Remember when megapixels kept doubling every year? When memory sizes, processor speeds and screen resolutions kept getting bigger and bigger too? Remember when every new version of your office software came with more menu items, more bells and whistles (and took longer to load, to open, to install)?

Have you notice that all of a sudden, in so many technological areas, all of this seems to have stalled? Here’s some examples:

• YouTube – Videos used to be long, expensively produced things. Here they can only be 10 minutes long, and this site is runaway successful.
• iPad/iPhone – Small screens, smaller memory, yet these things will be the big sellers this Christmas. The point is, however, that we are using these devices instead of our huge computers, even instead of our laptops.
• MP3s & MP3 players – Everyone said the low sound quality of MP3s would mean they wouldn’t catch on. Wrong! With the Shuffle, there’s not even a screen. People love them.
• Windows 7 – For the first time, the world’s most popular operating system has actually got smaller, not bigger (after the behemoth that was Vista).
• Software-as-a-service – Google Docs, Hotmail and other online, stripped-down versions of traditionally deskbound programsare replacing Outlook, Word and the like for many people. Faster, lightweight, simpler…

When did “good enough” replace “bigger, faster, better”? Whenever it was, it is now arguably starting to inform everything we do in our technological lives, and so much of what we do as web developers here at Reedus Design.

Designing for the majority
For instance, we’re developing mobile applications – for iPhones and the like. As we do, we strip away features necessarily, to fit the smaller screen, loading speeds etc. And we’re finding this “less is more” approach is helping us even more than before to focus on what’s really important for the end user.

As we design current products for real estate companies, betting firms, foreign exchange companies, our mantra is increasingly: “Is this feature really necessary?”

Maybe this has all come about because people got so busy that something had to give. Maybe it’s Pareto’s Principle – the 80/20 rule, stating that 80% of people only use 20% of features. Whatever, it seems increasingly obvious that something has caused us, as a culture, to subliminally re-evaluate what we really need from out technology on a day-to-day basis, and to increasingly reject what is just noise.

All of this means that excellent design, great usability and “good enough” are more and more informing the cutting edge, and “stuffing everything you can imagine in to a product just for the sake of it” is becoming an outdated philosphy of product design.

Frugal times are proving interesting at the cutting edge of design and technology!

Especially somewhere with as tight a community as the Costa del Sol, it’s a great idea to use social networking tools, and Twitter in particular, to find new business.

Still not sure what Twitter is? If you’ve got used to Facebook, think of Twitter as a stripped-down version that lets you send text-message length updates (and not much else). It has two big differences though: firstly, you don’t need permission to follow people, and secondly, everything everyone says is public.

So if you imagine Twitter as a really big room with a massive pool of people in it, many of whom are your potential customers, how do you “tune in” to what may be benficial to you? There are various ways:

1. Set up searches for key terms – This means that any time anyone mentions (for instance) “plumber” and any of a list of areas that you cover, you get alerted. (Twitter has lots of useful third-party applications that let you use its service effectively, and my favourite – called Tweetdeck, and free – installs on your PC and lets you do just this.) You can then tweet them back with the solution to their problem there and then – you!

2. Build up a network of local people and businesses – Just by searching for the name of your town or area you’ll find lots of people to “follow” who are local. You can click on their profiles to see if you like the look of them, or to check if there’s a chance they may be potential clients. You’re not looking to sell to them now – just to get “closer to them in the room”.

Another great way to find such people is to follow their followers/followed people; on Twitter, you can see all this information, and it’s fine to follow people because they’re following or followed by someone else.

3. Be helpful and reap the rewards A very powerful part of Twitter is the “retweet”, or “RT” for short. If someone says: “Anyone know why the A7 is shut today in Marbella?”, and you know, tell them on Twitter. They may well RT your post to their network of friends. some of those people may do the same… and before you know it, your post is helping loads of people, all of whom may click on your name, read your profile, decide they like you, and follow you.

See how this works? You build up a network of people you loosely know or are interested in, all of whom are likely to read what you write. The ideas is to be friendly, useful (posting links to websites, or retweeting other interesting stuff helps here), and to trust that when you can help someone commerically, you’ll be “front of mind”.

Get used to it!
Twitter is a brave new world for many, but once you make your first sale through it, you’ll have a strategy that you know works, and which you can build on.

Don’t expect results immediately and do 15-20 minutes every day. There’s no right or wrong way to use it; the only real rule is not to annoy people, or they’ll unfollow you and you’ll have lost the chance to pitch them your goods or services for ever.

Remember the “early” days of the web? If you can recall the time leading up to the dotcom crash of 2001, everyone wanted a website, nobody knew quite why, and web companies from the best in the business to fly-by-nights were picking up work left, right and centre building sites, the vast majority of which of course cost a lot and delivered very little.

As the web has grown up, and businesses have attached metrics to web performance, the web has become a more stable and useful tool for delivering performance – whether that is leads, sales or “eyeballs” – all of which is ultimately full measurable. This way, businesses have learned where to spend their marketing “bucks” online.

Tomorrow’s web is portable
Fast forward to right now. The iPhone is the ubiquitous “cool” mobile, with millions sold. For many more people than that, Google’s Android smartphone operating system is powering their phone, offering much the same “mini-computer” functionality as the iPhone.

Applications like Facebook are exploding in popularity on mobile devices, as are news, accouting, calendar, recipe, sports and a myriad other applications. Add in to this the runaway early success of the iPad, and it’s clear that tomorrow’s web is portable.

I want one of those!
Businesses are thus eyeing mobile “apps” and sites in the same way they eyed the web way back when. And while iPhone, Android, iPad and mobile apps and websites have ther own pitfalls (just like commissioning websites back in the early days did), the fruit is there for the picking: If you can offer your customers something on their portable device that adds to or complements your website, product or service, it is a great idea to get started on building something along these lines for your company.

The key is to be sure you’re adding something, be clear about what you want, and then speak to someone who can help you make it happen, and who can show you a track record of building sites and/or apps for these devices.

That way you’ll get a modern, fresh online presence for your company in all the right people’s pockets – while hopefully avoiding the mistakes of the last internet boom!

By Phil Morse