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 enjoying the TuneIn radio app for iOS, which is free with ads or only 99 cents without. Other Internet radio appliance are cool, but they can cost hundreds of dollars, and still can’t do most of what TuneIn can. It’s the best radio software he’s seen yet. 360…
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Imaginis WordPress Development
Kobayashi Online took Imaginis Marketing’s design and images to create a fully functioning WordPress site featuring rotating images, social media links, and a fully functioning WordPress blog.
Online Friendly Fonts: Six Web Typography Services
It used to be that Web designers were limited to a handful of “Web-safe” fonts, which made for predictable, if not boring, websites. Now, high-end typography is within reach of all website owners, making it possible to use nearly any font imaginable. Still, there are limits to how you can use fonts on your website. Fonts typically take hundreds of hours of work by skilled designers, and they can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars to buy. Luckily, there…
Around the Office: hand-drawn websites, the value of failure, 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. Kobayashi Online has been strengthening its profiles on the social networks this week. Our Facebook page now has the “vanity” URL: facebook.com/KobayashiOnline. And a handful of new LinkedIn testimonials have come in. “The [Kobayashi Online] team is always quick to implement and offers additional recommendations after taking the time to understand what…
Is my website mobile friendly? Three questions to ask your Web developer
Your website finally looks perfect in your Web browser — it’s the jewel of your desktop. But what about people coming to your website through mobile phones? It’s more important than ever, in fact, to have a website that’s mobile friendly. According to research from Morgan Stanley, global shipments of smartphones and tablets have surpassed those of desktop PCs and notebooks by the last quarter of 2010, and this gap will increase over the next few years. The report goes…
Around the Office: dictionary adds “tweet”, Word11 approaches, 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. The Kobayashi team has been busily working away on making this weekend’s 24-hour blogging festival, Word11, a welcoming and engaging event. They helped create a Word11 “Twibbon”, which is an overlaid image on your Twitter avatar that shows your support for an event or cause. They also designed the colouful Word11…
Design Focus: The National Film Board
“Design Focus” is a regular Online Friendly feature that examines well-designed sites to show how Web designers have overcome some of the challenges of their profession. This week’s featured site: The National Film Board The National Film Board of Canada is one of the country’s most respected institutions – this significantly raises the expectations for its website. In this post, the website experts at Kobayashi Online explain some of the challenges this site has overcome to live up to the organization’s reputation.…
Search Engine Optimized: the importance of meaningful internal links
Search engines use various methods for creating titles and descriptions (or snippits), and determining if your page is relevant to each search. They crawl for content contained within a web page’s meta tags including the “title” and “description” tags, but also page content that seems most relevant or useful. This means that various page elements are evaluated, including links from other pages on your website, known as internal links. Internal links, in fact, can play a large role in how…
Around the Office: making a social logo, UX design is everywhere, 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. If you want to know some of the many issues Eva considers when designing a logo, check out this recent post about how designing logos with social media marketing in mind. According to “12 Ways Your Logo Impacts Social Media Marketing”, designers need to make sure the logo translates well to…
Creating Website Content for Better User Experiences
Modeling and designing your website’s user experience means attempting to understand all aspects of the user’s online and offline interaction with your company, and how the site is perceived, learned, and used in order to make informed decisions that will improve your users’ experiences. Designing a great user experience or “UX” sounds like a tall order, but this post will provide you with some of the resources you’ll need to create content that will meet visitors’ expectations. Web writing, Web…