1. Greetings

Welcome again to i-news! Lots of interesting stuff this month - browse at your leisure. If you would like us to demistify a particular subject in next months i-news, drop us a line.

You may speak to the latest member of the Imagine team, Arminder, in the coming months. He is joining us for one year on his University placement. Arminder will be working in systems architecture i.e. planning and developing the technical side of websites. We look forward to him contributing to future cutting-edge projects!

2. DrinkMars

DrinkMars.com is a constantly evolving site we created for the Mars® corporation. Our aim was to develop a fun site to support the brand values and entertain the Mars® Drink target market. The recent update incorporated improved images and content as well as a new set of desktop pictures. Don't forget to check out Cow-Luge; a daring game of agility and judgement with a must-reach high scoreboard. You can battle it out to get into the top-ten but you will need to practice - it's very competitve! A more relaxed feature is the e-cards system allowing users to send cards to friends through a unique Flash system that custom designs cards on-the-fly. A range of 8 original desktop pictures, and a screensaver based on the cinema advert is putting Mars® Drink on the screens of computers around the world.

3. Key Stats

The number of UK households with Internet access continues to grow fast. Oftel estimates that the total has risen from 6 million in 2000 to 10 million in 2001. More importantly, of these households, Oftel estimates that 35% use an unmetered Internet access service that gives them completely unlimited time to access the net, usually for a fixed monthly fee. With the cost of each telephone call lifted, surfers are spending more time online. Services include:

• NTLWorld - £15 per month for dial-up access or choose from a range of broadband options for a really fast connection.
• Freeserve AnyTime - £12.99 per month from the company started by Dixons.
• BT Surf Together - £14.99 per month but only evening and weekend calls are unlimited.

4. Feature - Happy Birthday WWW

Yesterday (6 August 2001), the World Wide Web celebrated its 10th Birthday. That makes this a perfect opportunity to reflect on what the Web is and how it works, without getting too techie! First, you should understand the difference between the Web and the Internet. The Internet is the network of computers that are linked together around the world. The Web is all the resources and users on the Internet that are using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Keeping it simple, HTTP allows you to send and receive files such as text, images, sound and movies. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the language created by Tim Berners-Lee (a Brit), uses HTTP and allows documents to be linked, enabling you to easily navigate between files (this newsletter is written in HTML).

In 1993, the first browser, Mosaic, was released allowing people to view HTML through an easy-to-use interface and this caused an explosion of people using the web. In 1994, Netscape Navigator was released, followed by Internet Explorer in 1995 and soon after, these were the top two browsers used to access the Web. During this time, new versions of HTML were developed and the most recent version, HTML 4, added innovations for the disabled, support for international languages plus much, much more.

If we have got you hooked and you would like to know more, try these links:

• How The Internet Runs - listen to a 36 minute audio presentation.
• History of the Internet - read a ''brief" 9,000 word history from the Internet Society.
• HTML and the Web - read explanations from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
• Internet and Web history - read a 1,000 word historical summary.

5. Marketing Series Part 3 - Online Advertising

In the June edition of i-news, we discussed methods of online marketing, the most publicised of which is banner advertising. There has been good news recently for both web users and advertisers through the introduction of more standards by the New York based IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau). These standards extend previous guidelines that outline the image and file size for banners. By restricting the file size of banners, you should not have to wait for huge banners to download before you can view the page you requested. For the advertiser, the standard image size means the same banner will fit perfectly on different sites. There is also more choice to the traditional banner ad- the Rectangle, Skyscraper, Pop-Up and Interstitial ads. Before you go-ahead and start that campaign, here are some useful stats:

• 64% of online Europeans reacted positively to at least one ad in the past 6 months. 79% of browsers say offline advertising is most likely to send them to a particular website (IMPACT 2001 survey).
• UK-based Just-Sites.com found that 53% of the response to banners was direct, while 47% was indirect (visiting the site later without clicking the ad).
• CNET Networks found that 42% of the respondents remembered seeing a rich media interactive ads (e.g. using Flash animation) after only one viewing. Plus, ad brand recognition was 30% higher than standard adverts, brand awareness was 55% higher and purchase consideration was 12% higher.

6. Useful Sites

Stuck for words? The number of words people know and the number they use regularly varies enormously. People can know from 20,000 to 100,000 words but usually only use a 1000 or so in everyday life. This is a fraction of the 171,476 words in current use (as listed in the Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary) and the total 1,000,000 words estimated by Dictionary.com. So if you would like to improve your use of the English langauge, have a look at these very useful sites:

• Dictionary.com - An amazing search resource which references up-to-date dictionaries with a staggering 600,000 entries. It covers both the familiar and obscure with definitions from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary and other sources including 66,000 terms from the On-line Medical Dictionary, 50,000 entries from Acronym Finder and 5,000 definitions from the InvestorWords financial glossary.
• Thesaurus.com - Based on Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases and a welcome alternative to the feeble thesaurus within Microsoft Word. There is also a new crossword and word search puzzle every day in the "Fun and Games" section.

7. Website of the month

NewScientist has always been a great read. The online version NewScientist.com builds on the magazines' success with excellent content including:

• Daily News - breaking science news which can be delivered to your email.
• Conference Reports - coverage from the most important scientific meetings around the world.
• Hot Topics - guide to the most talked about subjects in science.
• The Last Word - answers to some of the most puzzling questions (our favourite).
• Feedback - strange but true tales from the world of science.
• Interviews - read what the people shaping the future of science have to say.