September 1st, 2010 by Lyndsay Walker
Whether you’re representing your company or yourself, it’s important to be easily recognized by a photo or image.
Think about big brand campaigns… whatever they do, their colours, fonts and graphics are the same throughout. How many times have you glanced at a billboard, web banner ad or commercial and immediately know the company because the name even appears?
Across the web when we’re Tweeting, liking things on Facebook and commenting on blogs, there are many opportunities to attach an avatar or profile picture. There are two important things to remember on this: Read more... (313 words, 1 image, estimated 1:15 mins reading time)
Posted in Online Marketing | No Comments »
August 30th, 2010 by John McDonald
It amazes me how simple communication can satisfy a customer and no communication can cause frustration and can cause customers to jump to conclusions. I recently took my boat into get repaired to a mechanic that we know quite well. I took it in on a Wednesday and they said they would look at it by Friday. Saturday, no call, so I called in to ask what the status was and the person there told me that they were waiting for a motor assessment tool and I left a message for the mechanic to call me. No word back, the next week I was going away so I did let them know there was no rush but I did want it the following weekend, got back in town and still no message. Finally I heard back the following week and the mechanic was very nice and said that the motor has been fixed and we could pick it up. Read more... (254 words, 1 image, estimated 1:01 mins reading time)
Posted in Business, Sales and Marketing | No Comments »
August 25th, 2010 by Justin Nedecky
We learn to treat the Google Docs software different than other software, when we don’t wait years for the next improvements to our applications. If you haven’t used a Google Docs application recently, you should find the interfaces much improved. I recently discovered how far the Google Docs presentations application has come — Ironically, Google Docs apps don’t seem to be named separately. Like the aspiration of other Google Docs applications, Google Presentations are Microsoft PowerPoint presentations on an attractive diet. Read more... (428 words, 5 images, estimated 1:43 mins reading time)
Posted in Business, Sales and Marketing, Tools, Tips and Tricks | No Comments »
August 13th, 2010 by Jonathan Dart
Unfortunately the title of this post is nonsensical. NoSQL isn’t any one thing, it’s a broad spectrum of emerging technologies. NoSQL could be used to describe just about any data store that isn’t a traditional database, and it turns out there are many flavours of databases.
I haven’t used any NoSQL product personally but I have the answers to some important questions:
Are these database systems proven and used in large scale productions?
They sure are.
Do they provide advantages over traditional RDBMS’s?
In some cases they are very interesting, in others there is debate as to whether they’re the right tool for the job. Read more... (200 words, 1 image, estimated 48 secs reading time)
Posted in Web Development | No Comments »
August 5th, 2010 by AJ Batac
I wrote about Google Wave before and even asked people if they wanted invites. But yesterday, Google decided to stop its development. I’m not sure if I’d be sad or happy about it, I have mixed emotions.
Here’s the official statement from Google
We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication. The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code. Read more... (286 words, 3 images, estimated 1:09 mins reading time)
Posted in Random Musings | No Comments »
August 5th, 2010 by Chris Savoie
As your website grows and expands its content and user base outside the initial scope for the project, it often becomes necessary to consider a re-design or re-organization in order to keep navigation intuitive and get the most from your content, preventing it from getting lost in a hard-to-navigate-to location. Usually a content re-design starts with your sitemap and grows from there, but when you have too many pages sometimes it’s quite difficult to simply re-organize them in your head or even on paper. The Card-Sort method is a great way to fluidly alter sitemap organization on paper to achieve the most intuitive organization for your users when re-designing. It all starts with a stack of index cards, and a big black marker. Read more... (415 words, 1 image, estimated 1:40 mins reading time)
Tags: Canada's Web Shop, Card, Card-Sort, Chris, Chris Savoie, design, Organization, Re-Design, Re-Organization, Savoie, Sitemap, Sort, TheWebShop, Tips, Tricks
Posted in Tools, Tips and Tricks, Web Design, Web Development | No Comments »
July 22nd, 2010 by John McDonald
Something interesting happened last week when we were recruiting for a web programmer. We had gone through our interviews and reduced the candidates to 3 and we were getting close to choosing our candidate. We chose our candidate and he was pleased with our decision and he said that he was excited about working with our team. He mentioned that he had been following our Twitter account and our blog posts and got a really good feeling for the expertise we had and it made him comfortable in making his decision to work with us. Read more... (187 words, 1 image, estimated 45 secs reading time)
Posted in Online Marketing | 1 Comment »
July 15th, 2010 by Chris Chatelain
Some services are capable of running in a chroot environment without having to build a separate chroot environment for them. OpenSSH and bind9 are both examples of chroot aware services. Simple config options will get you on your way to secure use of either of those. But for other services, like Apache2, things get more complicated.
It’s sometimes helpful to make a stand alone chroot environment so that you can run multiple versions of software. For example, it’s sometimes useful to run one version of php for your live server and experiment with upgrading to the newest php by running the newest php in a chroot. But how can you interact with the services running in the chroot? Read more... (371 words, 1 image, estimated 1:29 mins reading time)
Posted in Linux System Administration | No Comments »
July 14th, 2010 by AJ Batac
The 23th annual Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival starts today until July 25. The Fringe is currently the 2nd largest North American festival of its kind.
The street in front of our building is going to be packed for the next couple of days and we’re looking forward for a fun-filled week!
Posted in Random Musings | No Comments »
July 14th, 2010 by John McDonald
I recently met with a prospect and we were reviewing their website in the meeting and he said something to me that stuck in my mind. He said that when they got their website developed they told the website developer exactly how they wanted the site to be laid out and that is how they setup the website. I thought to myself that does not make a lot of sense, sure the customer knows what content they want in the website but what does the client know about how to organize the content and provide navigation on the website. Read more... (313 words, 1 image, estimated 1:15 mins reading time)
Posted in Online Marketing | No Comments »
