New website launched! Arena Rock Photos

I remember my first concert back in junior high school, it was Ted Nugent. He came flying out over the audience in a loincloth howling away like the madman he is. I was hooked, and soon after that I’d go almost every weekend up to New Haven to camp out for good seats, Van Halen, Queen, The Police, all the big arena rock bands that came through…it was part of growing up, something exciting to do in a pretty boring area of the country for a restless teen, and it inspired me to get into playing music (later on punk rock gave me the confidence to actually do it in public). Those were the days of big hair and men dressed in ridiculous outfits playing God on an extravagant stage. We were happy to help Portland Oregon photographer Pat Goebel set up a simple ecommerce website to sell high quality prints of his colorful images of this wondrous era of rock music. Take a look through Pat’s website and if you like what you see pick up a print or two for someone nostalgic in your life. They will enjoy it.

 

Filed under: Art,Design,Portland,Web Development — Eric Baldoni

Upgrading to WordPress 3.2!

Well we just pulled the switch here and upgraded to WordPress 3.2. It’s a pretty hefty upgrade, and our Media Temple DV server is always a bit finicky when I run WordPress upgrades, however all went pretty well (You can feel free to contact us if you need help upgrading your WordPress system). The new dashboard is quite a big change, and a few things to note with this upgrade.

The WordPress team has officially dropped support for IE6 (hooray I say) and they now include a little browser check right there in the dashboard to help give you a little poke if your browser is in need of an update (you’ll see in the screenshot my version of Firefox is outdated…yes I know, shame on me, I was waiting for a 1Password update). Next thing of import, your server will now need php5 AND mySQL 5. This will require those of you running older Media Temple Gridservers to upgrade. I’m sure MT support phones have been ringing off the hook, and they have already been addressing the issue diligently. As a matter of fact they just posted a video to Facebook which should help you on your way.

Last bit of advice should always be the first bit of advice. BACK SHIT UP! You’ll feel better about the whole process.

Here is a screenshot of the new Admin Dashboard, pretty slick!

Wordpress 3.2 Dashboard

You want fonts? Google got fonts.

Google is everywhere…it’s true, they have a hungry tentacle in so many cookie jars it is hard to keep track of. One of the more recent and I say exciting evolutions in web design and development has been easier embedding of fonts! Yay! No more just relying on the 18 or so web safe fonts available (let’s face it 6 or so that get used) to all viewers across platforms. Of course you always want to be careful and make sure your cool new embedded fonts will degrade gracefully, just to be sure you have all your bases covered. This of course has opened a new can of worms, and opportunity for font makers…it is of course not legal to just use any font you have on your website.

There are TONS of free fonts out there and I’d say (being generous) about 5-10% of them are attractive and usable…it’s like web design in general these days, almost anyone can design and build a font thanks to computers, but you know there are reasons you hire a professional! We’ll save that for another post. So, moving foreward, once you have found a free font that works for you, all you need to do is head over to the Font Squirrel @fontface Generator and upload your font: convert it, download it, and add it to your CSS! Excellent. Google has made it even easier, they have 182 fonts (as of this post) for you to choose from, and they are all converted and ready to go. they even serve them up for you, all you need to do is add a simple link to your code.

Take this final piece of advice to heart. Keep it simple…don’t use embedded fonts for your content, use them for headers or emphasis, as they can cause some page load issues if you load too many styles or use them for large areas of content.

Google Screencap

Check out the open source Google Web Fonts

If you need to grab them all for the purpose of design mockups, Google has made it kind of difficult. A kind fellow named Joe Maller has zipped them all up for you and posted them here.

Filed under: Design,Tips/Tutorials,Web Development — Tags: , — Eric Baldoni

The Black Magic of Search Engine Optimization

Many companies offer SEO as a service, and yet not very many will guarantee their results in writing, even less with an offer to refund your money when the promised results don’t bear fruit. This is because the process to deliver front page rankings on Google involves a great deal of work, and unless you are REALLY willing to invest some time and money into creating a bunch of networked domains and websites which are loaded with the correct keyword formula, all linking back to your main site…well let’s just say you’re not going to see miraculous results.

When we bid out a job, we try to explain that we take a white hat approach to SEO. Present all your data in a logical well structured manner, and make sure your html code under the hood reflects this (you’ll see this referred to as good semantic code). Google spiders need to be able to easily read, understand, and rate the importance of your content. They base search results on a combination of keyword density (and weight of the words in the data structure), reciprocal link popularity, age of the domain, and probably a few other things I am unaware of. You can game the system, and if you have the resources go for it, however my main point here is beware of the snake oil salesman promising a cheap miracle, and think long term. You can get decent results with good code structure and a bit of honest work over time. Chances are you found our website searching Google for WordPress Development.

Filed under: SEO,Web Development — Eric Baldoni

WordPress Website for Portland Film “Rid of Me”

How cool is the local film scene here to have the filmmaker/acting team of Katie O’Grady and James Westby? Their latest film Rid of Me was recently screened to great reviews at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film features all sorts of local Portland talent romping through a romantic comedy about a young woman named Meris and her struggles to fit in. The film stars Katie O’Grady and we can only wonder why she has not broken big time yet…We were contracted to take their poster artwork and turn it into a fully functional WordPress CMS with a news section they could easily update. We worked in a rotating slideshow to give visitors and instant feel for this wonderful film.

Rid of Me WordPress CMS

Filed under: Bitclone,Portland,Web Development,Wordpress — Eric Baldoni

Website Launch for Deep Cello Portland Coffee Roasters

We worked with Portland designer Giuseppe Lipari of Studio Lipari and the Deep Cello coffee crew to set up an online presence with this new ecommerce website. The biggest challenge for us was we needed to craft a good shopping solution using phpurchase which was their plugin of choice. You can order their delicious hand crafted beans directly from the website and have them delivered to your doorstep! Studio Lipari provided us with a beautiful design that captures the hand made quality of the product crafted by local roaster Justin Kagan (also one heck of a cellist with the Portland Cello Project). Beam yourself over to Deep Cello and learn what they are all about….good people making good coffee with lots of love.

Filed under: Bitclone,Design,Portland,Web Development,Wordpress — Eric Baldoni

Fun with robots.txt

The robots.txt file is a file you can include in your site directory to help prevent most spiders or bots (automated programs) from ‘crawling’ or indexing certain directories. Here someone (on the Lastfm crew http://www.last.fm/robots.txt) decided to have a bit of fun with it, note the last set of rules.

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /music?
Disallow: /widgets/radio?
Disallow: /show_ads.php

Disallow: /affiliate/
Disallow: /affiliate_redirect.php
Disallow: /affiliate_sendto.php
Disallow: /affiliatelink.php
Disallow: /campaignlink.php
Disallow: /delivery.php

Disallow: /music/+noredirect/

Disallow: /harming/humans
Disallow: /ignoring/human/orders
Disallow: /harm/to/self

Allow: /

Filed under: Design,Web Development — Eric Baldoni