This month has shown that Chameleon’s work is becoming more widely recognised for its innovation and creativity, and that the company has climbed a long way in a decade.

My Dimbleby mission continues. Seriously, David, look over your shoulder and you will see me there…albeit with the need of the Hubble telescope.

In the process of planning for Chameleon Net's 10th bday celebration (today's the actual day, by the way), it occurred to me that I'm celebrating my own anniversary of sorts - October marks 5 years of my being here at Chameleon.

Time has flown by and a lot has happened, that's for sure. So in the spirit of the both Chameleon being 10, and me notching up 5 years service, here are my highlights of the past semi-decade working in web with Chameleon.

Maybe it’s my age but for the first time ever I’ve found myself following the developments of the US Presidential Elections. With just five days to go, the coverage on the BBC has been up to its usual standards, but I’ve been intrigued enough by the characters of the main players to have a look at their websites and see how they’re using the web to spread their message.

Organisations can no longer hide from the fact that the web now has the power to make or break them. The ‘blogosphere’ should be ignored at their peril.

When Alumni, Communications, Development and Marketing professionals get together to talk about the Higher Education sector, some interesting common issues begin to emerge.

In August, Vicky (our MD) and I spent an afternoon at the CASE Europe Annual Conference in Brighton. The sessions I had the opportunity to attend centred around the topic of reputation management.

Well it's nearly upon us. We knew it was coming, but here it is. On 31st October this year Chameleon will be 10 years old, and we're embarking on a whole bunch of fun to celebrate over the coming weeks. (Not least by behaving like 10 year olds on our temporarily kid-like blog ) In '98 the web was a different kettle of fish to what we see today. To kick of our 10th anniversary blogging, I thought I'd have a quick look at the web world circa 1998...

The gears of an internal project are finally getting in motion. The idea is to be able to have small teams of 'chameleons' continually investigating and toying with new technologies and trends that interest them. Such teams will have clear deliverables in order to keep things focused; but the drive should come from them.

Having recently joined Chameleon Net as Head of Operations I was asked whether I could write a short blog to talk about my first impressions of the company and talk a bit about my role here.

We have a brand new article on the Médecins Sans Frontières site build for the .NET readership

In my ongoing mission to become the David Dimbleby of the Web Industry (and beyond?) I recently spent an afternoon chairing a “Question Time” style event for movers and shakers in the UK publishing industry: “Digitise or Die” was the inaugural annual event run by The Bookseller, the leading trade publication for the book industry, with the sole intention of focusing on the issues facing the book business in the digital age.

When you offer a service or sell a product, either people are talking about you, or no-one is. If they’re talking about your brand, it may be positive or it may be negative. If no-one’s talking about you, perhaps they should be.

Last week I attended the annual Digital Marketing Conference in Cambridge to hear what those with a vested interest in the rise and rise of the Internet had to say about the digital future for all of us.

When Chameleon Net asked me if I’d like a regular ‘blog spot’ on their site, I was chuffed but a little nervous. Surrounded by the creative and technical insight provided by the blindingly bright Chameleon Net team, how would my PR perspective of the company and their work fare?

This month we have re-launched our very own Chameleon Net website with a brand new look. When I came on board as Creative Director at the beginning of 2006 one of my first tasks was to undertake a re-working of the 'then' current branding. Far from throwing away everything that had come before and creating something completely new I wanted to capitalise on everything we had already achieved as a company, and the recognition we already had within the new media sector. I saw it more as an 'evolution of the brand' and in approaching the recent re-design of our website I really wanted to stay focused on the principle of evolving our online proposition rather than going back to the drawing board.

Our development team have spent a lot of time creating a flexible, scalable .NET and XML based solution that is robust and easily maintainable. Likewise we have invested many man hours, creating relevant copy to achieve a very search engine friendly, accessible site. So the design brief was quite simple; Bring the website in line with the current branding and communicate our design abilities without effecting any of the underlying code or foundation work already undertaken.

Interestingly enough this scenario is not uncommon among many of our clients. There are of course occasions when their current solution is too old to cost effectively salvage technology, but many of our projects have involved existing systems or required collaboration with an in-house IT team to effectively re-skin their offering. With contemporary standards based development techniques like CSS ( custom style sheets ) we can 'skin' just about any system.

So back to the new Chameleon Net offering. We have added a dynamic Content Managed Flash Banner to our homepage and in the long term we will be re-tasking this space with multiple promotional panels featuring video, animation and motion graphic work from the design team. We have further utilised flash, and specifically siFr, to convert structural headings ( H2, H3 etc.. ) into our brand font on the fly,  whilst retaining an accessible, standards compliant layout for users without the plugin.

I hope you like the new look Chameleon site as much as we do, and if you have any comments or ideas I would love to hear from you.

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In the autumn of 2004 I was sitting on a train with a friend of mine, Karen Jepp, and we were discussing climate change. We’d both been reading about it (Bill Bryson started the whole thing as I recall) and had both, unbeknownst to each other, been going through a whole range of emotions about the subject: interest, fascination, amazement, incredulity, anger, disgust and fear. We were both clear about one thing: it was not the latest fad, it was not hysteria. We (by which I mean ALL of us) were sleep walking into the biggest disaster the human race had ever faced – Climate Change.

You see even re-reading that sentence somewhere I cringe. Talk of disasters, sleep walking, even “the human race” somehow sounds over dramatic, an exaggeration. Yeah, yeah, another global threat, another disaster. It’ll be fine. It always has. Except this time it is highly likely that it just won’t be fine at all.

It is a misconception that email marketing is solely deployed to promote a company and/or its products to random people.

Having just got back from my round the world, (well, Vietnam and Cambodia) charity travels. I arrived back at work and like any good employee, headed straight for Facebook. I am really excited about Facebook this year (especially now I’ve posted the video blogs from my trip.) Actually it’s the advertising on Facebook that’s really caught my eye. I’ve been checking out Facebook’s advertising interface and the list of targeting parameters is endless,

I have been back for a few weeks now but just thought I should let you know how the rally ended. The victory parade was good fun; we got lots of smiles and waves from passers-by. We drove through the presidential arch, which is normally reserved for the President. Only 2 cars broke down on the parade route, which was quite an achievement!

Then on Saturday we prepared the cars for the auction on Sunday. It was sad to see the car go, it had served us well – even in the desert the engine temperature had hardly risen, while cars all around us where packing up. The worst failure being the rear axle of an Opel separating from the rest of the car and flipping the car over in the process – luckily no-one was seriously hurt. Our car and it is contents (car and camping accessories, which were auctioned separately) rose over for £800 for Gambian charities, which in a country where most people only earn a couple of pounds a day, will go a long way.

I would be delighted if you would also give something to charity for our efforts and have set-up an on-line fundraising page, for Médecins Sans Frontieres at: http://www.justgiving.com/msf-plymouth-to-dakar. Simply pay on-line by credit/debit card and the money will go directly to the charity, to provide much needed medical care to many more people across Africa and the world.

I am glad to be back but I had a fantastic adventure, raised money for charity and possibly made some life long friends - not bad for a 3 week trip!

I hope you have enjoyed reading this blog and if you feel like taking part in the Plymouth to Dakar challenge yourself, next year, see: http://www.plymouth-dakar.co.uk/ for further details.

When I get all my pictures together I will put them on-line and be sure to post the URL on the blog, so watch this space!