A new year and a new chapter will be written in our book or I should say blog. This year, the first entry will be on us moving to our new office at the end of February. If everything goes well, we should start operating in our new location on the 1st March 2008.

Our new office will be located at Cendex Centre, 120 Lower Delta Road. More information will be provided later. We will also be posting some photos of our new office, so for those of you who are interested, stay tuned!

We all know that Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 7 but for most (or nearly all) web designers and developers like us, rushing to upgrade to IE 7 can be quite a problem. Their inability to run IE 6 and 7 concurrently would make it difficult for designers and developers to check their work and make sure everything runs smoothly on both IE 6 and 7. But with more and more public users starting to upgrade to IE 7, we do not have much of a choice but to find a solution which will allow us to upgrade to IE 7 and still be able to run IE 6. One solution is to install IE 7 on one test machine but if you are a web designer, you will know how painful that can be!

tredosoft.com found a nice way of running IE 7, 6, 5.5, 5, 4 and 3 together. Yes! You read that right! So to all web designers and developers out there, what are you waiting for?

NOTE: Use this software at your own risk. We are not the developer of this software, so all credit should go to tredosoft.com

For Windows Vista users, sorry… this software will not work on VISTA.

One thing that we have always fail to do is to showcase our clients website before and after the redesign work. We start with Marketing Institute of Singapore:-

Marketing Institute of Singapore

Before

After

Toshiba Singapore Pte Ltd

Before

After

Both Ron and I were recently featured in The Singapore Marketer, a quarterly publication of Marketing Institute of Singapore. In the article, we are labelled as “young enterpreuners who have proven ourselves to be successful in our business venture”. We are very flattered to be given the opportunity to be interviewed and to be called successful is indeed a glowing compliment that we do not think we are totally deserving, given that we have been in business for a pretty short four years. However, to be recognised for our efforts and be able to share a little with our counterparts on what works for us, we really wish to thank Marketing Institute of Singapore for the kind opportunity.

The road forward, we see more challenges and opportunities awaiting us. And we are excited by these and look forward to expanding our business the way we have never thought possible.

If you guys want to read the article, please click on the image below to download the PDF version of the article.

A few months back, after releasing this current website, we received an email from Sandu, the publisher of the Almanac of Asia-Pacific Design who invited us to submit some of our works to be featured in their upcoming second volume of the publication. We have just got an email from Sandu a few weeks back to inform us that our works have been chosen and as a selected contributor, we would be getting a free set of the publication. How cool is that! We are extremely impressed by the quality of the publication and the featured works by our counterpart, and feel very proud indeed to be part of this great group of designers and agencies. Thank you Sandu!

While surfing our own website today, I realise something that is kind of obvious — we don’t have a home button! I think to myself, “why do people want to put a home link on their website?” It seems to be a requirement that you must have a home button, to the extent that in some cases, we see a home button even on the homepage itself!

Don’t we all know that to go back to the homepage, we should click on the logo? This has been a practice for quite a while. To me, it feels more logical to click on the company logo to go to the homepage; afterall, the logo is like a beacon to the home base of a company?

Now that we have ushered in 2007, we cannot help but look back on 2006 and recollect the things that we have achieved in the past year.

The O-Six has been a very fruitful year for us. Not only have we launched a new website, but we have managed to roll it out with XHTML and CSS compliance, sprinkled with AJAX and a company blog to boot. The sweet victory from this was the recognition we received from various design awards and websites. To say we are grateful and overwhelmed would be an understatement.

Apart from the website and the mini buzz it had generated for us, we have also had the good opportunity to work with various new clients, such as Toshiba (Singapore), Marketing Institute of Singapore and National Youth Council, and many others, on their new web projects. The whole experience we took away from the collaborations opened our eyes to how different teams work and function, how each client’s requirements get translated to what their target audience are seeking and how closely working together between us and the clients helps create value from our web services to features that really matter.

On the home ground, we have been expanding ourselves on multiple fronts, and will continue to do so in 2007. The future is bright and we cannot wait to get kicking into gear again!

This year, Time has picked the collective us as the Person of the Year. It is not the first time that Time has selected a group instead of a person for the title and this year, they have decided to honour the explosive phenomena of the blogosphere, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, and the whole slew of Web 2.0 community sites.

This year has proved to be an exciting year for online social networking and people are starting to take notice and feel the impact of involvement by netizens in the forms of content contribution, citizen journalism and personal publishing and broadcasting, to name but a few.

The article features a number of personalities who have made use of such platforms as community sites, blogs, and websites to share information and commentary on their lives and the people and happenings around them. We are particularly touched by the stories of Ali Kurshid (young photographer in Karachi, Pakistan who shares his photos on Flickr), Lee Kelly (mil-blogger who writes from the front lines), Waz and Lenny (British couple who host an alternative kind of cooking show) and Harriet Klausner (the quinquagenarian speed reader who has written over 12,000 book reviews on Amazon). Each is a living and inspring story of how the Internet is changing the way we live, communicate, share and most importantly, bond and spread love for one another.

The Winners of The 2006 W3 Awards have been announced and we are delighted to know that we have won a Silver award for this website under the categories of Corporate Communications and Homepage Design. We are extremely delighted to find our quality of work being appreciated and acknowledged by relevant design bodies like W3 Awards…

The launch of this current website has done great things for us. We see ourselves being listed by sites like Netdiver, CSS Remix, Unmatched Style and many others. Our search engine ranking and listing improved termendously and the volume of online enquiries have increased, not only from Singapore but from overseas customers as well.

This post has nothing to do with design and development, but we are just trying to spread the word for a good cause against online child pornography. Help to light a candle for the innocent victims of online child abuse.

Crimes against children are what we feel are the worst forms of crimes. According to the website, victims of online child pornography are getting younger, and the abuses are getting worse. The average age is nine years old. If you are angry like us, head over there and show your support. Let’s wish for a better world today for our hopes of tomorrow — our children.