Web marketing & development company

There are some really interesting new design ideas about barcodes. Those completely boring and dull barcodes are being completely redone. A Japanese company named D-barcode has come up with many interesting twists to the old barcode.

Just to help you out if you do not know any Japanese, when you go to their site just click the top left image of a guy throwing away paper wads. This leads you to a screen with wads of paper which when clicked will show you some of their work.

It is an amazingly creative idea on a very creative site, although not very intuitive navigation. Ideas like these really inspire artists and designers to take their creativity to a whole new avenue.

Adobe just came out with Illustrator CS4. The new Illustrator doesn't impress you with a plethora of new tools or flashy gimmicks. It instead improves upon usability and helping the user get more accomplished. It is all about workflow and streamlining your projects. CS4 is to graphic design what windshield wipers are for cars. It just helps make something already functional get much better.

One new feature that you will already be familiar with is work tabs. These are the same tabs that you work with in your web browser. So now instead of having a million windows open and having to sift through all your projects you will have all your projects open in a tab. Of course you can still drag out a tab and work with floating windows if you still want to.

There is also a new workspace menu on the application bar. It is basically a drop down menu with saved preset toolbar and palette configurations. So if you are working with typography you could have all your typography palettes open in a saved setting then switch to a different palette option for painting just from a quick drop down.

"Yes they finally did it, transparent gradients, thank you Adobe!" - In the gradient palette you can now just slide the opacity bar and modify a certain swatch on the gradient bar. This feature has been lacking too long from Illustrator and I know personally all too often how much this is needed.

I would like to share some strategies for working online leads.

My experience is working with online requests that we receive from Houston-area Real Estate professionals that order newcomer guides on www.HoustonNewcomerGuides.com and also from working with my advertisers as they are responding to people moving to Houston and requesting information directly from our advertisers.

The common denominator for success working online leads is follow-up, follow-up and follow-up. Although they are requesting information, they often do not respond even if you reply to their email. Appropriate and timely emails are a must. You are calling for an action (a sale perhaps) but doing it online. You must funnel them back to your website, specifically the order form (or admissions department for schools, online sales counselors for home builders or employment pages for jobs, for example). Your site also needs to be able to make a sale (online order form) or give easy contact information to close the deal.

Here is an interesting marketing question: if you send 100 emails to 100 potential clients and no one responds, was that a good use of your time? Although we would love to have 100 people respond via email and say "Wow, that was great! Where do I sign?" that rarely happens. If 50 people clicked through to your website and did their research, that would have been a successful email.

Yesterday, Matt and I hit up the Houston Interactive Marketing Association’s Interactive Strategies Conference at the Angelika Theater downtown. The event ended up being an awesome learning experience, which means good news for our clients.

We stayed in the SEO/SEM track for the entire day and heard four top search engine-marketing gurus spill on vertical search, SEO for sites, tech tools, web design for ROI, and more. We plan on taking our new knowledge and giving it straight back to clients by making our web sites even more findable and user-friendly.

By far, our favorite session had to be the SEO Site Clinic, in which Tony Wright of Wright IMC looked at audience members’ web sites and ripped them apart from an SEM expert’s perspective. We offered up houstonnewcomerguides.com and were luckily chosen. Even better, Tony had a hard time finding something wrong with the site… at first.

He gave Matt some great pointers on internal things that will speed up load time and on ways to use title tags to target search terms we weren’t grabbing. These pointers of course were not exclusive to houstonnewcomerguides.com, and we will now be keeping them in mind on every site we build. Other than those few pointers, we got lots of praise on the design and content as well as for reaching the number 1 spot on Google, which should tell us and you that we are definitely doing something right.

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You may have noticed that when you copy content and paste it into the back-end of Joomla!, it also copies the formatting of the content. This can cause inconsistencies with the rest of the content on your site.

To avoid this you must first strip any formatting from the content before pasting it into the back-end of Joomla! To do this, just follow these steps:

1. Open a plain text editor (you can use TextEdit on a Mac or Notepad on a PC).
2. Paste the content into the plain text editor. You should see that all of the formatting has been removed.
3. Copy the content in the plain text editor and paste it into the back-end of Joomla!.
4. Reapply any styles that are needed, such as bold or italics, using the buttons in the editor in the back-end of Joomla!.
5. Save the changes and view the article on your site.

We finally have built ourselves a new website! We have been so busy working on client websites, ours got pretty neglected. We are planning on adding many new features that will help our clients and our company alike.

We will be adding live support chat, customer portal, tutorials, and a support ticket system... so check back soon! Please leave us feedback on what you think about the new site and any suggestions you may have on how we can make it better.

Here is a screencast I made on creating a single page in Photoshop and how to slice it. This is the first screencast in a series. Later in part 2 I am going to show you how to take the sliced up image and create a HTML and CSS page out of it. In part 3 I will show you how to take the HTML and CSS page and turn it into a template for Joomla! and WordPress.

Check back in the coming weeks for the rest of the screencasts in this series.

I recently purchased the MacHeist bundle priced at $49.00 because I needed a copy of Snapz Pro X which was included. By itself Snapz Pro X runs $69.00 so this was a steal. I decided I would try out some of the other software that came in the bundle and found CSSEdit. As soon as CSSEdit opened I could tell it was meant to be.

CSSEdit takes the pain out of CSS. I usually use google to lookup CSS properties I don’t have memorized. With the full featured sidebar built into CSSEdit you will find yourself building complex styles in minutes and learning many of the CSS properties it generates in the process.

This was the final blow to Dreamweaver which I don’t use at all now. Between CSSEdit and TextMate I have everything I need to turn my image slices into fully functional websites.