Real life beats virtual
Being an internet company, you might think that we are big fans of living in the virtual world, but that's not true. Real-life is hard to beat.
There was a time when we would see things on TV that was just magical. How did they make the Death Star in Star Wars look so real? How did they persuade Arthur the Cat to eat his dinner out of the tin can using his paw? But these days, much of that sense of wonder is lost because we routinely see the impossible perfectly rendered by CGI. Even the human feats which we think are just about possible we tend to dismiss these days without a second thought as mere "special effects".
But in real life, sometimes the seemingly impossible happens, something that looks like it would have needed hours of rehearsal and practice if it was intentional but happened on the spur of the moment, something that is captured on someone's video camera and becomes a viral YouTube hit. Just such an impossible moment happened at the Pinkpop music festival this summer, when David Achter, the lead singer of Dutch rock band John Coffey, decided to crowd walk, and someone in the audience threw a glass of beer at him.
Here at Skill Zone we are big fans of live music, so it has been great fun for us to work with music lovers in Oxford to build a website which is an ABC of Oxford's independent music scene. Not surprisingly, every remotely sensible domain name had long ago been snapped up and now lies unused and gathering dust in the hope that one day it will be valuable. And so, like Google, we decided to use a new XYZ domain instead. An XYZ domain seemed very appropriate for an ABC website.
We were given a completely free hand in the design so we have a site which is bright, vibrant, full of original photographic material, fully compatible with mobiles, fully accessible, and a big hit with the target audience. On Google's User Experience test it is scoring a minimum of 99 out of 100.
It took less than three days to reach visitor number 1,000, and that was before we'd even had a chance to submit it to search engines for indexing. This proves that people have a huge interest in grass-roots music.
24th November 2015
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.