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A heads up for any of our clients who manage or are involved in web sites.

This from Pinsent Masons:

Companies have to provide a means of contact on their websites in addition to their postal and email addresses, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled. A telephone number, or a contact form that is answered within 60 minutes, were deemed acceptable.

Companies must include an email address and a geographic address on their website. The ECJ has ruled, though, that something else is required. That could be the provision of a telephone number but it does not have to be. They have to provide some other way for a consumer to communicate with the company in a direct and effective manner.

The ECJ has ruled that a web form filled in by a consumer and responded to by the company via email was acceptable in a case where the company answered queries within 30 to 60 minutes. It stopped short of suggesting that all companies should respond to web form queries within 60 minutes.

For more, read the article at Outlaw.com.

Open Brolly’s sister company, 4TM Social Media, will be holding a workshop in Forres on 24 November. It will cover blogging: what is it, how to do it and how it can be used for business.

For more information, please head over to 4TM’s site for the Blogging Workshop information.

Together with our business partners, under the banner of 4TM, we are pleased to announce the launch of of a film crew friendly scheme in the Scottish Highlands & Islands.

The Scottish Highlands & Islands Film Commission (SHIFC) and 4TM services based in Forres have teamed up to develop a scheme aimed at accommodating film crews. On the 1st and 2nd of October workshops will be held to inform the tourism industry how to benefit from being “film crew friendly” and to launch a scheme to put the area at the forefront of the working with film and TV productions in the UK . The scheme will explain to the accommodation sector what film and TV productions require and, if its appropriate, help promote their business.

The event will be rerun on  1st of October from 2 – 5pm and October 2nd, 10am – 1pm for those who cannot make it on the first. Both events will take place at the Horizon-Scotland building.

We feel this is part of building a sound base for the full range of film tourism; from production to post-release.

I also hear on the grapevine that a major film tourism has been schedule for March 2009 in Marseilles. The Marseille Provence Chamber of Commerce and Industry there has been working with key participants to pull it together.

David Sim writes… A bit of a technical one this….

If you’re using Internet Explorer 8, you might be aware of accelerators. They allow you to select some text and search for it, map it or send it by email or to your blog. Quite useful all round, and a great new feature. I’m trying them out to see what use we can make of them to enhance use of our database systems. One idea could be: a database administrator selects some text on a member’s web site. An accelerator could automatically add the text to the information we hold on the member in the database, without cut / paste / search for entrant.

To try out the technology, I’ve created an accelerator for the social networking site, Twitter. Select some text on a web page, right click and it will post the text and the URL of the page to Twitter.

If you have IE8, you can install the Twitter Accelerator.

IE8 is due out later this year and we’re already testing our client’s sites to ensure compatibility – it’s a major change for Microsoft and therefore many sites that worked fine in Internet Explorers 6 and 7 won’t work propertly in IE8.

We’re continuing to support Firefox too, and we use that in the team. Give me a call on +44 (0)1309 678100 or email david.sim@openbrolly.com if you would like to discuss, or add a comment.