News

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 background. For just $9.99 per year, per machine, it can make fixing and reinstalling systems a lot easier.Brent has been…
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 to communicate what Hair Dynamix is all about. For the past 30 years, Hair Dynamix has been a family owned…
Accessible Web design: Why make your website accessible?

The World Health Organization estimates that about 15 per cent of the world’s population lives with some form of disability. Furthermore, nearly everyone will be temporarily or permanently impaired at some point in their life and those surviving to old age will experience increasing difficulties in functioning. Though often ignored, disability is part of the human condition. Accessibility is increasingly a concern when planning a building, yet many websites are designed without accessibility in mind. Accessible design helps make online content open to a wider range of people including those with disabilities that impact sight, hearing, comprehension and learning disabilities,…
Around the Office: TEDxToronto, Khan Academy, a massive IE crash, and 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. Wayne’s been doing some night school at Khan Academy, a website that has 2,400 odd educational videos on topics ranging from Black Holes to US social security, the French Revolution to linear algebra. Wayne’s been watching some of the finance lectures, but he’s interested in pursuing more topics. Given enough time, he might be able to take on A. J. Jacobs and his encyclopedic knowledge.Brent has been listening to the TEDxToronto conference today, in which Adam Garone talked…
Kobayashi Online wins WMA WebAward for Word11.com

The Web Marketing Association announced the winners of its coveted WebAwards on Thursday with Kobayashi Online being recognized for Outstanding Achievement in Web Development for Word11.com, the website for Toronto’s first 24-hour blogging festival. The WMA also awarded OPTIMUS | SBR and Grace Marketing the Consulting Standard of Excellence for the OPTIMUS | SBR Corporate Website, which Kobayashi Online helped develop. The WebAwards have been around since 1997, and are judged by a team of independent Internet professionals representing various relevant fields including media, advertising executives, site designers, creative directors, corporate marketing executives, content providers and webmasters. According to the scores…
Around the Office: Rating Places, Winning WMA Awards, “White is the New Green”

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 was a busy award week with the Web Marketing Association awarding its WebAwards for excellence in website development. Kobayashi Online won a coveted WebAward for designing Word11.com, the website for Toronto’s first 24-hour blogging festival. We’d also like to congratulate our friends at OPTIMUS | SBR and Grace Marketing which were recognized for optimussbr.com. We’d like to thank the WEA for the recognition, and applaud all the other WebAward nominees…
Around the Office: Augmented reality, Web radio and background music

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 Langstrasse, a site that lets visitors navigate a Zürich street by scrolling down a webpage, has made us think about…
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 we are looking to accomplish,” said Spark Boutik president and CEO Steve Dao. We think glowing testimonials are a great thing for businesses…
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 on to say that more and more people are using their phones to interact online, and that means that organizations…
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 event logo. And Brent will be one of the event speakers, presenting “Blogging for Small Businesses” on Saturday at 2pm…
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. Delivering to different audiences: simultaneously The NFB has produced more than 13,000 productions across a variety of topics with the…
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 a square thumbnail, can be consistent across platforms (like Facebook and Twitter), and that it’s not too visually complicated so…