Archive for ‘Devstars News’

New EU Cookie Law is this month

From Thursday, 26 May 2011, any company that tracks information about online users has to get consent from visitors to their website in order to do so. Businesses in the UK were given a year’s grace to become compliant, but time is almost up.

Although we believe that the law will only be used to bring to task any sites found mis-using cookies we do feel there are some steps you should take to be seen to comply with the law.

  • First Step – Have an updated Privacy Policy in place which includes a declaration on Cookie within your site. To complete this you will need to list the cookies used in your site. We can help you update your policy to include the necessary changes.
  • Second Step – If your site uses cookies to help the user navigate or stop the same page/offer appearing twice then you should put in some automatic notification. Devstars have written a simple patch that will ask the new user to help keep your site the way it is by approving cookies. If the user decides to decline then we will have some fallbacks in place to display a site without using cookies. They will possibly see some areas more than once, or not be offered the most relevant content but that would have been explained to them in the pop up.
  • Third Step – communicate with your current customers. If you have an existing newsletter, facebook and twitter account you could request some help keeping the site just the way they like it. A simple landing page will ask the the user to check a box, acknowledging the use of cookies. If you use our Campaign Monitor system then the request can be entered directly into the user’s preference centre, negating the need for a bespoke landing page. In this way you have completed all your obligations to new and existing customers

How Devstars can help

  1. Update existing Privacy Policy – 1.5 hours
  2. Create a new Privacy Policy – 3 hours
  3. Add automatic pop up to homepage and create if/then statements for use of cookies in site – 8 hours
  4. Set up newsletter with landing page – 6 hours
  5. Set up newsletter and preference centre in Campaign monitor – 2 hours

For around 2 days work we can have you fully compliant with the new laws, or for around 2 or 3 hours work we can get you started!

I hope you have found this information useful, please click here to get started

 

 

 

 

 

IndyCar graphics for Jordan Zevon

Way back in the very early days we had an office in Hollywood and Jordan came to work for us, managing projects and doing some development. Since then Jordan’s been focussing on his music career with a couple of albums under his belt and appearances on the David Letterman show.

Jordan gave us a buzz a couple of weeks ago telling us he’d secured some advertising space for his upcoming new album “Imperfect” on the side of Panther Racings IndyCar and could we come up with some ideas for the graphics. Not our usual brief but we jumped at the chance of working with Jordan again and a top flight race team.

Roll on a few days and graphics were visualised, designed, art-worked and sent off to the printers in LA 3 days before the Long Beach race where the team secured a 5th place finish.

Find out more about Jordan here

Young developer of the year

Devstars are very proud, (and more than a little excited), to announce that Paul Davis, our WordPress genius developer has been nominated for .net’s Young Developer of the Year award.

We’re crossing our fingers and toes for him, help him win by giving him a vote here:  http://www.thenetawards.com/

Voting is open until the 30th of September, so vote now!  The winner will be announced on November the 17th, Good Luck Paul :-)