly to our video banner services.

The Aliens Vs Predator video banner features an eerie starting sound track that explodes into an adrenaline filled action fright-fest, with a combination of real game footage and promotional material, inter-cut with punchy promotional tag-lines.

The Bioshock 2 video banner uses dramatic voiceover footage and menacing game sounds to create an atmospheric and spooky depiction that rings true to game. Cleverly incorporated game reviews are also nested within the action to create an alluring trailer.

The Dante’s Inferno video banner features an apocalyptic score with a dramatic climax that booms out behind old-style textual descriptions. Outer worldly imagery and an intense montage of real game footage and slow motion video create an epic, absorbing experience for the viewer.

If you like the look of what you’ve seen and think your store could benefit from our video banner services, please contact The Pixel – we’ll be happy to have a chat and show you a few more examples of what we can do for you.

‘Backbreaker’ is the upcoming American football game (well it’s not really football is it?) from NaturalMotion. It’s been built using their euphoria engine that uses full 3D character animation to generate animations as the game is played – so every tackle is unique and not a recording.

What this means then, is no more sports stars dressed up in funny tights with sensors strapped to their every orifice. A shame, but nevertheless ‘Backbreaker’ is set to change videogame football forever – and we’re very pleased to be a part of that.

To see our logo animation in action, check out the Natural Motion YouTube Channel. ‘Backbreaker’ is due for a spring 2010 release on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

For more information on the types of video services we offer, check out our Video Banner services page, or contact The Pixel via our contact page.