Why Google+ is the Ultimate Social Networking Hybrid. - Ziller Web Marketing Blog

In the last ten years of the web, we’ve witnessed the rise of the unstoppable freight train that is Google. Extremely crafty and ingenious in the ways in which they innovate, we’ve seen them knock over the title of world’s largest search engine, pioneer web metrics, and occasionally have a dig at social networking; the latter of which has never been taken too seriously.

As a search engine, Google has always been perceived to be too impersonal and sterile to be able to successfully function as a hub for online social activity. Instead, we’ve seen the figureheads Facebook and Twitter set the standard for engaging social activity online. Google Wave, to its credit, was never intended to be a social networking platform but instead a community-driven tool of productivity. To be fair, the only direct attempt that Google has made at competing with Facebook was Google Buzz. I guess that you could say that it was a trial and error exercise for Google. They saw a hole in the market open up, and they lunged at it, without properly formulating something built entirely for the people, which ultimately, is the core factor in a social network becoming popular.

This is how Facebook achieved greatness. While Facebook did pioneer a lot of things, they did not invent the idea of the social network. The social network has been around since the days of ‘Yahoo! Geocities’. What gave Facebook their success, most notably over networking giants MySpace.com, is that they refined the idea, simplified it, and ultimately made it better.

A good social network is a hybrid of its predecessors, and this is exactly what Google has just achieved with Google+.

What makes Google+ so different.

Again, the key to a successful social network is one that is built purely to meet the demands of the general public. Translated into what needs to be achieved in order to harbour online loyalty, we simply need to look at what Facebook has done, and how Google+ has improved upon it.

Google+ addresses Facebook’s fatal flaws.

Facebook became popular because it virtually rendered Internet anonymity obsolete. All of a sudden, there was a social net work that was not only encouraging, but almost forcing you to be you online. It also introduced the status update, which left you feeling fanatical about checking your ‘newsfeed’ to see which one of your ‘friends’ was in a new relationship, who had chicken for dinner last night, which one of them got so drunk they passed out, etc.

For Facebook there were of course flaws. For example, everyone on your ‘friends’ list appears in your newsfeed, and everything you post appears in theirs. Unless you ‘block’ someone from viewing your profile, as long as you’re friends with them, then they’re always going to see what you’re up to. This element is kind of invasive. For example, if your boss adds you on Facebook (Hi, Trent!), or you’ve got your Great Aunty Flo on there, the next time you post something, let’s say “got way too drunk, ate a bunch of hotdogs and puked on my mate’s lawn”, then they’re going to know about it. 

Google+ addresses this major flaw in social networking by allowing you to assign the people you ‘follow’ into groups, or ‘circles’, from the get-go. You can have separate newsfeeds for family members, drinking buddies, work colleagues, team mates… You get the idea.

Google+ is born for mobile.

Google+ is a social network that will be born into the age of the smart phone, whereas the likes of Facebook have had to adapt. This is a massive new feature that Google+ boasts over its competitors because the social network is already engineered to fit in with a smart-phone savvy search engine. Unlike Facebook, when you upload photos on Google+ from your mobile, there is no load time. As soon as you take a picture – it’s online, waiting in a private album, ready for you to edit or delete.

It has a cleaner, intuitive user-interface

This means less time spent working out what you would like to do, and more time being able to organise and edit the content that matters most to you. I almost feel like I’m selling the product as I write this, but I actually endorse this feature 100%. Facebook is full of junk you couldn’t give a damn about. Your newsfeed can become littered by posts from fan pages you ‘liked’ and forgot about eons ago. If you make a mistake typing a status update, then you have to manually delete it and retype it. Google+ on the other hand gives you more control over what goes in and out of your primary newsfeed, lets you build up a hearty catalogue of ‘favourited’ links, and even lets you freely edit typing mistakes in posts without you have to delete anything.

In summing up – it’s definitely the simple things that will make Google+ big. Will it overtake Facebook? Well, Facebook certainly has a head start so one can only speculate. I think what it will do, however, is revolutionise the standard for social networking and force Facebook to reevaluate the core features of their network.

The formula that Google has concocted for Google+ is pure genius. We’ve been talking about it all week at Ziller, and we personally can’t wait to see it go live in the next couple of months!

What are your thoughts? Will Google+ throw Facebook off its pedestal?

It’s ironic that we’re posting this in a way, because a lot of you will be referred to this article via our Facebook page! Either way, here’s a little piece of useful information you may want to keep up your sleeve should you be in a situation where you need to call on it.

Regardless if you’re a web developer, or simply an end user, it is incredibly simple to block a website on your computer. We figured we’d focus on Facebook. Why? Well, although the guys and girls at Ziller love a bit of short-lived attention on the world’s largest social network (like every other human being!), it can prove to be extremely counter-productive when trying to get things done.

It’s a problem faced by many employers. Productivity is lost because staff are addicted to social networking. Anyway, if you would like to know how to block Facebook at work, or at home, here’s how it’s done:

Blocking Facebook on Windows OS

I’m going to take a stab in the dark and say that about 90% of workplaces use PCs over Macs, therefore knowing how to block a website on PC could prove to be extremely useful knowledge. Let’s run through it step by step:

1. For this example, we will block the site using the hosts file. All hosts files are located deep within your operating system, but they’re easy enough to find. Go to ‘my computer’ and in your C:\ drive, navigate to the following path:

   C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts (Windows7, XP and Vista)
C:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc\hosts (Windows 2000)

   The file named ‘hosts’ is the file that you want to edit. Before you open the file, however, it is suggested that you drag and drop a backup copy to your desktop.

2. Open up the hosts file with ‘notepad’. Simply right-click and ‘open with…’
3. Add the following line to the hosts file (do not delete anything already existing):

   127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com

4. Ctrl + S to save, and you’re done! If you try and access the site now, you’ll hit a 404 page.

Blocking Facebook on Mac

I run on a Mac at home, and having personally grown up using a PC, I initially had no idea how to go about blocking a website. This method is slightly trickier than Windows, because you have to use command line, but it’s still relatively simple!

1. On the desktop screen, click the ‘Go’ option and navigate to ‘Utilities’.
2. Open up ‘Terminal’.
3. You’ll be greeted with the following – basically, the name of your computer, and your username.

   

4. In the first line, type the following then hit ‘enter’:

   sudo pico /etc/hosts

   Note that command line is case sensitive, including spaces.

   Once you hit enter, you will be asked to enter a password. This is the password for your Mac that you use to verify installations of programs on your computer.

5. You’re in! Similarly to PC, simply enter the localhost IP address and the name of the site you want to block like the following example:

   

   Save and exit by hitting Ctrl + X (not Cmd). When asked if you want to save changes, type ‘y’ for yes. All done! Facebook should be blocked on your Mac.

And there you go! The primary object of your procrastination is gone!

We just had one of our existing client’s do what they do best and install a new TV for us in the office. Very professional installation and the setup looks great. Thank you AV Installation Specialists!

Hey there, welcome to our third installment of ‘Sydney-based eCommerce websites we’d change’. Once again, we’ve been trawling cyberspace in search of some of our favourite retail chains that could use a bit of a makeover, and this week, it’s the Dangerfield website.

A bit of a background on Dangerfield

If you’re between the ages of 18-30, are really into the music scene and the fashion that surrounds it, then Dangerfield should be a name that rings a bell. Originally from Melbourne, Dangerfield are now a nation-wide retail chain that specialise in the retail of branded and custom made bohemian style clothing. We’re talking leather jackets, studded belts, chaotic tee shirt designs and skinny jeans to give you a visual.

Dangerfield appeal to a huge demographic, and through their growth have obviously achieved a lot of success through their sales. In fact, you can even visit them in select Myer stores around the country.

A lot of the Dangerfield stores have been designed to reflect the rawer elements of youth culture with a strong emphasis on post-modern art, punk and goth styles.

If you take a look at their website, a lot of this is visually summarised within the insane background image. What’s a shame though, is that there’s actually nothing going on to promote the sales of their products online.

Should a boutique clothing store take to the Internet?

Yes. We don’t need to rant on how important we think eCommerce is, we normally let our clients see for themselves. When you take your business online, you’re effectively opening up an additional revenue stream. In fact, it seems senseless not to.

eCommerce opinions aside, let’s dissect the Dangerfield website and see what they could do to improve usability and customer experience:

1. There’s no catalogue of products – Understandably, if eCommerce is not an option, then your website should become an information portal for customers searching your brand online. The first thing that sticks in my mind when I land on the Dangerfield website is, “I can’t shop, so can I at least browse through their product range?”

If you’re new to the Dangerfield brand, you want to know the style of clothing that they sell. This is best achieved through the brand offering some simple visuals. This could be anything from promotional model shots, to shots of the inside of the store, or more obviously an online catalogue based on the season’s fashion. 

If we were contracted to build a new website for Dangerfield, this is undoubtedly the first point that we would address.
2. There’s no home page? – Awesome, we’ve arrived at a blank canvas. In fact, if it weren’t for the the content in the navigation bar at the top of the page, I’d have no idea where I was. 

The home page is the most valuable real estate on any website, so the question lingers, why have Dangerfield neglected this in favour of a tiled background image? The element of ‘mystique’ doesn’t work on the web. 

If Dangerfield has done this intentionally, then I don’t think they realise the implications. If the home page doesn’t instantly address the needs of the users, then they’ll arrive in a sense of bewilderment and then leave in their confusion.
   

   Here’s a very quick mock-up of how we think it should look:

   

   To run you through it, all I’ve done is added a vertical nav for the user to browse through product categories, I’ve taken a screen grab from the ‘hot topic’ website for a modular presentation of the product specials, and i’ve added a shopping cart. 

I did this all in the space of five minutes, and it looks a lot better already!

3. Search engine optimisation – Again, something this website is completely bereft of. On the plus side, at least it’s not built in Flash. We’d make sure that all pages and products are optimised for search engines, everything from the URL paths, meta data, site content and internal link structure.
4. A phone number above the header? – This is a quintessential element of websites that often go overlooked. For a site that doesn’t even make use of a ‘contact us’ web form on the contact page, all of their online enquiries will be received over the phone. In this case, they should make their contact details visible all throughout the website to make it easier for their customers to just pick up the phone and dial without having to go digging through various pages.

What do you think should be changed about the Dangerfield website? We’ve got many more ideas up our sleeve, but for now let’s just give the website an overall rating out of 5 bananas:

One thing we know for sure about Google is that they’re always looking for new and unique ways to improve the relevancy of their search results. For a while now, Google has been dropping obvious hints towards the growing importance of the ‘social’ aspect of search and the ability for people to contribute to and vote towards other user-generated data.

Well, now they’re going as far as to experiment with a new Facebook style ‘like’ button.

When signed into your Google Account, when browsing the web, the search engine will present you with a ‘+1’ option beside the search result. If you click on the ‘+1’, you’re publicly endorsing the website and recommending it to other people who may be looking through similar search results.

Although it’s in beta phase (of course), you can sign up to participate here.

The remains however as to whether or not this new feature, should it ever become widely implemented, will be allowed to have a direct influence on search results?

With regular advocation of user generated content of popular quality in order to perform well in search engines, this new feature would reinforce Google’s stance on the issue and promote user-controlled voting as opposed to search results that have been manipulated by SEO’s. Should the new ‘like’ button have an impact on search engines, you would think that search results would become a lot more relevant and refined based on the nature of what you’re searching for. 

For one, if it did have an impact on search results, it would be cool to see the amount of times people have hit the ‘+1’ button next to your own search listing in Google Analytics.

From an outside perspective, though, as a search marketer there’d be no way of knowing just how well your competitor’s websites are performing for the amount of ‘plus ones’ they’ve received in comparison to your own website. Because the system is based on your own Google Account, and who your Google Account is networked with. The only time your endorsements are made public is when a user view them via your Google Profile.

Is this a new invisible ranking factor? We’re not sure, but we think that it very well could be in the near future should it prove to be a popular feature among users.

If you want to learn more about this new feature, you can visit the Google ‘+1’ information page here.

As mentioned in our previous post (see ‘Sydney-based eCommerce website designs we’d change. Part one.”), we’re on a bit of a ‘banana peel’ tirade at the moment, continuously scanning the ecommerce website designs of some well known and respected brands and offering advice on how they could improve on their website design to the benefit of their customers, as well as hinting on what we would do to improve them.

This week, we came across one of the most well known names in Australian retail: Rebel Sport.

To give you a bit of a background to Rebel Sport, their stores are enormous, they’re (probably) one of the biggest sports stores in Australia and they’ve generally got some pretty big budget advertising campaigns. I’ve personally seen everything from billboards to TV commercials and catalogue mail-outs. Unfortunately for their website, they too, treat the design as if it were a commercial catalogue.

To give you a visual, here’s their existing website design as of today’s date:

Kind of messy, right? Well, let’s get stuck into it and offer points of improvement for the Rebel Sport website design.

Dissecting the Rebel Sport website.

The website is built in asp.net, a web application framework that we’re quite accustomed to, and extremely confident in using, here at Ziller. asp.net is an advantageous framework so it’s good to see that Rebel Sport have used it to develop their online portal.

From a usability perspective, the Rebel Sport website uses a generic left navigation headed by an internal search bar. The header of the website is reserved for login information, the company’s contact details and in the top-right, is sectioned off for the shopping cart summary. It sounds pretty simple, right? So how do we critique it?

The Rebel Sport Website Navigation.

Firstly, let’s start with the navigation on the left hand side of the page. It’s bland and kind of cramped. If a vision-impaired customer was trying to navigate through the website, it’d make it quite hard for them. There is no ‘alt’ attributes to the code for the navigation, either, so it’s not accessible for screen readers – as an online retailer, this is a big mistake because you would want to make sure that your site is accessible to everyone of every background to make it easy for them to buy online.

Second, there’s a ‘sale’ button added to the very bottom of the navigation? What is this achieving, and why is it in the navigation to begin with? It goes against the flow of everything else that they’ve listed – being type of sport. We’re kind of against verically aligned navigations here at Ziller, because they deduct valuable real estate space from the home page.

Effectively, if we had control of the Rebel Sport website design, we’d create a simple, intuitive top level navigation aligned horizontally beneath the banner space at the top of the page. From here, we’d reduce the clutter and make it a drop-down navigation instead. For example, we’d have ‘shop > sports > sports type’, ‘brands > brand type’ etc.

To give you a visual, here’s a quick mockup of how we think it should look:

Stylistically, there’s not a whole lot going on. I know that the Rebel Sport colour scheme is black and white, which is fine, but they should at least put more effort into the style of the navigation, or perhaps even add some graphical elements to the page to make it look a bit more enticing.

The centre console of the website.

Moving away from the navigation, if you scroll up a bit to view the screenshot again, you’ll see why I mentioned that the content on the website makes it look a bit like one of their mail-out catalogues.

There’s so much I could write on this, but I’ll try and keep things as concise as possible. Basically, we’re looking at a textbook case of banner overkill.

Now, when I mentioned ‘perhaps even add more graphical elements’ above, I was talking about the construction of the navigation only. The content on the home page is the polar opposite. We’re looking at visual assault with banners.

I understand that as a retail store, there is a heavy emphasis on sales and getting your product seen, but this simply isn’t the way to go about it. Let’s start with some positives about the banners first.

The banner at the very bottom, “Whatever your code, we have have it” is extremely effective. It sums up why people come to sporting goods store to buy in the first place. In fact, when looking at the general design of their banners, it’s not a bad effort (if you exclude the pixelated, low quality NBA jersey banner on the right!).

The problem is that there are just too many on the page!

The home page should be a place that welcomes users, addresses their needs and guides them through the website. This should be met with a balance of text and images to give it more balance. If we got the chance to rebuild the website from scratch, we’d do away with the excessive banners completely and integrate a lot more text-based content into the design.

As a retailer, too, the online niche for sports goods is highly competitive so it’s a bit off that the Rebel Sport website hasn’t included more text on the home page for SEO purposes. In a redesign of the home page, we’d also take into close consideration the semantic structure of the website to gear it for better performance across search engines. It really is an important aspect that should be factored into the Rebel Sport website design… As a result, what they’re now missing is good home page usability and potentially good search engine rankings.

On the topic of search engine optimisation, there’s a lot of things that Rebel Sport seemed to have missed when optimising their website. For one, their meta titles are excessively long – perhaps because they’re being pulled directly from the database – and two, the product category URLs, and even the product pages, aren’t optimised very well (if at all). Perhaps this I’m moving towards a different type of banana peel now, right?

I think we better wrap this up now. The Rebel Sport website design is one that could definitely be improved upon, and we feel that we’ve certainly got the experience and know-how to get the job done. We would hope that in the future, that the Rebel Sport franchise begins to take it’s online shopping experience a little more seriously for the benefit of its customers.

What do you think of the website? Let us know!

This week, I thought we’d explore a different angle away from the conventional ‘top ten/five/seven/whatever of everything’ list. The reason for this? Well, I’ve just been itching to execute this idea to be honest, because firstly, there’s not much emphasis placed on what’s available to us locally.

We live in Sydney, Australia. If you’ve ever been lucky enough to take a look around this majestic harbour-side city, you’d find yourself in amongst a spectacular zen garden of boutique shops, historic sights and sounds. Don’t get me wrong, our shopping might night be as illustrious as, let’s say, Melbourne, but our seaside city has quite a lot to offer consumer-culture. So does the Sydney-based web space.

In saying this, there are tons of Sydney-based retail stores, either privately owned or in a franchise, that are making their products available to buy online. A lot of these shops are simply awesome, very cool to shop in and with great service available. There’s just one downside to them though – their websites!

For this post, I felt that I could offer some constructive criticism for some existing Sydney-based eCommerce websites, should they choose to stumble upon this post. I guess you could pretty much call this another Ziller ‘banana peel’

1. 99Degrees Skateboard Emporium – If you’ve never heard of these guys before, don’t be alarmed – you’re most likely not into skate culture or clothing. For the record, I am. After checking these guys out a fair few weeks ago, they’ve got some really awesome gear. In leaving the store after buying a pair of shoes, I thought I’d jump online to check them out and see what else they’ve got going on. To my dismay, I was kind of let down when confronted by a… uhhh… not-so-good eCommerce template. 

A TEMPLATE!? Come on guys, you’re a skate store… You have so much potential! 


Obviously, there’s a lot of room for improvement – seeing as your site is ‘currently in construction’? I can’t be sure. What I will say, however, is this:

Skaters shop online for pretty much everything nowadays. You need a reliable storefront, something quick to load and easy to use. Skateboard.com.au runs a monopoly on the online market for skate brands in Australia – you have the potential to be better. We have the potential to make you better

A blog should be the central focus of your website. Skaters don’t want to wait… They want the latest gear presented to them on a platter. Blogs are a great way to keep them in the loop about shop activity. A good example is the store around the corner – check out: http://halfsleeve.net/news/

Skaters love a sense of community. Check out the Emerica site and then check out the forums. We’ve built similar stuff in the past, and would likely build a built-in community engine to promote some more customer centric activity on the site.

As a customer, it’d be great to see this amazing store do something better with its online campaign. It’s been around for over 10 years, and it certainly deserves better.

Utopia Records Sydney – A 30 year old record store based in the heart of Sydney, around quite a while before stores like JB Hi-Fi started moving in for the kill. Utopia is a fun place to shop, and every experience I have ever had there has been superb. Their website on the other hand, not so superb. 

With the record industry becoming more and more competitive, you would think that selling CDs and merchandise online would be an imperative part of your business strategy. For Utopia records, it is. But is it done correctly? Not quite. Here’s why:

The site conveys too many mixed messages, particularly the home page. To be honest, my mind blanks out from the flashing gifs and harsh use of bright red before I know what I’m looking for. Flashing animations are the enemy of usability, so are meaningless banners and scattered thumbnails.

The navigation font and colour combination kills my eyes! Also, it’s not very intuitive. Between the menu at the top of the page, and then a random menu on the far right (?), I’m not really sure where I’m going. We would simplify the navigation at the top, remove a lot of the unnecessary clutter and make it easier for the user to navigate.

The news feed on the home page – Woah… The size is a bit extreme. It takes up too much home page real estate. People are only interested in seeing the latest news on your home page… Not what happened 2 months ago. If they wanted to see older stuff, they’d go to your news archive! If it was our call, we’d clean it up, style it a lot nicer and give it an allocated section on the home page so that it doesn’t confuse the user.

Contact information – The most vital part of ANY online store, and Utopia Records have hidden theirs on the bottom right underneath the mailing list!? This doesn’t make sense at all. The call to actions need to be made a lot clearer – in fact, they could even change the position with the social network icons and there’d be a huge increase in the number of phone enquiries. It’s that simple.

For Utopia Records, they’ve got a lot of potential to be massive online – they just need to give their design a bit more thought!

Anyway, this is just some food for thought. We’ll be posting more critiques of Sydney eCommerce website designs in the up and coming weeks. Stay tuned!

We require a talented, front-end web developer to join our team on a casual basis with opportunity to develop into a full time role. You will be required to work from our Surry Hills office, at hours that suit you.

What we require is the following:

- Very strong skills in CSS
- Very strong skills in semantic HTML
- Ability to develop table-less websites
- Basic understanding of Photoshop, ability to work with layers
- Be a quick learner
- Love this type of work

In addition, while not mandatory, any experience in the following would be highly advantages:

- Experience with PHP
- Experience with Javascript
- Experience with JQuery

The successful applicant will be able to provide previous work examples.

We look forward to receiving your application.

The year is 2011, and for a while now, the team here at Ziller have been predicting change when it comes to the user of an automatic image rotator, or auto slider, on the home page of prominent eCommerce websites.

If you’re new to this concept, to give you a bit of a background, home page sliders are more or less banners that rotate through their images automatically. Sort of like the automatic commercial billboards you see inside of a train station or airport.

They’ve been around for a while now, and originally came to fruition with many major eCommerce websites with a large range of products. Automatic sliders are quite beneficial for businesses because they save space on valuable ‘real estate’ throughout the home page, meaning the business can cram as much marketing material, product sales and offers into the banner as they want without any imposition on home page space.

From a business point of view, you can see why most eCommerce websites would deploy and automatic slider above the fold of their web page. But are automatic sliders really that effective? The answer is no, and here’s why….

Despite the benefits from the business end of things, automatic rotating images banners are actually a usability nightmare when it comes to keeping the attention of the user.

As you’re well aware, the home page of a website is highly likely to be the first element of a web page seen by users. As a result, any element contained within a home page should be considered most important to the business.

In the case of home page sliders, there’s a bit of an underlying psychology. To cut to the chase, they’re distracting and they detract the user’s attention from other valuable elements on a web page. With an image constantly flashing to a new slide every 5-10 seconds, from a user’s point of view this can be extremely distracting when you’re trying to occupy yourself with another page element as you’ll find that your eyes are vectoring immediately towards the sparkly, pretty new image.

It’s like peripheral vision, if you’re driving a car and something flashes out of the corner of your eye, you’ll naturally react to it. Well, the same goes with automatic rotating image banners on a web page!

As of 2011, we’re beginning to see a lot of big eCommerce stores take their slide off ‘automatic’ and instead, program them to be in the complete control of the user. The end result of this is that the slider only activates when a user either clicks on, or hovers over it with their cursor. When they do this, it is at their control and it exactly where there eyes want to be.

We thought we’d take this opportunity to demonstrate some major eCommerce stores who have moved away from the automatic slider, instead opting for the user-controlled sliders.

eBay Australia’s website – A nice, user-friendly slider with hover controls. Exactly what you want to keep the user’s attention at all times.

37signals’ website – Same again. These guys have heaps of services to offer, but do you think that they’re auto-rotating them in your face? No way.

And of course, we wouldn’t finish our post without pointing out those with room for improvement…

Dick Smith’s website – Our suggestion to these guys is to remove the ‘pause and play’ functions completely. While the slider looks good, it’s still set to automatically rotate when you land on the home page. Kind of annoying when you have to press ‘pause’ to browse through the page undistracted!

Harvey Norman’s website – One of Australia’s biggest retailers. They’re slider is stuck on turbo, just try and read through the home page without being distracted!

So what are your thoughts on auto rotating sliders in eCommerce website design? Let us know, and feel free to share some of your own examples

If you work in an office, regardless of your profession, there’s always something that you keep close by to act as a bit of a muse. Here at Ziller, we all have unique personalities, and what better way to show what type of person we are than by showing you what we’ve got sitting idly by the sides of our computer monitors.

Leo Alvarez – Project manager and Web Designer:

The blue-eyed gorilla mascot…

This guy sits atop Leo’s desktop and stares at him with hungry eyes all day, it almost looks like he’s been deprived of bananas. I don’t know what the story is here, as Leo’s been known to sit in front of this little guy and lay into some fresh fruit. It sounds kind of cruel, but I think it’s strategic.

You see, Leo has been known to cook really good food as well… This might attribute to the fact that Mr.Blue-eyes gorilla always has a furious look on his face because he’ll never get to eat any. Our theory is that Leo likes to keep Mr.Blue-Eyes really angry.

Gorilla fury is what inspires Leo to design amazing websites, it also gives him strength when times are tough!

Mark Kemp (me) – Online Marketing (SEO) and Content Development:

Super Saiyan Trunks (Dragon Ball Z)

Super saiyan Trunks, if you don’t know him, is from a really lame TV show known as DragonBall Z. Now, a lot of people think I’m super nerdy for being into something so childish, but I still think it’s cool. The story behind this guy, is that when he gets blonde hair (turns into a super saiyan), he can go all “Hulkamania” with his enemies. He also has a wicked sword.

Trunks sits by the side of my desktop, looking like he’s about to power up and destroy something. It’s excellent inspiration for me, because when I work through those late nights and I’m feeling a little bit drained, I look over and catch a glimpse of some DragonBall Z glory. When this happens, my black hair turns blonde and windswept, I start flying around the room, and I blast energy beams at my computer.

Well… Not really, but that would be cool, right? Trunks is cool because he shows me that there’s some light at the end of the tunnel when I’ve got a lot of tasks to work through!

Do you have a desktop mascot? Who gives you inspiration..? Tell us! We’re interested to know.

I’ll update this again when I get some more photos from the Ziller team.

Happy Friday