Looking around the web today you will find some really amazing stuff going on. There are many start-ups, with the help of agencies who are revolutionizing the web and paving the way for a digital, connected future.
These guys dedicate months and years refining and building their platforms and often do it for free and for “the love of the job”.

However, with all this good, inevitably comes some really bad… Take a look at our list of Worst Websites, Ever! and let us know what you think in the comments section.

At Apex, we love anything slick, fresh, innovative and forward, the following are not that.

5. 5safepoints.com

Driver improvement workshops in the USA, maybe someone should call these guys and offer them a website improvement lecture…
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4. ronoslund.com

Not too sure what Ron Oslund likes, but, we don’t like his website… My opinion is that he got lost in space with his site?
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3. arngren.net

This site is a newspaper that has been opened onto your screen and is a good illustration of what an E-Commerce or any website ever should look like.
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2. dokimos.org

Dokimos is a virtual ministry that has several awful pages across their network. This is why you should leave professionals to do their work!
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1. theworldsworstwebsiteever.com

Ok, this one is dedicated to bad habits and trends found across the internet, but, they did a great job of making this site awful. Don’t believe us? Check it out for yourself…
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We’re Turning 2

And Giving Something To You

We are giving away a website design, development & hosting to the value of R25 000 to celebrate our 2nd birthday. Tell us why you should have an Apex website and win, its our way of getting you in on the celebration.

The “Rules”

Like, Share & Comment on our facebook pic telling us why you should pick your project. Make it exciting, challenging or just for a good cause.

We Pick The Winner

There is no random winner by a computer here, we’re picking the winner based on motivation. We want to do something that gets us excited, thinking and moving on more than a business level. Let us know your cause, your “next-big-thing” idea or simply why you think you deserve an Apex built website.

Facebook has a set of rules and regulations when it comes to advertising on their platform, These rules govern everything from content and links to target markets and shock value.

Facebook’s advertising Philosophy

“At Facebook, we believe that ads should contribute to and be consistent with the overall user experience. The best ads are those that are tailored to individuals based on how they and their friends interact and affiliate with the brands, artists, and businesses they care about. These guidelines are not intended to serve as legal advice and adherence to these guidelines does not necessarily constitute legal compliance. Advertisers are responsible for ensuring that their ads comply with all applicable laws, statutes, and regulations.”

for a full list of facebooks rules and regulations Click Here.

Tips

Split Test Your Ads

One of the most important things for any advertiser is to ensure that the advertisements you are running are the best that they can be. Too often advertisers/marketers will launch a Facebook ad campaign and see that they just spend R1000 and got little results and generalize that this must be the case for all campaigns on Facebook. The reality is that your ad campaign probably wasn’t performing well because your ad wasn’t great. The best marketers know that performance comes from testing things out.

There are a limited number of variables that you can change, but here are the four primary groups that you should be testing ads against:
Ad copy – What does the text of your advertisement say? Asking the user to click “Like” below tends to work relatively well.
Ad image – Test different images to see which ones perform the best. You can get extremely granular and test images within various demographic groups. You may find things such as that pink images work better for females.
Interest groups – Another thing you should be testing is which interest groups are more passionate (and hence more likely to click). It’s frequently too expensive to target less passionate and less responsive markets as they click on ads much less frequently.
Demographics within interest groups – Once you find a passionate group, try splitting the ads by gender or age group. You may find that some groups perform better than others. Narrowing this down will help you increase your ads performance and reduce the effective cost per click and cost per action.

Ad costs and impressions are heavily influenced by click-through rate

Click-through rate (CTR) is an incredibly important measurement for Facebook advertising. Even if your singular goal is to grow fans, regardless of how many people click through, you’ll still need to keep a close eye on CTR. Essentially, Facebook judges the success of your ad on the ad’s ability to get a relatively high percentage of people to click. Facebook rewards successful ads with a lower cost per click or cost per impression and more visibility.

Unfortunately, if your ad drops below a certain CTR threshold it will be nearly impossible to bring it back up. In that case, it’s better to start a new ad than to tweak the one you have. From my experience, having below a 0.1 CTR will almost always result in an underperforming ad. But the criteria for establishing a threshold will depend on the goals you establish.

Targeting friends of connections increases the relevance of your ad

Have you ever seen an ad pop up on Facebook that shows that one of your friends is already connected to that page? Did you feel more drawn to the ad than you would have been if no connections were shown? Fact is, Facebook is really great at peer pressure, and when users see that one of their friends is connected to a page, it increases the chance that they too might want to check it out.

Ad Copy

REMEMBER: The most important aspect of your Facebook ads are the images. The image has about 75% bearing on whether or not the user clicks on your ad. Make sure you test multiple ad images as well as different types of images. This can include Stock vs Amateur images, Female vs Male, different ages, etc….

Get Past the Direct Response Mentality

The Challenge: Executives or decision makers possibly don’t understand that direct response isn’t the only (or most important) metric and sometimes the goal isn’t even to drive sales with the ads, but to build relationships.

Clickable: People on Facebook are there to consume social media and produce social media. We don’t want to show a “Buy This Now” ad, we want them to connect with this brand. Once those people are advocates of the brand, it’s much easier to get them to buy things later on. Now you are able to connect more often without the ad and they actually want to hear from you. There’s a fundamental difference.

Design flows that are tied to clear objectives allow us to create a positive user experience and a valuable one for the business we’re working for. In this article, we’ll show you how spending more time up front designing user flows leads to better results for both the user and business. Then we’ll look in depth at a common flow for e-commerce websites (the customer acquisition funnel), as well as provide tips on optimizing it to create a complete customer experience.

Start With The User

When starting a new Web design project, we’re often handed a design brief, branding standards, high-level project goals, as well as feature and functionality requirements. Unfortunately, these documents typically amount to little more than the technical specifications of the project, with almost no thought given to how exactly the website will fulfill the multiple user objectives that lead to successful interactions.

Two examples of popular user flows for e-commerce and subscription websites.

If you start with a detailed look at the objectives of the user and the business, you would be able to sketch out the various flows that need to be designed in order to achieve both parties’ goals. User objectives could range from finding a fact to replacing a product to learning a new skill to buying a gift for someone. Business objectives could be getting a lead, a like, a subscriber, a buyer, a download or a phone call. Identifying each user and business objective is the first step to creating design flows that meet all of them.

Get The Full Story on Smashing Magazine Here

Take a look at what director Rick Meriki did last summer: a spectacular one-minute video he made with two of his pals as they traveled to 11 countries over 44 days, walking us through a dazzling variety of cultures, locations and images.

“Move” shows actor Andrew Lees strolling toward us in perfect sync, surrounded by a mind-boggling group of scenarios, all whizzing by so quickly you have to watch this quick clip a few times just to absorb it all.

The film was part of a three-film series of short subjects commissioned by STA Travel Australia, based on the concepts of movement, learning and food. Of the three, this one is by far the most compelling. The other two, entitled “Learn” and “Eat,” are artfully done as well, and all are beautifully photographed by Director of Photography and Editor Tim White.

Get The Full Story on Mashable Here

Here are six of them (in no particular order) that we expect to help define the coming year. We chose companies based on the momentum they gained in 2011, promising new takes on old problems and, in one case, the possibility of an IPO.

Did we look at every startup in the world before compiling this list? Nope. Did we overlook some of the startups speeding toward 2012 definition-dom? Yep. Which is where you come in. Let us know in the comments which startups are on your list to watch in 2012.

1. Skillshare
2. Zaarly, Taskrabbit or Something Similar
3. LevelUp/SCVNGR
4. Dwolla
5. Eventbrite
6. Codecademy

Get The Full Story on Mashable Here

The role has been vacant since the company fired Carol Bartz in September. Thompson will relieve Yahoo’s interim CEO Tim Morse, who will return to his position as chief financial officer.

Thompson has served as president of eBay’s payment division since 2008. Yahoo’s announcement points out that under his leadership PayPal more than doubled both its active userbase and its revenues.

Get The Full Story on Mashable Here

Google announced on Tuesday that it acquired a company called Clever Sense, the maker of the app Alfred, which serves as a digital personal assistant. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Mashable confirmed with Google that the Alfred app does not have voice-command capabilities. Similar to Siri, he does search the Internet and provide users with recommendations from restaurant suggestions to bar and nightlife options. Alfred also learns user preferences and tastes over time to make more targeted recommendations.

But Siri does that already, and can also answer questions about the weather, news and directions. It’s unclear whether Alfred can catch up.

Also unclear: whether Alfred was named after Bruce Wayne’s confidant and butler in Batman. Clever Sense has said it originally picked out the name Seymour for the app.

See the full story on mashable.com

Citing an unnamed source, the site says that Hitachi and Sony have already started shipping 4-inch LCD panels to Apple for use in “new iOS devices.” The two companies are also said to be providing panels for Apple’s next iPad, which is said to be “changed fundamentally.”
If true, the move would suggest that Apple has not just decided on the design for the followup to the iPhone 4S, which was unveiled and released just last month–but is beginning to collect parts and produce units.
Yet the 4-inch display rumors ahead of that unveiling were numerous. In February, a snapshot out of China depicting the front screen of what looked like an iPhone with a larger and wider display cropped up. Just weeks before, component industry tracker DigiTimes claimed that Apple was eyeing bigger screens, in part to better compete with Android and Windows Phone devices.
Then, in March, something a little bit more interesting happened. Purported “mold engineering” drawings made the rounds, depicting a device that looked like an iPhone 4 but with a noticeably larger screen. This was followed in June by blog This Is My Next, claiming that Apple was working on an iPhone with a 3.7-inch display, and a slew of cases that hit store shelves designed for a slightly larger, but thinner iPhone, based on an alleged prototype device leaked from a manufacturing facility.
Alternatively, a report by our own sister site CNET France near the end of September loosely claimed Apple would use a qHD (960×540 pixels) screen that measured about 4.2 to 4.3 inches diagonally. That’s compared to the iPhone 4 and 4S’ 3.5-inch display that runs at a higher 960×640 pixels.
One of the most recent reports ahead of this came last week from iLounge, which laid out several rumors about Apple’s product changes during 2012. On that list was an iPhone with a 4-inch display, alongside metal casing and a summer launch.
Apple currently maintains three basic sizes for apps to fall into: non-Retina Display iPhones and iPods, Retina Display iPhones and iPods, and the iPad. Changing dimensions with two additional configurations would mark another step for developers when designing their software, be it utilities or games.

South Africans have embraced social media as a core pillar of Internet activity in this country, along with e-mail, news and banking. MXit and Facebook lead the way in user numbers, while Twitter has seen the most dramatic growth in social networking in the past year, and BlackBerry Messenger is the fastest growing network in the second half of 2011.

These are among the key findings of a new study by Fuseware and World Wide Worx, entitled South African Social Media Landscape 2011.

“The question of how many South Africans use each of the major social networks comes up so often, it became a priority for us to pin down the numbers,” says Michal Wronski, Managing Director of information analysts Fuseware and co-author of the report. “The data was collected through a combination of Fuseware’s analysis of social network databases, information provided directly by social networks, and World Wide Worx’s consumer market research.”

An analysis of Fuseware’s extensive database of Twitter usage, in conjunction with World Wide Worx’s consumer market research, shows that there were 1,1-million Twitter users in South Africa in mid-2011. This is a 20-fold increase in a little more than a year.

“One of the drivers of growth of Twitter is the media obsession with the network,” says report co-author Arthur Goldstuck, managing director of World Wide Worx. “Most radio and TV personalities with large audiences are engaged in intensive campaigns to drive their listeners and viewers to both Twitter and Facebook. The former, coming off a very low base, is therefore seeing the greatest growth.”

As in the global environment, not all Twitter users are active users, with only 40% tweeting, but probably as many simply watching, following and using it as a breaking news service.

MXit remains the most popular social network in South Africa, with approximately 10-million active users. Its demographic mix runs counter to the popular media image of MXit as a teen-dominated environment. No less than 76% of the male user base of MXit and 73% of female users are aged 18 or over.

A surprising finding emerged from analysis of Facebook data. Of approximately 4.2-million Facebook users in South Africa by August 2011, only 3.2 million had visited the site in the year-to-date.

“This is partly a factor of many users moving on once the novelty of the site had worn off, as well as a result of the fickle nature of the youth market,” says Wronski. “Once BBM picked up significant traction in private schools, for example, many teenagers who had previously flocked to Facebook, opted for BBM’s greater immediacy.”

While LinkedIn, aimed at professional users, also reached the 1,1-million mark, it came off a far higher base – but still saw 83% growth of South African users from 2010 to 2011. Of these, 112 000 or 10% are business owners.

Consumer research analysed in the report revealed that future intention of usage of most social networks is strongly related to age. The younger the user, the greater the intention of usage.

“This is only one of many micro-trends shaping social networking,” says Goldstuck. “MXit, Facebook and BBM statistics illustrate, for example, that as social networks become more mainstream, their penetration within all age ranges deepens. This, in turn, will result in the continual flattening of the age curve as social networks mature.”