Adam Bird - My Personal Blog

On Sunday, 3 June 2012, amidst the pomp, pageantry and celebration of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. King’s Church Medway were having a minor celebration of their own - a launch party of not just one, but three brand new websites which concluded four months of hard work and effort by  everyone involved in the project. If you have followed the journey through my series of case-study blog posts, you will know that I asked to be involved after seeing a new website launched at the beginning of the year by the existing media team and publicly advertised by my Uncle Matthew, who is pastor of the church. I felt that the website was of insufficient quality, that it suffered from a lack of direction and a confused message. It was also blatantly clear that it had been built by someone with little experience and who had gotten by with a huge amount of commitment and enthusiasm. You’ll also know that I started this project by understanding more about the work done by the church, by its ...

In danger of slipping into the abyss that is known as ‘non-updated blog content’, I thought I’d write a short and concise account of just what’s been keeping me away from my keyboard and broken the weekly habit which I’ve so long maintained. I should first of all congratulate myself on ‘short and concise’. Afterall, those who have read any of my previous blog posts will know that I don’t do short and concise very well! Waffle yes, overthought and over complicated, yes to that as well! Anyhow, before I get too far into beating myself up, what’s been happening? The biggest thing? That would be the three websites I’ve been working on with my Uncle Matthew and his colleague Austin. We aim to soft launch next weekend with a formal live announcement a week later. I’ve actually been invited to stand up and talk about the whole process to the church congregation at the formal launch service. To say that I’m nervous is an understatement! I don’t think I’ve ever stood up and spoken to ...

It has been nearly two months since I wrote the last part of my series of case studies looking at the project I am currently working on for King’s Church Medway. I’m pleased to say that those two months have not been wasted. We have the skeletal bones of the websites and creative ideas in place, we have a launch date in mind and all hands are on deck adding gloss to make sure that the final products are something that I and more importantly the church can be proud of. With that in mind, I thought that now would be the ideal opportunity to talk about copy. A website generally has many levels of engagement. You have the ‘bouncer’s’; those visitors who have hit your website by mistake and immediately leave. You have those who arrive at the correct destination, but leave shortly afterwards as the site on first view just doesn’t do it for them. There are people who then arrive to be nosey, looking around the website, looking at the pictures and videos with no real aim in getting someth...

Last week I wrote about the family and our Easter break in Cornwall. What I didn’t mention at the time was how I’d spent the entire week digitally disconnected, or as I’d left it on Facebook “Adam is Rebooting”. What this meant was, one whole week, no laptop. no Internet, no phone, no iPad, no nothing at all. Question is now, how on earth did I cope? I have a little line of copy on the banner of this site, proclaiming myself as something of a digital evangelist. What I mean by this, is that I believe strongly in the Internet, that it is a tool for empowering people and that by making use of it productively, can improve peoples lives by a) giving them access to opportunity or b) providing a platform to communicate. Why then would I want to leave it all behind? The truth is, so far during this calendar year, I’ve been working pretty much nonstop on either the King’s Church Medway project, work in general or another one of the projects that has landed on me and taken up some of ...

Towards the end of last month, I read a status update from my Uncle Matthew who is Pastor of King's Church in Medway. His status championed the launch of his church’s new website and encouraged his Facebook connections to visit. Except that when I did, I wasn’t enthused by what I saw. After I put across my point of view he agreed with my assessment and accepted my invitation to review the current site and work with him and his team to start again - pretty much from the ground up. Over the past few weeks, I’ve visited the church several times. On each occasion we’ve had a proactive discussion on what a potential new website should feature, how it should look and most importantly of all, how it should communicate - not just to visitors of the website, but to friends of people who belong to the church, or organisations that help on a daily basis to do good for the greater church community. We made a decision early on that we were actually dealing with multiple websites rather t...

Last week I took a look at a website ( www.kings-medway.co.uk ) which belongs to a church run by my Uncle Matthew and are doing some wonderful work for their local community. I pointed out that perhaps the website could function better and look more professional. More importantly, it should show off some of that great work that is happening on a daily basis and be more accessible for the local people of Medway and beyond. Whilst discussions are very much at preliminary stages as to the concept of the new website, I thought that now would be as good a time as any to look around at other church websites, get some inspiration and look at what people have done well, what type of content is being displayed and what pitfalls to avoid. As design is always so subjective, it should be stated that those that I’ve not particularly liked might well be by others. It should also be worth remembering that someone, or a group of people have put the time and effort to make these websites work, an...

As in life, users of the Internet can be loosely grouped into demographics, or categories dependent upon age, or behaviour. We use them at work in planning for a website, add a little bit of fictional background information, give them a name and call them ‘persona's’ which are designed to try and work out ways in which the project we are building can be used to serve them purposely. The other night, a chance conversation led me into taking my own persona and dissecting it into pieces, not for research but to stand up for who I am and what I work and believe in. A friend of mine greeted me on Friday night by saying “how are you doing, how is your second life?” which I wasn’t quite sure how to take. Originally, I took it as it was intended, as a bit of banter, taking the piss - we do it all the time, nobody is, or should be immune. But being a sensitive creature and one prone to over analysis, I pondered the question over the space of a few days and thought, actually, this might ...

This little corner of the Internet was originally intended as a place to keep Dad up to date with the comings and goings on at home whilst he worked out in Iran. With the Internet now becoming ever more 'social' content found here was gradually being duplicated elsewhere, leading me to question whether or not I needed a website at all. Facebook, the Daddy of all things social on the web wasn't around back in the early naughties when adambird.co.uk went live, and has since grown into a daily institution in people's digital lives. More or less everyone I know is a friend on Facebook and I can share with them photographs of Oliver and the family without worrying about whether or not a complete stranger has accidentally roamed onto my website. I can update news in tiny nuggets of information through the form of a status update, or a tweet and not have to worry about updating the html and RSS on my homepage - v4.0 therefore, is all about the management of content. Using ...

The iPhone, must have gadget for boys who like their toys (and Pastors apparently). Having watched the full hour long podcast direct from Apple HQ back at the beginning of 2007 I was rather enthused and said "I must get me one one of those!". However, with the price and restrictions in contract with O2 and what not it seems that I will be waiting for just a little while longer. However, this post is not all about the iPhone and its negativities, nor indeed the many highlights. Although it does have a damn fine camera, which brings me to my point. I have taken just shy of 233,784 photos of Oliver since he has born, and not one of them matches the quality of the images which arrived in Stephs inbox last night. Oliver had been staying with Steph's friend Cheryl, and apparently her iPhone owning boyfriend had taken some snaps. After a swift navigation through Hotmail Live's endless security protocols we were finally able to see the images Paul had sent. When Steph said th...

I saw this article on the SPAOTP football blog detailing the top 20 searches resulting in people visiting their site. Having done a little research, here is the top 20 searches in which resulted in people finding this small part of the internet world! 1. adam bird 2. adambird 3. adambird.co.uk 4. www.adambird.co.uk 5. adam bird"" 6. adam bird music 7. ebsfleet 8. first hatrick at the new wembley 9. adam bird football 10. adam's birds 11. adam+bird 12. charles w . chesnutt photos 13. diagram of wembley stadium 14. ebsfleet united fc 15. efe sodje and baby pictures 16. frannie collin legend 17. fueturventura 18. gillingham fc photos 19. how much does derek stillie united goalkeeper earn 20. is my unborn baby likely to be a boy or a girl