Web Design

Several months ago, while driving to lunch, I spotted a sign near a warehouse area here in Hollywood Florida. It was one of these small signs that usually get posted illegally near a highway off-ramp and generally promote some of the following:

• Buy your old home
• Help you clean your credit
• Buy a new mattress
• Help you out of foreclosure
• Etc....

However, this particular sign was promoting cheap web site design. I took a snapshot with my camera and posted it to my Facebook page.

Today I came across another sign and this one was right outside of my building in the parking lot. And I can see how the competition is starting to get fierce since they are less than half of the price from the one I saw a few months ago. And these guys even added their URL to the bottom. Way to go, now that is what I call progressive thinking.

Can these companies really be serious?

I would love to see more of these if anyone has them, please add your photos to the comments below.

With the release of HTML 5 coming, the internet and its developers have reached the point of no return. Developers have logged extra hours, dealt with extra (unnecessary) headaches, and have had to continue to plan for the browser of the internet stone age (back when dinosaurs roomed the web in 2001). 
Well Twitter is buzzing and the internet community has rallied, IE6 is being caste out and battered.
Even major sites like Facebook, Digg, and Youtube have ended IE6 support.

This Christmas season is turning into the season of Android, with the mobile operating system reaching nearly 20 devices currently, and another half dozen expected to be released in the next few weeks. With Android now on all US mobile providers excluding AT&T, which has the iPhone, and Blackberry still as strong as ever in the business market, more and more websites need to consider their website on a mobile scale.

So many times we are told to just put a sign-up form on a website. No discussion about goals, required fields, actions, validations or anything whatsoever. Just "Put a newsletter sign up form on my website", is many times all we are told. Asking any questions from our team usually results in a futile lecture about web principles and usability that the client will never understand or retain. It's nice to know that there are some people out there who "get it". I came across this article several months ago. Although it is a year old (which is ages in Internet time) the principles are still true today and I can see them holding ground for the foreseeable future. Check out the Web Form Design Patterns Part 1 & Part 2 for a great read on all of the thought that goes into creating those "simple" sign-up forms.

With the slew of marketing emails I receive (and you too, I'm sure), I was recently taken off-guard by a sarcastic message that turned out to be quite humorous. While I do not use Rackspace and I in no way endorse them, I am, for some odd reason, on their mailing list (imagine that, an email from a company I didn't sign up with). The subject of the email was simple enough and caught my eye for a scan (rather than a quick delete) Helpful hints for maximizing your business budget The email was properly created, using images and text so that a quick scan would tell me what I need to know without downloading images. I saw the bullet points and then decided to download the images. It wasn't until a few moments when it actually sank in. At that point, I got the joke and had to read the rest of the email. 

Helpful Hints for Maximizing Your Business Budget

Over the past year I have read numerous articles and posts about a great website/web application to help track your tasks. Rememberthemilk.com has been praised as a new way of handling To-Do Lists. Being an avid Outlook fanatic, I never felt the need to stray from my existing system. Outlook has everything in one nice neat package: Email, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks & Notes. And it all syncs with my phone. Recently with my new purchase of an IPhone, I realized that the Tasks & Notes did not synchronize. While I had to find a new way to track my shopping lists and other miscellaneous notes, it came to my attention that I never really did use the Task feature in Outlook. Maybe because it just doesn't work well. I did use the Notes feature to track shopping lists and other misc notes that I may need from time to time such as an IP address, CPR reminder, store shopping prices (which has been replaced with my camera phone) and others. Since my IPhone purchase several months ago, all of this has abruptly ended.

Nobody likes a pushy salesperson. And it doesn't matter if it's someone trying to sell you a car or someone blocking your way past a kiosk in the mall, these sales people have a commonality that is persistence and the belief that they can persuade you to buy anything and/or everything. Maybe they can fill your head with so many claims or talk fast enough that you will be convinced or at least moved enough to make a purchase. The internet is loaded with websites that follow this same belief. If they inundate their visitors with claims and boasts and incomprehensible numbers and figures, they'll persuade you that what they are offering is exactly what you need.  Has anyone ever seen a web hosting company that claims 99.9% uptime? Try asking them how this figure is calculated. Just like when you look at a store from the outside and you feel it might have something that you want inside, when you enter you realize that it is not what you want at all. You make a hasty retreat. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) practices work the same way. You can fool someone while they are searching, but once they enter, if it’s not what they are looking for, they are gone.

A new coat of paint and a little oil can go a long way...
We began working with Lou Lamoureux (the transplant athlete) several months ago. He has been running his  e-commerce website (www.cycling-videos.com) and selling training and fitness videos and books for several years.  He started small and did all of the work himself up to the point that he contacted SoFla Web Studio. 

What a great way to start our new blog. After years of assisting our clients with their online marketing efforts, we have finally started to practice what we preach and begin blogging ourselves. In a similar fashion Google, which has been helping all of with just about everything online for the past several years, has finally built their own browser... Google's Chrome Browser is an open source alternative to FireFox and IE (the big two browsers at this time). While the thought a 3rd party in the browser wars is enlightening (and yes I know there are others such as Safari, Opera, etc... but they don't really count) it is too soon to tell if google will actually have something new here. Google does have a golden touch with certain things (Adwords anyone?), but they also have a lab full of a few more tarnished projects which havent reached their fullest potential (more on some of these in a future post) The implications of google getting into this realm are huge (especially for Microsoft). Google is known for thier insatiable thirst for data and I am sure the service agreement that we will all agree to when we install thier browser will, in its most "non evil" legalize state that google will watch and record everything you ever do on the internet for all of infinity.