wp.website.design
29Mar/100

Portfolio Update: Four Corners Clinic and Contest

We’ve spent the last week working with Jackie — the even coordinator — and the Four Corners Clinic and Contest Website. She did a great job getting content online, but was looking for the next step in user interaction. Four Corners Clinic and Contest is an event that takes place each year where Farriers come together, compete, learn and enjoy conversation. The contest has always had applications but this is the first year they’ve been able to take them digital. We set them up with a great application form and web-based invoicing. Jackie can see exactly what each entrant needs for the contest and then bill them accordingly. The entrant can then view their invoice directly from the website and securely pay it with PayPal or Credit Card through Authorize.net. We also gave them a donations portal via PayPal: it will allow visitors to donate directly to the Farrier Relief Fund without signing up for or participating in the contest. After hours of site design work and a quick refresh of their logo, the site was ready to go and will continue to serve them for years to come. Jackie is dedicated to getting helpful content on the blog… so [...]

29Jan/100

February design deal, yes it’s a few days early

We couldn’t wait to bring this news to you, so we’re letting out early. wp.website.design would like to offer you a website for $500 that you’ll be able to maintain yourself. Other companies are charging $299 or more for limited 2 or 3 page websites that have absolutely ZERO potential to bring your site recognition among the search engines. You’ll also have to pay that company more money to continuously maintain your website. Is that really what you want? Just for this coming month, we’ll build or re-build your website so that you can get the recognition you deserve. We’ll integrate you with all the social networks and optimize your site for search engines. Don’t pay someone $299 for a static site that will cost you more money than it will make. Let us build a website for you so that you can start keeping your content up to date… today!

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25Jan/100

Personalization is awesome, try Gravatar

You may frequent blog websites and wonder how some users have avatars and others don’t. You want an avatar too, so you dig through your profile options but don’t find any way to upload that awesome photo of you from three years ago. What do you do? Well, in those instances, it’s pretty likely that the blogs are using Gravatars. Gravatars are “Globally Recognized Avatars” that will work on any website that accepts them. These days, you’ll find that most legit sites do. If they don’t, you should ask them to… it’s great software that takes very little to implement. How do you set up a Gravatar account? Browse your way over to Gravatar’s Website and set up an account. Just give them your email address, upload a picture, and then make sure you’re using that email address on your blog of choice when you comment. If you have multiple email addresses you’d like to use, great! They allow for primary and secondary email addresses — you can even assign a different picture to each. We have all of our email addresses set up so no matter what account we log in with, we’re animated. This is just another way [...]

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25Jan/100

What’s the point to social integration?

A new trend among internet companies is social integration. What is it? Well, if you’re running a company that allows people to connect with you on a social network, that’s social integration. It can take form in many ways. For instance, our blog automatically updates to Twitter… and our tweets automatically show up in our blog. It’s one way for us to stay more connected with our site — and our users can have to-the-minute updates from us if they subscribe to our Twitter feed. It doesn’t stop there, our website also allows you to log in and comment using your Facebook account information. You don’t have to sign up for “yet another” website in order to participate. Any good designer wants to make the end-user experience easier… they’re much more likely to retain traffic if their site is extremely well socially integrated. The little icons you see in every post allow you to share or bookmark each article depending on the service you’d like to do. You can email it, follow the comments RSS feed, put the article synopsis on your facebook profile, re-tweet it with Twitter, and share it on countless social networks that will connect you to [...]

25Jan/100

The power of live-blogging, we can do that

We just finished an additional design for Cocoa Touch Apps today that included live-blogging software so they can cover the upcoming Apple Event with ease. They were looking for a design that would allow them to push out their updates to their readers without any need for refreshing the page. Ah, the wonders of technology. We set them up with P2, a piece of software that allows the administrators to publish directly from the homepage. We also set them up with our Facebook account integration so their commenters don’t necessarily need to login via the website, but instead can just use Facebook to get in on the action. It works like this: Every cool thing that happens during the Apple keynote will be written by the administrators and then automatically pushed to the readers on the homepage without the need to refresh. The commenters will see it immediately and have the ability to add their own thoughts to the update with the comment system. As soon as a commenter is finished with their update, it’s automatically pushed to that post’s comment section so everyone reading can see it — without refreshing the page! This is a relatively new technology that’s [...]

23Jan/100

Is big brother really a bad thing?

In the world of websites… no. We offer many types of analytics that will help you play big brother with your website. What are analytics? Analytics are the study of data: for web development it means the study of the different statics your site produces every day. With the help of Google and other plugins, we can accurately measure who’s visiting what page when, repeat visitors, what website they used to get to your site, what terms they searched, and even where they live. Not specific addresses, it’s not that big brother-esque. If you’re a company in Denver that’s not getting any traffic from Denver locations, then we need to look at how we’re managing your keywords or your advertising. If you realize that you’re getting a lot of traffic from a specific location, then we could pursue advertising in those areas. Maybe we notice that a lot of traffic is coming from a particular site, it may be advantageous to pursue advertising on that site. The advantages to knowing your reader demographic are remarkable. We make it easy to realize this potential. Just ask.

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23Jan/100

Facebook integration, an evil worth fighting for

Any web developer would cringe when you ask them if you could integrate Facebook with their website. Twitter? Absolutely, that one is much more customizable. But Facebook? Everyone and their mother has a Facebook account. I realized the truth to that statement when my mother, my grandmother, my aunts and uncles all added me as a friend on Facebook. I long for the days when it was reserved for college students, when my parents couldn’t follow my every move, when high school students couldn’t have accounts — but for web developers, it’s actually a good thing. Since so many people already have a Facebook account, why shouldn’t we integrate Facebook logins to our websites so people can quickly and easily have access to our features like commenting? Well, that’s what we’ve been working on. Facebook development is difficult but very rewarding. The ease of use your readers have with that integration alone will make them more willing to come back. We’ve been working with other developers to improve upon the Facebook integration technologies available. We’ve tried every plugin out there and realized that there’s no easy solution, but we’ve put in the groundwork and the research to make it the [...]

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22Jan/100

We’ve finished our site design

We’ve finished the layout of our site… finally. We’ve been so busy working on other websites that we have yet to have the opportunity to finish one of our own. We’ve tried to include a lot of different features to help you get a better grasp of what we can do with our design work. Please check out the portfolio page so you can see some of the other sites we’ve done recently. Let us know if you have any questions about the technologies we use. We’d be happy to share our knowledge with anyone who asks! May your images be sharp and your code precise.

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