This guest post by our friends at Toronto social media marketing company Spark Boutik lays down the rules to follow in order to truly engage your audience through social media. One of the biggest reasons brands struggle with social media is because they do not understand the need for engagement. Engagement means going beyond output and actually stimulating conversation. So, instead of blasting twenty tweets a day, you should be reaching out to your followers. Instead of asking for Facebook ‘Likes’,…
Author: Brent Kobayashi
Around the Office: Facebook/WordPress integration, real-life e-commerce, more
Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Brent likes the idea of bringing e-commerce into the real world. It’s not science fiction! The Korean division of Tesco supermarkets made it possible to go shopping on a subway platform using a mobile phone. They put full-scale images of their aisles and cellphone scan-able QR codes in the subway, letting…
Don’t lose your domain: Tips to keep your domain safe
Losing your domain is a big deal for any site owner. A client of ours recently had their domain expire because they didn’t renew their domain, leaving them without email or a working website. As anyone can imagine, this can have a devastating effect on your business and productivity. Usually, someone will notice that their website is down and figure out that they have to renew their domain name contract, and after it expires there’s usually a period when you can…
Around the Office: WordPress SEO tips, Googling images, Chrome’s arcade, more
Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. We’re very happy with the current WordPress plugin Formidable Forms, but to make it even better, we suggested that the developers, Strategy 11, add a query parameter after the form has been submitted. This would help us collect data for analytics purposes. Strategy 11 helpfully obliged, telling us this feature will be added in a…
Around the Office: virtual worlds, online privacy, the two sides of versatility, more
Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Brent came across a Toronto artist this week who creates original pin-up art and accessories she sells on Etsy under the name Bombshell Artillery. It’s good to see that working in technology doesn’t dull one’s taste for classic design.Wayne has been checking out Chrome Experiments, a collection of applications to inspire…
Carousels: Rotating your featured webpages to help turn heads
You cannot count on website visitors to scroll to find your content, so why not scroll your content for them? You can do this using what are known as “sliders” or “carousels”. Like their fairground counterparts, website carousels rotate — but rather than moving model horses and unicorns — they move images and links. Bell Canada is one of many major businesses that uses changing images to draw attention to its various initiatives. A carousel is actually a standard application…
Around the Office: custom grids, proper CSS3 use, what Google knows, more
Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. A post on Web design blog Six Revisions this week confirmed our notion that CSS3 sites are only as good as the experiences they create. Author Delwin Campbell explains that CSS3 hasn’t ushered in anything new in terms of fundamental design and visual presentation principles. And while cosmetic CSS3 properties work…
The Path to Accessibility: Six AODA Questions to Ask Your Web Developer
With about 15 per cent of the world’s population living with some form of disability (pdf), accessibility is increasingly becoming an issue that cannot be ignored when, for instance, hosting an event or planning a building, yet it’s still often an afterthought for websites. (Updated January 2018) In an effort to simplify the process of making a website accessible, the W3 Consortium (W3C) set out to provide a set of recommendations to make Web content more usable by everyone in…
Around the Office: banking apps, Ninite Updater, font mustaches, more
Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. How does Wayne manage to stay on top of the latest software updates? It’s not precognition, just Ninite Updater, which keeps software at its latest stable version. Where other software updaters tell you when new versions are available, Ninite goes further by automatically downloading and installing all your updates in the…
Kobayashi Online gives Hair Dynamix a corporate identity makeover
Hair Dynamix is a top-notch salon and spa in Toronto’s Beach neighbourhood. We’ve known them for a while, having redesigned their website years ago. And when they decided they needed a corporate identity refresh, we were very happy they came to us again. This corporate identity makeover involved creating a new logo and reworking marketing materials What resulted was a new, unified impression across its business cards, brochures, signage, and monthly email blasts. Why go to these lengths? It all serves…