March 10th, 2010 by Adrian Balkwill
First things first, what is a wireframe? Wireframe: A basic visual guide used in interface design, to suggest the structure of an interface and relationships between its pages. Think of it as a detailed blueprint of a building, showing things such as fire escapes, rooms, and layout.
Wireframes over time have become the starting point for pretty much any custom website design/interface I make. There are many different options when it comes to making wireframes. You can use wireframe programs, mock them up in Photoshop, etc. the list goes on and on. But I find the best, and fastest way to get things done is to draw it out with a good old pencil and paper. With pencil and paper you can quickly make changes, write down notes and things along these lines. It’s both fast and easy. Read more... (666 words, 2 images, estimated 2:40 mins reading time)
Posted in Web Design, Web Development | No Comments »
March 9th, 2010 by John McDonald
Incoming links to your websites are like votes for your website. If there are competing websites and one site has 300 links and another site has 20, likely the website with 300 links will have better page rank and better Search Engine positions for certain terms. However there is an art to link building and below are some keys to follow when building links to your website: Read more... (415 words, 1 image, estimated 1:40 mins reading time)
- It is very important for your links to be built naturally, which means don’t go from 1 to 1000 in a day. Google looks for slow but steady link building that looks natural instead of artificial.
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March 5th, 2010 by AJ Batac
So, you were wondering, how did that video get viral in less than 48 hours? Here’s how I think it happened (Disclaimer: I am making this up as I go. Ok, not really. I’m quickly researching things as I type.)
Here it goes… someone found this video somewhere, digitized it and uploaded it to Youtube (around October 15, 2009).
However, at that time, not much people knew what it was. It was also posted on Youtube swimming on a pool of millions of other videos. How can this be viral? Nope. Not yet. There are still some ingredients missing. Read more... (659 words, 5 images, estimated 2:38 mins reading time)
Posted in Random Musings, Tools, Tips and Tricks | 1 Comment »
March 4th, 2010 by Chris
Have we seen the last of IE6? Google has dropped official support for Internet Explorer 6, and YouTube is close behind. It’s finally fallen behind Firefox in the web’s usage statistics. More and more developers are charging extra to add specs for IE6. Some people are even throwing funerals for the near-ancient browser (http://bit.ly/9ikjC1)!
No, we’re not out of the woods yet. Despite massive compatibility problems with the rest of the internet’s specifications, there’s still that last 20% hanging on, and it’s mostly for two quite understandable reasons. Read more... (449 words, 1 image, estimated 1:48 mins reading time)
Posted in Online Marketing, Random Musings | 1 Comment »
March 1st, 2010 by Kevin MacNeil
Not everyone does online marketing? That’s not what I’ve been taught in marketing class, and communications class and every other business class that has groomed me for the world ahead. Students take today’s techniques for granted because we’re taught them in university like they’re common practices in every business. Imagine our surprise when we learn businesses must adapt to new techniques and may not have them incorporated into their strategies by the time our marketing professor plans them in a lecture. Read more... (240 words, 1 image, estimated 58 secs reading time)
Posted in Business, Sales and Marketing | No Comments »
March 1st, 2010 by Justin Nedecky
VANOC commissioned an awesome website for this historic event. Everything from the art to the technology is extremely well done. Here’s quick roundup of the noteworthy stuff.
Great layout, great design: The content organization and navigation is intuitive: find the sport, scores, venue, read the news, etc. It appears cluttered, but it’s got a lot to do! But more fun is the design. Notice the modern lineart used in the large backgrounds (peaking out the right side of the content) and through the header. The sport featured is random on the home page, and sport-specific on the sport portals. This original art is seen all throughout graphics at the venues and in associated advertising. Watch for it on the boards in the hockey and curling highlights we’ll be seeing for some time. Read more... (422 words, 3 images, estimated 1:41 mins reading time)
Tags: Olympics, Vancouver
Posted in Web Design | No Comments »
March 1st, 2010 by John McDonald
I had an interesting local search weekend. I am always interested to see who is optimized for local search as I feel that companies in Canada are not as optimized as well as they should be. So I was out on Saturday looking for a certain DVD and I dropped into Rogers to see if I could find it. While in there I thought I would see how a large player like Rogers performs for local search. I did a local search on Google Maps on my Blackberry (that has a GPS) for “DVDs” and to my surprise Rogers did not ever come up. Surprised that such a large player would not be optimized for local search. So I thought I would test another large retailer, I live by an Indigo (Chapters) Bookseller retail store. So right outside their doors I searched for “Books” to my surprise they did not even come up in the results. Then I went by Golf Town and searched for “Golf” and they did not even come up. Interesting. Read more... (285 words, 1 image, estimated 1:08 mins reading time)
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February 26th, 2010 by AJ Batac
Today, I was wondering how I could ever search for something if Google didn’t exist and I asked myself, “How do I look for answers without using Google?”
I certainly wanted to answer my own question really bad so I dug up a few worthy search engines out there that can be my alternative to Google search.
Here are some of my early favorites (in no order):
1) Yahoo!
www.yahoo.com
No introduction is needed for the 3rd largest website in the world.
2) Bing
www.bing.com Read more... (345 words, 9 images, estimated 1:23 mins reading time)
Posted in Random Musings, Tools, Tips and Tricks, Web Design, Web Development | 1 Comment »
February 26th, 2010 by Jonathan Dart
I’ve recently needed to get longitude and latitude coordinates for several locations. I first went about it by getting the values from http://www.geonames.org/. This was difficult because it requires you convert degrees, minutes and seconds to the wgs84 format. This is no treat.
After some googling I discovered that it’s pretty simple to make a Google map with a pin on it which tells you the coordinates of the pin in the wgs84 format.
Here’s the code:
HTML
<p id="coords"></p>
<div id="map_canvas" style="height: 600px"></div>
Javascript
function gogmap() {
var map,
marker,
point = new GLatLng(52.482780222078205, -102.65625); // default position
var posChange = function() {
point = marker.getLatLng();
document.getElementById('coords').innerHTML = "lat: " + point.lat() + "<br>lng: " + point.lng();
};
map = new GMap2(document.getElementById("map_canvas"));
map.addControl(new GLargeMapControl());
map.addControl(new GNavLabelControl());
map.setCenter(point, 4);
marker = new GMarker(point, {draggable: true});
GEvent.addListener(marker, "dragend", posChange);
map.addOverlay(marker);
posChange();
}
gogmap(); Live Example
When you drag the pin to a new location the longitude and latitude below will update. Read more... (153 words, 1 image, estimated 37 secs reading time)
Posted in Web Development | No Comments »
February 22nd, 2010 by John McDonald
I attended a presentation at the Manitoba chapter of the Canadian Marketing Association luncheon last week and the presenter was a marketing executive from Canwest Global. He was discussing the important elements they use in their marketing strategy: Read more... (326 words, 1 image, estimated 1:18 mins reading time)
- work outside your comfort zone
- concentrate your advertising at times (ie taking over all advertising on a website etc)
- be consistent with your message
- surprise your audience
Posted in Online Marketing | No Comments »
