Author: Brent Kobayashi

Around the Office: Evaluating Google+, On the hunt for chocolate, more

Posted on July 15, 2011 by - News

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. Daveed has been playing with Google’s latest foray into social networking, Google+. And eventhough the much-hyped social network is very similar to the incumbent Facebook, Daveed thinks he might start spending time on it because in addition to the fact that the new platform has “gee-whiz” appeal, Google already knows a…

Around the Office: Twitter town hall, Tilt-shifting the classics, more

Posted on July 9, 2011 by - News

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. This week, US President Barack Obama answered questions on the economy and jobs in his first Twitter town hall. Obama’s use of contemporary media has been cleverly compared to that of other American presidents, who have used the popular medium of their day such as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s use of radio, John…

Around the Office: Firefox personas, mobile’s effect on design, more

Posted on June 30, 2011 by - News

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 and Eva have been playing with Firefox personas, which are easy-to-use themes that let you personalize the look of your browser. They’ve creating some excellent Kobayashi Online logowear for Firefox, and have been pleasantly surprised to see one of their seven personas has had more than 60 active users! Eva…

Around the Office: Free plugins pay off, App shows nearby pics, FTP war, more

Posted on June 24, 2011 by - News

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. Wayne did some sleuthing this week to find out why someone would create a website widget for free. The reason: inbound links. A great number of the inbound links to Ignite Social Media‘s website, for instance, come from the download page for its “Follow Me” plugin, according to data from Yahoo Site Explorer. The…

Are you stopping visitors from commenting?

Posted on June 21, 2011 by - Tips and Tricks

Blog comments are something that you should typically encourage because they give readers a chance to participate in the conversation. Comments give readers the opportunity to relate their experiences, offer their point of view, and provide related information. This interaction within the blog can help to expand the original blog post, sometimes giving it a life of its own. If one of your blog’s goals is to encourage commenting, you should try and make the commenting process as simple as…

Around the Office: Facebook loses face; airplane cell phone bans are serious

Posted on June 17, 2011 by - News

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. While he’s still among the site’s 687 million users, Daveed has been thinking about the millions of Facebook users logging off for good, especially in Canada and the US, and among younger users. It’s too soon to tell if the social network is on its way to becoming the next MySpace,…

Around the Office: hands-on with Kohana, picture sharing with DailyBooth, and more

Posted on June 10, 2011 by - News

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. Roberto had a very good first impression of PHP5 framework Kohana, and actually liked its modules for database interactivity and cookies. With its basic template system, simple installation, and online learning resources, he’d recommend it to developers who want to save lines of code and time, but be warned, it only works with PHP…

Does your website have an effective call to action?

Posted on May 25, 2011 by - Tips and Tricks

A “call to action”, as the name suggests, tells your visitors what they should do. In the case of a website, it’s basically a message that links to a desired action. A successful CTA will help persuade visitors to take your desired action, which you should be able to determine based on your business goals. It can be a short phrase as simple as “Click here!”, but should be something at least a little more specific or sophisticated. In this…

How to read your site’s statistics: 6 tips

Posted on May 17, 2011 by - Tips and Tricks

As we wrote in a previous post, statistics are necessary to determine if your website is meeting its goals. But it’s hard to know if you’re meeting your site’s goals if you don’t know how to read the multitude of numbers and graphs provided by a service like Google Analytics. In this post, we offer five suggestions on how to read your Analytics statistics beyond simply hits or views to help you determine if your site is attracting the traffic…

Do you own your blog?: Owning your domain

Posted on May 3, 2011 by - Tips and Tricks

With the wide variety of free blogging platforms, blogging is essentially free. However, to get the impact you’re looking for, it may be worth it to blog using your own domain. In fact, it can be easy to setup and doesn’t have to be terribly expensive to get your blog on a URL that you own. Many blogging platforms allow you to buy a custom domain, including Google’s Blogger platform, and WordPress.com. You can also transfer a domain name you…