Clean. Simple. Bold. Apple.
Posted on Apr 30, 2010 by Peter Ellis in Advertising, Web Design
The image above is from Apple’s home page. Clean, simple and bold message – “iPad is here.” This is a perfect example of why most people that mimic or copy websites, try to make it look just like www.apple.com. To this day, its one of the top 5 websites in my book.
Dennis should be writing a quick post about the iPad itself and comparing it with similar devices, so stay tuned.
White House website is open for all
Posted on Apr 30, 2010 by Peter Ellis in IT, News, Web Design
I am not sure how much of this is going to be exciting for consumers out there, but this is pretty awesome for web developers. The White House official website (www.whitehouse.gov) is built on an open source platform called Drupal.
Drupal, amoung other open source (another words, “free” code base platforms) such as WordPress and Joomla, is often used for a large-content websites to offer an administrator of that website a user-friendly way to edit/update/create content without any web programing knowledge.
These Content Management Systems (CMS) have years and years of development, along with thousands of developers world wide adding to them to make them better. Like with anything in life there are pros and cons about using an open source CMS, but this is not the time to open up that can of warms.
Anyway, representatives of White House official website made an announcement to release modules of Drupal code they have developed and customized as open source, i.e. are giving them away free.
Imagine your best website developer, the most expansive budget then multiply it times 10 (at least). This is how much time and money the White House has invested into their website, after all the do have to represent the nation on the internet. Now they are making all those custom changes available to other, this is amazing!
Awellness Focus
Posted on Apr 26, 2010 by Anne Lopez in Graphic Design
Holly Marek is a new inspirational entrepreneur with the goal of giving back to the community. She is putting her years of experience to use and looked to us to help develop her brand. First things first, Awellness Focus needed a logo! So we went to the drawing board and got to work.
The icon created for the logo is actually a ligature of the company’s initials, A and F. From there, we duplicated it to form a dynamic entity. The symbol evokes the company’s purpose and tag line, “Your Pathway to Personal Power,” while contrasting it to the bold type of the text in the logo. After finding the perfect shades of blue, we finalized the logo and it’s now what you see above.
Logorama!
Posted on Apr 01, 2010 by Anne Lopez in News
French Studio H5’s Logorama has been getting all hyped up since receiving an Oscar for best animated short film, so I wanted to see what the big fuss was about. The short film is amazing and includes more than 2,500 logos that took them over 6 years to produce! The Oscar was well deserved so if you have an extra 16 minutes, check it out below:
Logorama from Marc Altshuler – Human Music on Vimeo.
Constant Contact vs. VerticalResponse vs. MailChimp
Posted on Mar 29, 2010 by Peter Ellis in Advertising, IT, Social Media
Email marketing is a very affordable way to promote your business online. There are many online companies that provide this type a service. I had run-ins with many of the but the following 3 really stood out:
As an owner of a small business myself, I understand that there are many important factors which play a big role in making the right decision in selecting one of these email marketing providers.
Here are some pros and cons that I’ve personally find out by using the listed 3 services:
Contact Contact (CC)
CC is definitely the well-know solution out of many. Most users default to this solution. CC offers many more options for export/import then other competitors. The pricing can be more competitive. It offers WYSIWIG email editor as most of the email marketing services out there.
To sum up: Trustworthy service, great functionality, good customer service, ok pricing.
VerticalResponse (VR)
VR is the underdog. It has similar user-interface to Constant Contact. VR is an obvious choice for non-profit organizations (501 c 3) because of its offer of 10,000 free emails each month for qualified orgs. We’ve worked with over a dozen local and national non-profits that are now using VR’s services for free – you can’t beat that!
To sum up: Trustworthy service, great functionality, awesome customer service, great pricing (amazing pricing if you are a non-profit – IT’S FREE).
MailChimp (MC)
MC is a newer solution on the block. Its the most stylish one as well, offering amazing flexibility when it comes to customization of email templates. It offers great integrations with social media and social marketing, but lacks in some simple tasks such as more options for pre-created email templates (only 4, I believe) and their customer support sucks. You can look on the bright side, you can host up to 500 contacts in your list and email up to 3,000 emails per month for FREE. So, if you are a designer/developer and know what you are doing (most likely you are using your own HTML email template as well), you don’t really need the customer support. Just get those 3,ooo emails out because they are free.
To sum up: Trustworthy service, ok functionality (good functionality when you know what’s you’re doing), no phone customer service, good pricing (500 contacts and 3,000 emails per month for FREE).
If you are looking for a more technical and in-depth review, view this link.
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