The new Messaging 2 suite in Affino is not simply an incremental update, it is a complete re-imagining of how messaging should work for businesses online.

It has meant a fundamental re-think of how bulk and targeted messages work, and breakthrough improvements for notifications and auto-responders.

Sales and Marketing Automation

Messaging is at the heart of sales and marketing automation. Typically though it is necessary to integrate with many different systems to achieve even the basics of an effective messaging campaign.

Although Affino’s Messaging doesn’t do everything that tools such as Mail Chimp, Mandrill, Hub Spot, Eloqua, KISSmetrics and Scout do, it does a big part of it, and a whole load more.

It also does it at no additional cost, with easy-to-use tools, and with no code integration required.

Message Campaigns vs Mailing Lists

The first big change with Affino’s new messaging comes with the splitting off of the mailing list from the messages being sent. Affino now has Mailing Lists and Message Campaigns in place of Newsletters. Mailing Lists manage the actual subscribers, whilst Messages are sent out based on your Message Campaigns.

This means you can target your mailing lists in much more creative ways by running multiple messaging campaigns against individual mailing lists.

It also means you can do much more to target your subscribers effectively, whilst maintaining a unified unsubscribe and bounced subscriber list across multiple campaigns.

Premium, Personal and SMS Message Campaigns

You can now run three distinct types of messaging campaigns. Premium messages act the same as the previous Newsletter messages. These are tailored messages which can have high design values and where the message content can be highly targeted, automated and personalised.

It is now also possible to send out bulk SMS messaged and Personal messages. Personal messages are instant messages which appear to be sent individually, but are in fact sent in bulk.

We have also made it much easier to send out individual messages and to test / preview those messages. You can now simply enter in the message content, and Title where they are being sent by email. You can then preview them, send test messages or simply dispatch your message

Affino 7.1 is now out, and it’s a major release in every way. Whilst there are many aspects to this Affino release, the two key threads are improved scaling and greater engagement. Affino 7.1 has been significantly re-architected to scale with new search and analytics engines. With the release of Affino 7.1 we will also be migrating sites to our new super-scaling cloud.

We’ve rolled out big updates to many core Affino services including Messaging, Search, Analysis, Customer Ladder and Relationships. We’ve also introduced great features such as Store Credits for incentivising customers, and Design Panels for creating great popups.

The combined improvements in the Customer Ladder (engagement), Messaging and Analysis add up to a breakthrough for sales and marketing automation. The new Messaging Campaigns for bulk premium, personal and SMS messages, come with advanced targeting, filtering and triggering options and great analytics.

Site Search has been completely re-engineered around Solr which gives Affino greatly improved performance on searches, and allows for much smarter searching. Core management elements such as relating content have also seen big updates focused on making editorial teams much more productive.

Altogether there are nearly 400 great new updates in this release, many of which will be transformative when fully rolled out on existing Affino sites.

We have also fixed most of the identified low-level issues which arose from the Affino 7 launch, and which are inevitable with the introduction of such a significant new platform.

Upgrade Guidance

The Affino 7.1 release is a signifiant update, and unlike most Affino releases, this one takes some time to run as we’re completely restructuring all the analytics data and refreshing the search indices. Given how intense this update is on the infrastructure, and that your site will be moved to the new hosting cloud, it is essential that you co-ordinate your update with your account manager.

Also in this release is a significant change to how most images are presented as you can now set the margins around the main images using Design Styles / CSS. It is essential to review your pages to ensure that the images are presented as expected, and note that you can now optimise the layout.

It is essential that

Ecommerce is speeding up, and no one is safe if they’re not fully committed to meeting the evolving market head on. 2013 will see big winners and losers as more shopping goes digital.

Here are some of the key trends for the coming year.

Personalisation

Nothing comes close in importance to being able to tailor the buying experience for each and every one of the shoppers who comes to you, whether it’s online, on mobile devices, kiosks, in-store or via television.

The starting point for personalisation is the unified user account. This means offering a single login for the user across all devices, with instant syncing of user data across all different sales interfaces, or preferably using a single client-facing commercial engine across all platforms.

Product listings, product searches, recommendations, emailers and community engagement should all be tailored to the individual user. This should be done on recently viewed products, identified interests, and increasingly by using game mechanics to automatically identify and guide users’ buying preferences.

Cloud

The economics, scale and distribution of Cloud setups mean that companies must embrace cloud services in 2013. Even though there are still occasional headline stories on cloud provider down-time, cloud services are maturing rapidly, and in real-world scenarios downtime is becoming increasingly rare.

On the other hand the cloud costs keep on coming down, and the service levels are rising dramatically each year. It means the cost / performance / scale / reliability equation has now firmly swung in favour of cloud setups rather than in-house infrastructure for ecommerce.

Being able to deliver a rapid response, at scale, globally, is best delivered via cloud platforms. Solutions such as Scalr mean that it is now possible to automatically scale up and down your infrastructure. This means that you only pay for what you use, and can run much fewer servers as a baseline, even within the same day as demand scales up and down. It also means that you can address peak demand with the best response times.

Using Content Delivery Networks means that your media and static files are delivered locally, globally, with much faster response times. Using cloud-based storage networks with offsite backup networks means

2013 is going to be all about being Responsive, so expect priorities to be very fluid to meet the ever evolving needs of the Affino community. One overwhelming priority we will have for 2013 will be Responsive Design. We’re going to be introducing Responsive Skins which means that pages will transform to fit any device, however they are turned.

The second Responsive element is that in 2013 we are going to turbo-charge Affino’s evolution. The past years have required a great deal of effort to evolve Affino to work on mobile and tablet devices; to become super-scalable and reliable; to run on the latest cloud-based architectures; and to have a new 21st Century management interface. All of those are now at highly evolved states.

It means that the Comrz team can now focus on rounding out Affino Social and Commercial platforms; do much deeper integration with the leading Social communities; evolve key communication and promotion aspects such as direct and real-time messaging, and a new approach to A/B and Multi-variate testing.

Below are many of the key challenges we will be tackling during the course of 2013. Expect the most productive Social Commerce platform to become even more so.

Responsive Design

We will be introducing Responsive Skins to Affino in the first half of 2013. Responsive Skins will mean that Affino pages will automatically re-organise themselves to provide the best experience whatever form-factor of device is being used to navigate the pages. This will affect how everything is displayed on Affino sites and is the major undertaking for the year.

As part of the process, the new Skins will be light-weight, fully CSS-based and Affino will have built-in code compression to minimise the page size.

Usability and Learnability

We will continue the major initiative to make Affino as learnable and usable as possible. This was what we spent most of 2012 on, and Affino is now much more usable than ever before. Key initiatives include new Setup Wizards, Control Centre Zone filters, and the new Media v3 management interfaces.

Continuing from last year we expect to make hundreds of further usability improvements throughout the course of the year and have already wrapped up some great ones for Affino 7.1.

Publishing

Relating content becomes

Our priority for Affino 7 has been to make the most productive platform available for running your business online. The integrated nature of Affino means you only have to manage your community, content, products, design, , promotions and analytics in one place. This is by far the most effective approach for managing an online business. What we have done with Affino 7 is to improve in every way how how you manage your online business.

Affino 7 has a New Control Centre, with the pages delivered by a New Page Generation Engine, and it runs on a New Cloud Architecture, all with the intent to deliver the best Social Commerce platform on the market today.

New Look Affino

We’ve brought together great productivity ideas from the Affino user community and the Comrz team. It has meant re-styling, re-factoring and re-architecting Affino from the ground up to be more productive and easier to learn. Affino 7 also has a great new minimalist look, and now works great on tablets and mobile devices. With Affino 7 we’ve set a new baseline which means that every new element we roll out in Affino will be that much better.

Affino has a brand new Control Centre and Live Edit tools. It is now optimised whether you’re using it on a desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile device, so you can use it anywhere any time. We’ve really raised the bar for every management interface in Affino. You fill find almost every task easier to do, with great new short-cuts, lookups, help items, searches, lists, entry forms, and navigation elements.

Affino has been brought right up to the leading edge with it’s platform support. It now runs on the latest technology which means it is faster, more reliable and more scalable than ever before. It also means that the Comrz team will be able to accelerate the development of the Affino platform in the weeks and months ahead.

There’s a great new Design Centre. The Design Objects are now completely managed within native browsers with no Flash requirement. All the Design Control screens have seen significant updates and Affino now has better than ever custom CSS support. We’ve also introduced some much needed enhancements such as padding on Design Cells and full Font styling, along with a breakthrough ability for you to be able to secure each and every Design Element

The Affino 7 Control Centre will build on familiar metaphors. Behind the scenes it’s all change though with every single screen having been updated.

You will be more productive at doing almost any management task, whatever the context.

New Look

Expect a great new look. It’s a natural evolution for Affino, and is better suited to the mix of desktop and mobile environments Affino is used in. It will also be faster.

No Screen Left Behind

We have been on a year-long process of updating every Control screen to be more effective at delivering what is needed. We will complete that process in Affino 7, with dozens of interfaces becoming much more useful.

Frameless

One of the biggest compromises we made with the Affino Control Centre was using frames to display the navigation elements. This was essential at the time to allow for dynamic drill-down navigation, but it meant that the URLs were no longer representative of what you were doing.

Frames are deprecated, they’re on the way out. Although they’re still supported by browsers they are no longer the best way to do things. HTML 5 offers us better alternatives. This will mean though that you will need a modern browser to manage Affino sites. IE7 doesn’t cut it any more.

Control/Promotion

You will be able to directly link through to any management screen using simple URLs. No more clicking around required.

Also when you share a URL, it will be exactly the screen you’re referring to. Something which will be particularly useful for support.

There is a massive benefit for Affino development with this approach in that we can now run a great deal more automated tests on the Control Centre, which should ensure higher quality levels all round.

Security

We’re working through every control screen again to ensure that the highest level of security is in place for each one. Since nothing is more important.

Less Flashy

Since Flash simply doesn’t work on mobile devices any more (and never really did) we’ve been busy removing it for the past year and a half. Affino 7 sees the removal of all but two Flash control elements (Dashboards and the Media Editor) which will be converted to HTML 5 in the following release.

Design Centre

Recently a lot of Affino sites have stared to implement custom CSS. We’re going to make this both easier in Affino 7, and remove the main need for doing so at the same time.

Font Styling

Most of the time custom styles are used, are when fonts / titles / content styling needs tweaking. Till now Affino has had very limited native options for styling text. That will all change in Affino 7 with tight control over different headings, content and titles.

More Custom CSS

We are also making it possible to completely lock down your custom CSS on design styles, which will give you full control over the styling, but has the side-effect of making the styles less ‘future proof’.

Style Previews

You will also have a great new Design Style preview so you can instantly see your styling.

Sticky Focused Navigation

Web pages increasingly have sticky buttons (ones which always stay on the page), especially navigation buttons. Affino will be no exception with Sticky Buttons, which also can have a focused effect.

We are also introducing popup panels for the first time, which will allow for much more visually rich and capable popup navigation.

CSS Design Menus

Design Menus will be changed from being tables to CSS. This single change will mean big improvements in styling flexibility and speed.

We have a number of other enhancements lined up, but we’ll need to see which ones beat the cut before we elaborate on them further.

What are your thoughts, are there other styling enhancements you would like to see in Affino?

For any online business to succeed and remain relevant, you need to continuously review what is and isn’t working. At a minimum you shuld do an annual review where you check your assumptions and apply your learnings for the year.

We’re often asked to help work through this process. Below is a useful checklist when you’re looking to update your online business.

Target Market

The most important element is identifying your target market, i.e. who’s your ideal client, the second level client, third level client etc.

You need to identify the tone of your site, i.e. if your site were a person who would they be: gender, age, look, way of speaking.

It’s well worth checking out Stefan’s excellent Brand Profile Creation piece for more details.

Barriers

The most important barrier you have to overcome when setting up an onine business / website, is Trust. You have three key barriers that users have to overcome:

• users need to get to trust your brand
• you (i.e. the people on / behind the site)
• and the products / services you’re selling.

You have to put enough information online so that users who do not know you / your brand / your products are able to buy into them.

It’s essential that you take your customers’ perspective on this, don’t assume they have any knowledge of who you are unless your company / brand is a household name already.

Revenues

What are going to be your revenue drivers?

Rank them in order, e.g. subscriptions, service / product sales, ad revenues.

These define the priority in how they will be showcased / ordered.

Priorities

What are the priorities you have with the website, e.g. customer experience, client sign-ups, revenues, usage growth

These determine a lot how you build your pages and what you showcase.

In our experience the simpler the proposition and presentation, the more likely business will take off online.

Hooks

What are going to be the hooks that bring people back to your site regularly, e.g. blogs, news, stats, tools.

Do an analysis of what’s driving the most traffic on your current site.

Without these hooks, people won’t see what else you have to offer.

Affino 6.0.16 is the final significant Affino 6 release. It’s the culmination of a greatly improved Affino user experience where almost every interface has been enhanced during the course of the last couple of years. We’ve focused on smoothing out the remaining rough edges in Affino 6 and it’s now a whole level easier than it’s ever been.

This release sees the introduction of Cookie Policies to meet the EU Privacy Directive. These are smart and geo-targeted so that only users from the relevant countries are presented with the policy dialogue. Additionally continued browsing is registered as implied consent so as to minimise any disruption to the user.

Affino ecommerce makes yet another big step forward. In this release we’ve significantly improved shopping baskets which are now editable, can be taken over and handed back to customers, or created from scratch and assigned to customers. The baskets also have greatly improved audit tracking and styling. There are also dozens of significant updates throughout the shopping experience which mean that buying is now more engaging than ever in Affino.

There are some major usability improvements in this release, in particular the new Guest Browsing Mode which allows you to instantly switch to the customer’s point of view when managing the site. It is now much easier to navigate through the Control Centre with better browser tab naming and highlighted drill-down links throughout the Control Centre.

As with all Affino releases, we have upgraded the integrations with a number of 3rd parties to reflect their changed APIs. We also integrate with Broadbean for the first time for incoming job briefs. The integration updates with Facebook, LinkedIn, PayPal, Metacafe and Google Merchant Centre are critical if you integrate with any of them.

The improvements we have also made to: the checkout, publishing workflows, recruitment, funding platform, geo blocking / targeting, and user export make this an essential update if you’re using any of those elements.

This is also going to be the best tested, most polished Affino release to-date, as we further evolve our quality assurance processes and build up our core project management team. We’ve added a whole new layer of QA in this release so that you can have the best possible

We’ve been meaning to do this for a while, and it actually turned out to be a lot less painful than I had originally envisaged - but here it is! - a comprehensive ’Affino Design Elements Overview’ - featuring 76 of the 81 Design Elements currently available in Affino - including the 2 new Recruitment ones (’Job Search’ and ’Member Profile’).

I have managed to squeeze them all onto a single screen - and placed them in the position you would likely encounter / utilise those elements - Left Column, Middle Column or Right Column - with some overlapping / spanning.

To further help you Designers and Site Implementers, I have completed the ’Design Elements Feature’ - which lists out every single Design Element by name. While you’re at it you can check out Affino’s other 50 key Features!

Both of these are best used together, and are essential reference guides for designing and implementing an Affino site - you are of course best off logging in, as more Design Elements appear for you when logged in. It is though also useful to compare the logged-in and logged-out states to get a fuller understanding / picture of exactly how some of Affino’s Design Elements work.

For anyone considering buying into Affino or about to embark on a site implementation - this is a good starting point - don’t try to shoe-horn it all in on one screen like us though - this is just a reference and showcase, and you can see by how long it take the page to load up, how impractical it would be to cram everything onto a single page...

NOTE - One word of warning - the MP3 Player currently has the annoying habit of auto-playing, so make sure you have your computer / laptop muted in advance - or on low volume!

This is a well rounded Affino release in that there’s something for all Affino users. Beginners will have a lot less questions, as we’ve answered hundreds more by moving settings into context, simplified options, provided more meaningful help and added the new in-context Help Guides and Features. Shoppers will find the new optimised checkout to be simple, clear and fast; and store managers will find it is now much easier to set up and manage stores. Recruiters will love the new recruitment engine and all the updates we’ve done to smooth the entire recruitment process.

Startups will find raising project finance has gotten a lot easier with all the updates we’ve made to the Funding Platform. Designers will love the improved styling on the Design Elements. Marketers have improved tools for recommendations, campaigns and lead generation and better analytics and reporting. Community Mangers have the great new Member Profile DE for better personalisation, improved notifications and user management. Finally, Developers have access to the great new content and authentication APIs.

We’ve spent a lot of time setting up new Affino instances over the past couple of months to test specific use cases such as the new Funding Platform and Recruitment engines. This has highlighted a number of issues with creating and running multiple sites on a single Affino instance and we’ve resolved all the issues we came across. It means it’s now considerably easier to set up and run as many Affino sites as you want.

Affino’s quality level has been raised considerably in this release. We now have a great new Business Analyst / Project Manager / QA Pro in Catherine Phillips, who will be a key member of the team driving forward Affino’s excellence. She brings a lot of smarts, insight and attention to detail which will be reflected in Affino moving ahead. We’ve also developed a number of new regression tests and added more test instances to ensure we’re delivering the best Affino releases we can.

Make sure that you check out the new Feature Guides and updated Help Guides, as well as the brilliant Affino Design Elements page which crams most of the Affino DEs into one very long screen.

Affino 6.0.15 Release - Ecommerce, Usability and Recruitment

This release is the culmination of seven months work on the new Optimised Affino Checkout. During the course of the last six months we have rolled out dozens of incremental improvements (and fixes) to the checkout process to drive higher conversion rates. The checkout experience has been taken to the next level with a complete revamp for simple, fast checkouts. We’ve also rolled out a new ecommerce engine, greatly simplified the ecommerce setup and made many nuanced enhancements to the whole ecommerce experience.

We continue our focus on Usability with in-context Help and Feature guides in each Control Centre. We have also greatly improved the process for setting up and running multiple Affino sites on a single Affino instance. Hundreds more elements have been made more intuitive than they were previously, and a lot of rough edges have been smoothed in this release.

Recruitment also sees a great leap forward with dozens of essential enhancements, including a great new Job Search Design Element, recommended jobs, refined CV handling and much more.

Affino’s style has also subtly improved in this release. Many elements now look better than before, in particular Affino Design Elements, but also the font sizes and proportions, many notifications, most ecommerce and recruitment elements, member search, the funding platform and events.

Upgrade Guidance

This is a Major update which sees amends to everything from registering, logging in, adding to the basket, checking out, member’s profiles, all Design Elements and much more. It is essential that you set aside time to review your site after the update. Ensure that you liaise with your Account Manager prior to the update and update during Comrz support hours to ensure a rapid response to any issues.

Note: you are strongly advised to become familiar with the new checkout on Public Staging prior to updating to this release. It is a complete reworking of how it works and it’s essential that you are prepared for the changes.

It is essential that you run through the complete update process starting with the Affino Updater, followed by the System Update, Re-Initialise Site, Design Element Update, Skin Update and finally Clear Guest Cache; all of which are available on

The new Irish Books Direct website, is the epitome of a modern family business; it’s also a great example of proper Social Commerce. Affino and Comrz have always been great enablers, but nothing is achieved without a sound business vision and the right people behind it.

Alasdair Verschoyle has long been involved in book retail and distribution, and always had the goal of one day creating a community-centric book store focused on his Irish roots, and underlined by a passion for championing and sharing Irish Literature, Authors and Culture.

The idea was to hand-pick a broad spectrum of quality Irish books, published both locally and abroad, which would appeal to Irish Nationals at home, as well as ex-pat Irish and their descendants around the world. The key point of difference is not just in this particular selection of books, but in the use of Affino’s numerous community tools to create a proper global sharing community for everyone interested in Irish Culture.

The site contains video interviews with authors, and frequent blogs and special features - offering extended background information on key titles, their authors, their motivations, inspirations and reference points - all in all giving the site visitor a fully immersive experience of Irish Literature.

Alasdair is the visionary partriarch, and Lorna Lawless and Jenny Coughlan take care of the day-to-day management of the site. This is typical of Affino sites - just a core of 3 people doing amazing things with the software.

We worked with Alasdair to ensure that he ended up with the best possible logo and positioning statement to underline his vision. We then oversaw the design of the site and some custom template creation, but pretty much all the work was done by the team of 3.

Of course this is just phase 1 really, and we look forward to seeing many more innovations to come.

This is a significant stability release for users who are running Affino 6.0.4. It is recommended that you update to this version at the earliest opportunity. There are fixes across the board and a couple of great new features that didn’t quite make it into the last release.

Owing to the timing of this release (i.e. just before the Christmas Break), we have excluded a number of the latest project related developments from it to ensure the smoothest Affino experience over the festive season and into 2011. These will be released in a further Affino release early in the New Year.

  Upgrade Guidance

This is a minor release following on from the major Affino 6.0.4 release a couple of weeks ago. It is recommended that if you’re on 6.0.4 that you update at the earliest opportunity since there are key fixes across the board in this release.

If you are having issues with your catalogue items, in particular with catalogue item attributes and inventory variations then most likely your custom catalogue item templates will need updating which is outside the scope of this update. 

It is essential that you run through the complete update process starting with the Affino Updater, followed by the System Update, Re-Initialise Site, Design Element Update and Skin Update; all of which are available on the Settings > Update screen.

  Key Enhancements

Predictive Site Search v2

Affino Site Search sees major improvements in its predictive search capabilities so that it now shows a great preview panel with the search results categorised, with thumbnails and teasers where relevant. Catalogue Items will also show prices, allowing users to instantly have the key information at their fingertips.

Online Forms v2

Online Forms were one of the first elements to be developed in Affino and they have hardly been touched in ten years. This release sees a major upgrade with the release of the new Online Form Design Element which means that Online Forms can now be included in any page either in the form of a Button Activated form or a full Inline form.

Online Forms are now all instant so that they are now subm... More

Those familiar with our website, may have seen Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir’s name mentioned once or twice before on this site. I picked up on her several years ago (back in the days of Emojo) when her celebrated Flickr Photography Page first rose to prominence. She has many strings to her bow; apart from being a great photographer with an exceptional eye for composition, she is a competent pencil illustrator and superb knitter of stylish Icelandic ’Lopi’ wool sweaters - as can be seen above.

I tend to shop for clothes largely twice per year - in Spring for the warm season, and in Autumn, around my birthday - for the cold season. I am a particular fan of funnel-necked zipped wool sweaters, with a compulsion for 2-way zips, and ideally the inclusion of hand-warming pockets.

As usual, I’ve been doing the rounds of the many London malls, stores and boutiques, and have found nothing to touch on the unique quality and design of Rebekka’s handcrafted works of art. Rebekka takes commissions for $395 dollars for a zipped sweater / cardigan with pockets - approximately £250 - you can of course choose not to have pockets and have a hood instead of a funnel neck. This may seem expensive at first glance, but is actually quite a bit less than more mass manufactured Italian designer knitwear pieces, which typically are on sale for between 10 and 100% percent more and then upwards. Fully handmade fashion designer knitwear can retail up to and over the 1,000 dollar mark - so it’s all relative really.

Rebekka tries on and photographs each of her unique creations - the production log currently stands  at 54 pieces - as you can see on her Flickr Photostream . Each sweater is totally unique, and mine will be the first in the ’Burgundy’ colour-way I believe.

My commission has been accepted, money has been transferred, and the initial dialogue has begun. Those who know me, know my love for the creative process, and I am very much looking forward to seeing the outcome of this project.

Back in May and July I wrote a couple of blogs - ’The New Industrial Revolution ’ and ’World of Boutiques ’ - about how small scale designer / manufacturers were commercially mobilising on the Internet and how they could take advantage of a global audience. In the same way, I first came across Rebekka on the Internet, I check her blog every now and again... More

Markus was not happy with how our News pages looked on Comrz, and I was set the task to devise a new presentation template to showcase the very best of news delivery currently available on the web. I spent several days trawling all the major news sites, and was particularly impressed with several of these, largely - BBC , CNN and The Guardian . The idea was to produce the Ultimate Topical News Resource - where you could easily seek out, list and review key news stories by key criteria.

The make-up of the main listing template is as follows: RSS and Content Subscription appear with Section Header, as well as at base Articles can be listed out by time range - Latest | Most Viewed | Most Liked | Most Commented | Most Shared You can click through to the Public Profile of the Author Click on the Date to list out all articles within that Section published on the same date Click to add / view Comments Number of Views - also clicks through to article Most recent Article is highlighted with Larger Image and Teaser Text Article Topics are only revealed on mouse-over Facebook ’Like’ is revealed on mouse-over Share icons / function is revaled on mouse-over The following articles are listed in summary format - mouse-over reveals Topics, Like and Share

We may still have a couple more tweaks to do, but so far it’s working pretty well. The ’Detail’ presentation utilises the ’Info Box’ for ’Article Highlights’, we also list Topics in a left hand column, and we include a new ’Quotation’ field.

All the new icons are enabled via additional fields / settings on the Design Style. Some of these icons / elments may find their way onto other existing templates in the fairly near future ...

Design Community COLOURlovers recently produced an interesting piece on ’Colours of the Web’ - reviewing logo colour preferences for the 100 leading web properties - in accordance with Alexa .

You can see that the full spectrum is fairly well covered all in all, but there is a significant dominance of blue and red, which funnily enough are the most popular brand / logo colours both offline and online. For a brand expert, there are no real surprises here - either by pattern or distribution / frequency. In colour separation, the primary colours are Red, Green and Blue. We use Red and Blue to indicate extremes of ’Hot’ and ’Cool’ both literally and figuratively. Visually as well, red and blue are very dominant - the Sky and Sea are Blue, Sunsets and Blood are Red - there is so much symbolism that can be conveyed by colour - even the tone of colour - pastels don’t look as high quality as the rich-hued jewel colours. For logos and brands - you want them to stand out and be appealing. A trip to the supermarket soon confirms the dominance of a specific colour pallet  - but in the supermarket Red is dominant, as red is the most appetising colour, whilst blue is the opposite - blue is used for frozen and refrigerated goods, but for other articles you will see a lot of red and warm colours, as well as earthy tones.

I did an article in the Branding Digest section of our Magazine not so long ago - ’The Colour of Brand Identity ’ which features how certain logos are so strongly associated with certain colours, that they effectively ’own’ them, at least within their space / market sector. For Comrz, we wanted to creat a fairly unique appeal to the brand, and settled on a very specific colour of ’Lime Green’ which is not much in use at all. It has to be said, that brand colours play a very significant symbolic /  interpretive role in how the brand communicates its values.

ANyway, I thought it might be interesting ro review the top 20:

(7 x Blue | 5 x Red | 3 x Multi | 2 x Orange | 2 X Grey | 1 x Purple) Google - Multi - Represents breadth of offering MSN / Windows / Bing - Multi - Represents breadth of offering Yahoo - Purple More

Affino websites can be evolved continuously with ease. The powerful Design Centre and Live Design Mode allow designers and editors to roll out entirely new looks on Affino sites and more importantly allow the designs to be continuously evolved so that they provide the most engaging experience for site visitors.

This video is one of a new series of Affino videos which gives a brief introduction into specific aspects of Affino and touches on:

  Affino Application Bar Live Design Mode Design Objects Skins Design Styles Design Menus Design Elements Design Previews Smart Images Smart Copy If you enjoyed this video or found it useful, and would like to see more Affino videos, then please post back on the comments below.

  More

Well, it’s finally happened ... Comrz.com is now sufficiently shiny and refined to be shared with the rest of the world.

It is certainly the most refined build of Affino currently in existence - featuring lots of little design details which are only likely to be discovered by those who take their time to review the entirety of every design page, possibly with the aid of a magnifying glass!

We’ve honed our approach to brand reinforcement with lots of brand echoes assigned to menus and frameworks. This has undoubtedly been an enormous undertaking, and still has some way to go. We still have Magazine, News, Partners and Store Skins to complete - but we are well on the way with those.

The build stats to date are as follows - in volume order!  Design Objects = 227 Design Styles = 65 Skins = 42 Design Menus = 19 Form Styles = 3 Dynamic Menus = 1 Main Menus = 1

Almost 1,000 new Icons have been designed and added to the system for this site!

More to come on Structure and Content ...

Throwing up a site quickly with Affino really isn’t problem. The difficulty comes when you want to use and deploy everything at your disposal in as high quality a fashion as is practically possible.

I am in the process of building an enormous site - wholly from scratch - this involves originating hundreds of icons and dozens of Profiles, Channels and Skins.

We deemed that communication was the key factor, and as a result this is where I have concentrated my efforts in rolling out all the different Community aspects of Affino. I’ve been working on the site for a week now, and there is still a while to go - of course sales and marketing content needs to be populated and more imagery sourced.

In the meantime - please enjoy getting yourself acquainted with a new level of website refinement - we hope you enjoy the experience ...