Blog

Around the Office: Accessible Talk on Accessibility, Weekly Knit Fonts, Mobile Design Beyond WebKit, More!

Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. As far as we’re concerned, inclusiveness should be one of the key features of the web – everyone should be able to experience webpages. This is why Kobayashi Online sponsored and attended Accessibility Camp Toronto, a gathering of people who want everyone to experience and enjoy the Internet. For an introduction to accessible web design, Brent…

Around the Office: Procurement with Diversity in Mind, Treating Customers Equitably, A Raspberry PI Update, More!

Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Brent thinks Toronto businesses can benefit from diversity. That’s why he’s encouraging business leaders to attend the “DiverseCity Counts Procurement” event on November 28. Event organizers, Maytree Canada, will also be releasing the next DiverseCity Counts report that night, which will explore the extent to which diversity in procurement has taken hold in the GTA, and how it compares to other…

WordCamp Toronto Developers 2012 Inspires and Educates

Some incredible things can happen when you gather dozens of WordPress developers into the same room. Kobayashi Online was a silver sponsor of WordCamp Toronto Developers 2012, which brought together roughly 260 attendees to discuss everything to do with building websites with the WordPress Content Management System. Because we do most of our web development and design on WordPress, we were especially excited to see so many people learning about WordPress and realize the full potential and power of WordPress. Incredible things…

Around the Office: Patternizer Backgrounds, Shopp E-Commerce, Marketing as Storytelling, and More!

Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Building an e-commerce WordPress website? Savvy developer Scott recommends the Shopp plugin, which he decided to use partly because it works, and partly because of the depth of documentation for both developers and users. After all, we prefer plugins that we can figure out how to customize easily. And our clients appreciate having something they…

Around the Office: The Truth in Taglines, Finding Images with Photo Pin, the Cult of Disruption, and More!

Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Believing that marketing is a promise, Brent was pleased to read Andris Pone’s blog post on less-than-truthful company taglines. Does grocery shopping at Metro deliver on the promise of “Food at its best”? How does Telus live up to the tagline: “The future is friendly”? And is Tim Hortons actually “Always fresh”? Sometimes a tagline…

Around the Office: Meme-Inspired Commercials, Google+ SEO, 19th Cen. Futuristic Predictions

Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Caroline was excited to see an advertiser use the popular “Charlie Bit My Finger” meme as the inspiration of a new commercial for Ragu pasta sauce. With its 489 million views, the YouTube video, which depicts youngster Charlie gleefully biting his older brother Harry, has achieved widespread popularity on the Internet. Some have attributed its…

Around the Office: iPhone Tracking, Millennial Online Shopping Habits, Sliders, and SEO for Developers

Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. David is always impressed with a great website image slider. This happened when he visited the Seattle’s Streetcar website and saw a slide on the homepage with a nice “Ken Burns” effect (a technique director Ken Burns uses where the camera pans and zooms in and out on still images). The Streetcar site uses the…

Around the Office: Opening the Curtain of Online Privacy, 3D Printing, and Vanishing Facebook Likes

Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Brent and Daveed are excited for the possibilities of a 3D-printing revolution now that the price of this technology – which has been around for years – has fallen. This will have huge creative potential for printing out original designs and products, and inevitable legal hassles over counterfeit products created using 3D printers. Still, it…

Teaching and Learning WordPress at the WordCamp Happiness Bar

Helping people people out at the WordCamp Toronto Happiness Bar turned out to be really fun. And we learned a bunch of new things too! One of the great things about the WordPress community is how we’re all able to learn and grow together. Some of the people I talked with included a high-school teacher whose students use WordPress to create sites for clubs and year book; a designer who wanted to know the best way to structure the menus…

Kobayashi Online’s WordCamp Ticket Giveaway Ends

We had a tremendous number of entries in our WordCamp Toronto ticket contest, and we’d like to thank everyone who took the time to enter. The contest closed on Monday, and the following winners were randomly drawn and notified by email: Neil G. Lynn J. Leonard S. Catherine G. Colleen C. Mara S. The contest had been originally for five tickets. As a Silver Sponsor, however, Kobayashi Online was given a number of tickets, and we had one left over after our…