Angus Russell, Author at Bluewire Media

Angus Russell has a real passion for web strategy and implementing it through design. He’s built and markets several of his own websites, so he truly practices what he preaches.

Angus’s native genius is for “constant improvement” and – adding to being skilled in front-end development and user-experience design – he has an architect’s mind for combining both aesthetic appeal and functionality in web design.

Angus has built Shamooly – his own Content Management System designed for small businesses and sole traders. Angus also works part time as a freelance web designer as AR Web Design. Follow @ARWebDesign on twitter.

Blog posts by Angus

Posted on Apr 27, 2013 by Angus Russell

Solving the Issue of Context in Responsive Web Design

A while ago I wrote an article titled Responsive Web Design vs Separate Mobile Site – Which is right for you? As the title suggests, it compared responsive web design to building a separate mobile site, and the reasons you might choose one over the other. I highlighted three core considerations when deciding which path to take: context, content, and your current situation. Of these, the most important consideration in most cases, is context.

“Context” as a consideration in responsive web design has been discussed and debated at length since Ethan Marcotte introduced RWD to the world in 2010.…

Posted on Apr 27, 2012 by Angus Russell

How to make sure your website doesn’t work for your business

If you’re not in the business of making websites, it might surprise you to learn how many people decide they need a website, seemingly for the sake of having a website. As a freelancer, I get lots of enquiries for small-budget websites, most of which can’t clearly articulate WHY they need a website, other than to check it off the list. Even at Bluewire Media, a high-end web strategy company, the “Website Goals” section of our getting started questionnaire is all too often left blank.

But this just won’t do. Even for small projects, it’s important that we begin with some goals.…

Posted on Mar 13, 2012 by Angus Russell

Google Launches GoMo – A Service To Help You Take Your Website Mobile

It’s no secret. The internet is going mobile.

Depending on where you’re getting your stats from, internet enabled mobile devices will outnumber desktop devices as early as 2013.

Google, of course, knows this (because Google knows everything), and they’ve launched a simple tool to help you evaluate your current website’s mobile friendliness, and what you should do to make it more accessible to mobile users. The tool is called GoMo, and it shows you what your website will look like on a smartphone, then gives recommendations as to how you can make it more mobile friendly.…

Posted on Dec 8, 2011 by Angus Russell

Responsive Web Design vs Separate Mobile Site – Which is right for you?

It’s been obvious for a while now that mobile internet use is on the rise, in fact some estimates suggest that as early as 2013, more people will use mobile devices to access the internet than desktop computers.

It’s equally obvious that if you’re building a website now, you need to think about accommodating mobile users.

Until recently (or to be more precise, until this article by Ethan Marcotte in May 2010), accommodating mobile users meant creating a separate mobile version of your content. While this is fine, it comes with a few disadvantages (which I’ll get to soon).…

Posted on Jul 12, 2011 by Angus Russell

How To Score 493/500 For A Website: Bluewire Media shares some of its winning methodology

A few times a year, Bluewire Media will submit some of our latest websites to the IMA (Interactive Media Awards).

We’ve had much success over the years, with 6 “Best In Class” awards and 5 “Outstanding Achievement” awards. One of our latest entries, however, has scored our best mark yet – The Maura Fay Group’s Corporate Learning website managed to get a final grade of 493/500 or 98.6%.

So, bragging aside, what makes a website score 493/500?

Design: 98/100

The IMA website’s Judging Criteria page has this to say about design.…

Posted on Mar 10, 2011 by Angus Russell

How To Create A Business Page On Facebook

I’m writing this blog post because I’ve recently been in a few meetings where one of the last things I said was “… and we’ll send through some instructions on how to create a Facebook page”. I could have just written it down in an email then copy + pasted it whenever I needed to, but I thought it would make more sense to put it in a blog post for anyone to see.

I’ll note that these instructions are current as of the 10th of March, 2011 – but the process does change every now and then, so apologies if you’re viewing this from the future and it’s no help.…

Posted on Jan 31, 2011 by Angus Russell

Weekly Round-Up vol. 79

To all those regular weekly round-up readers, apologies for the lack of a weekly round up recently. This weekly round-up is the best (and most relevant to our readers) of what Mashable and Hubspot published in the last week. I’ve also included a question from Quora, a relatively new Q&A website where questions get answered by some of the big names in whatever industry you’re in.

How would you measure the ROI in social media?
If you’ve never used Quora, check it out! This question has been answered by some big names including David Armano, a social media strategist with around 35,000 twitter followers.…

Posted on Jan 11, 2011 by Angus Russell

How Twitter is Being Used To Disseminate Information During The Queensland Floods

Twitter is abuzz today with the news of the Queensland floods (#qldfloods), this post looks at how it is being used by various different types of twitter users to make announcements, share photos, gather information, raise awareness and encourage donations.

Right now on twitter if you search for #qldfloods, you only need to wait 5-10 seconds before the new tweets button appears saying “20 New Tweets”. This means that people in Brisbane and Queensland are tweeting at a rate of around 2 tweets per second. These tweets range from people posting photos via services like TwitPic and YFrog, to people linking to the premier’s disaster relief appeal, to general tweets about individual situations.…

Posted on Jan 8, 2011 by Angus Russell

13 Must-Watch Marketing TED Presentations

Earlier this week, Hubspot, one of our favourite blogs, posted an article that contained 13 embedded videos of great marketers speaking about their ideas. As the title suggests, all of these videos are worth watching.

As a sneak peak, here’s an interesting talk by Malcolm Gladwell about how one psycho physicist brought about a change in the way that food companies thought about their products.

Malcolm tells the story of how food companies came to realise that there isn’t one perfect formula for their product. That different people have different tastes, and by diversifying your product line you can satisfy more people.…

Posted on Dec 13, 2010 by Angus Russell

Why You Should Find Something Of VALUE To Give Away For FREE Online

If you’re from a web agency in Brisbane, you’re probably aware of how competitive the number one Google ranking for “Web Design Brisbane” is. The spot has long been dominated by John Hacking, with other, much larger companies stuggling to stay in the top 5 for longer than a few months.

Recently, Bluewire Media has claimed the #1 spot from John Hacking, who has dropped from #1 to page 2 (any ideas why?). If you looked at the home page of the Bluewire Media website however, you might be confused as to how we’ve made it to the number one spot.…