State of Gold Coast Web Development

We just posted an interesting article on our site, regarding the State of Web Development on the Gold Coast. Hope you find it interesting!

An ODE to Jason

One of our web developers has left us after being with us for 2 awesome years. So this is a big thank you Jason love : the coder of coders, the king of css, the integrator of Google. Jason was instrumental in pushing the web development team who built our new Content / Web Management Systems, and thru his constant nagging (joking!) this has evolved into a first rate product.

Jason is leaving the Gold Coast and moving back to Sydney and we wish him all the luck for his future endeavours.

Search engines from the 90's

Do you remember the days when Altavista, Lycos and Yahoo were the sites to go to find information online? This is back in the days before Google, and I was mostly accessing the internet from School or at home using Dialup (we were on a $40 / month plan - and that got us 20 hours of internet per month! - great value back then! Also there was like two suppliers of Internet on the Gold Coast back then as well).

Take a trip thru time, and suss the gallery on Zdnet featuring screen grabs from the most popular search engines (suss Google's logo!) back then.

Meet the QR Code.

You are seriously going to see the explosion of these things over the next couple of Years - they are called QR codes and they are coming to an advertisement near you!

QR Codes are a really funky way for Mobile Phone users to quickly get information (such as a web page address) into their mobile phone from a physical medium i.e a print advertisment, business card or banner advert (such as in a bus shelter).

How does this work?

A mobile phone user takes a picture of your QR Code (let's say that you've placed in your Advertisement) using their phone camera. The mobile phone recognises this as a QR Code and translates it into a piece of information (i.e a web address like: http://www.tmdesigns.com.au/).

Example of how this could work

Let's say Seaworld (a tourism attraction on the Gold Coast), runs advertisments in a number of bus shelters along the Gold Coast Highway. In this advertisement they could offer a discount of say $10. To redeem this voucher the mobile phone user has to "scan" the QR Code using their camera phone.

Now let's say Seaworld's Agency is really clever ... and they recommend that Seaworld has different QR Codes for each bus shelter. From this, Seaworld could quickly track which bus shelters are working the best! (Tracking is tops!).

A bit of history

Originally developed in 1994 for use with tracking parts in vehicle manufacturing it has now expanded and is becoming a popular method of inputing information into a Mobile Phone. You can think of a QR Code as a barcode. Wiki has a tonne of information on this here.

Got Questions?

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