What we think

More Traffic. Increased sales. Connecting with your customers and clients.

The Secret

June 10th, 2010 by Brett Hart

In web development, there’s a little secret. Nothing suits every need. What do I mean? Sometimes, custom web applications make sense, sometimes WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or Kentico are a better fit. Each one has it’s strengths and weaknesses.

We analyze each project and determine the best match. You wouldn’t pound a nail with a sledgehammer would you? Do you need a company site? A social network? A blog? Is your company all Microsoft?

There are a lot of web development / design companies that use one solution. It’s what they know, they’re good at it, but pushing round pegs into square holes doesn’t always work. It can lead to longer development times… meaning more money. We find the right tool for the job and use it to keep development costs down. Our goal giving our customers the best site at a great price.

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Google’s Caffeine

June 9th, 2010 by Brett Hart

Google’s Caffeine update is here after nearly a year.  What does it mean?  Quicker indexing of your web site.  The idea…  With feeds, video, blogging… Google is trying to stay up to date with what your website is saying. 

http://www.pcworld.com/article/198438/googles_caffeine_gives_the_search_engine_a_boost.html

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Social Media Mistakes

June 4th, 2010 by Brett Hart

Social media requires a few things of business.  Primarily, the willingness to engage, listen and respond to customers.  Instead of trying to sell your company’s products and services you should concentrate on providing valuable content.  Something they will find interesting.  The rule of thumb is ten items of interesting content for each ‘buy me’ message.  Who wants to read every Tuesday that it’s Senior Citizen day?  That every Friday any customer who wears stripes gets 10% off?  Sure at first they’re interesting to new customers.  But, if you want to engage your customers, repeating the same thing every week isn’t going to cut it.

Find things that interest your customers.  If you run a surf shop, why not post info on local water conditions?  Local surf celebs…  Maybe even contest results?  What interests your customers? 

Listen to your customers.  Read your wall page, check the tweets.  See what they are talking about.  Join in.  Be the expert.

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Twitter for Small Companies

May 17th, 2010 by Brett Hart

Large companies employ services to track their reputation on social media networks.  There are a few ‘free’ tools out there too.  I’m not sure that smaller companies benefit from it.   We’re just not talked about enough. 

Large companies like Comcast can use tracking to service their customers.  Hey…  this guy on twitter is complaining about the reception he’s getting…  Comcast can send him a message, get his customer number and get a service call scheduled for him.  And it is happening hundreds of times a day. 
As a small company we can’t necessarily support that.  We don’t even need to.

It does however open doors to another possibility.  Using different services or even a custom application, we can see if someone (or a company) nearby is experiencing problems…   As an example, A mattress retailer could track the words mattress, sleep, tired …  within a geographic area (twitter lets you narrow a real time stream of tweets to a radius you set) and ‘flag’ them for reading by a real person.  That person could then decide to send a message or even a coupon to the twitter user.  That is true targeted marketing.  Something you can’t get from a newspaper, magazine or TV.

As small business’, we are nimble, quick to change and take advantage of new technology that can grow our sales and business’.

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Posted in Business, Social Media | 1 Comment »

Giving the Web a Typeface-lift Part 1

July 29th, 2009 by Micah Miller

Font selection and the lack there of – It has been an age old problem in web site design. Web developers seem to run into this problem
consistenly. In fact, I ran into the problem of a typeface being named differently from one platform to another causing an inability to
edit text within a Photoshop document provided by one of our designers.

Knowing that there are tools available to keep the web site
looking good while maximizing SEO and minimizing efforts to make simple text
changes, I decided it would be worth while to research solutions for embedding/displaying typefaces on the web. Though text images have
their place, here are the two main issues that I see stems from using them:

  • Text Images used on headers, menus and various navigation elements can add overhead.

    Creating images of text turns quick & simple text changes into tedious, frustrating work.
    Issues arise when developers don’t have the font(s) installed on their system that are used in the layout file.
    In this scenario the developer has to either obtain the font to make the change, or have the designer make the change.
    This added link in the chain complicates any content changes which results in increased cost for the client.

  • Search engines crawl web sites for textual content, not images.

    Though search engines now have an image search feature, the results are still driven by the content that surrounds an
    image within the text. Though I’m sure its possible with new technologies text content within an image can be read
    using OCR, however the amount of processing required to do that still
    isn’t justified. Developers can specify a title/alt attribute for an image to help a search engine’s crawler understand
    the context of the image. Problems can arise when a textual change is made to the image but not the title/alt attribute for
    that image.

Early Solutions

In the late 90′s there was EOT and TrueDoc, technologies that compress a typeface
by using a limited character set and various compression schemes. While EOT is still
supported on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, TrueDoc was supported up to Netscape Navigator 4 and was discontinued in Netscape
Navigator 6 since Netscape could not release Bitstream’s source code for its font embedding technology.

Current Solutions

Today, we have a variety of browsers and platforms that people use to browse the web. Cross-platform, cross-browser solutions allow
us to provide the same experience to a broader audience with out having to solve the problem more than once. Here’s a list of current
technologies available to give the web a typeface-lift that I know of:

  • EOT only available on Internet Explorer.
  • CSS2 introduced @font-face property allowing web developers to link directly to a font file on the web server.
  • sIFR offers a cross-browser, cross-platform solution utilizing Adobe Flash
  • Cufón offers a cross-browser, cross-platform solution using JavaScript and SVG/canvas/VRML.

I’m sure that the CSS2 @font-face property will become supported by more browsers as time goes on, but at the moment sIFR and Cufón offer
the greatest compatibiliy. I focused on utilizing those techniques as a potential solution for our new site design.

What About the Font Foundries, Could there be legal implications?

The various licenses available from the font foundries seems to be the biggest challenge to this type of technology.
When looking at font embedding technology you will need to be informed on what licenses dictate can be done with a particular typeface.
Some licenses may allow you to use Cufón while others may only allow the use of Adobe Flash.
See Fonts and the Law at fontembedding.com for more information.

Though sIFR and Cufón seemed the best choices, they are not with out their challenges to implement.
Stay tuned for my in depth review of implementing these techniques as a typeface embedding solution! Until then, feel free check out sIFR and Cufón for yourself.

Micah owns and operates Stoke Tech.

Posted in Business, Web Design, Web Development | 1 Comment »

What’s a Store todo?

June 14th, 2009 by Brett Hart

Often, we’re asked how a store can accept credit cards. I mean, it should be easy. There are 2 main ways… Services like PayPal or use a Gateway. Paypal’s pretty easy. But, they take a large percentage of the sale. Gateway’s should be easy, and they are… But, there are several pieces in the chain. Forget one, and you don’t get paid!

First, a bank account! Yes, you need a business bank account.

Second, a merchant account. Not the same as a bank account. At least, not usually! Sometimes, your bank can set all of this up for you (including the merchant account). Other times, you’ll need to get a merchant account on your own.

Third, the gateway. Make sure your ecommerce software accepts the gateway you choose! Writing a custom gateway script can get expensive quickly!

The worst part of this, is you can’t just call up a gateway and get an account! They will require you to go through an intermediary possibly your bank. Sometimes another company that provides merchant accounts. You need to make sure that the gateway’s they use can work with your ecommerce software. Even further, you could have a problem if the gateway requires you to install anything on your server. Since most web sites are hosted on shared servers, do you have the ability to install any software? In most cases no.

Fourth, if you want to accept anything other then the standard Visa and MasterCard, you will need to apply to become a merchant for them. AMEX, Discover,… usually charge an additional monthly fee and a slightly larger percentage of your sales to be able to accept their card.

Posted in Business, eCommerce | No Comments »

Writing Content

February 3rd, 2009 by Brett Hart

Writing content for a website is sometimes problematic. For instance, trying to write good quality content that has meaning to real people will sometimes not be ‘search engine’ friendly. The reverse is also true. There is a fine line that must be walked (written) in order to keep content SE friendly and person friendly.

It’s the reason that some sites use cloaking. We NEVER use cloaking because it is considered a Google TOS violation. We believe in using only white hat SEO techniques. Although, they may not get you to the top of the search engines as quickly, they have staying power. Once you get there with good clean SEO, you’ll be able to continuously rank well.

Posted in Business, SEO | No Comments »