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 found out a few ways to thoroughly secure a WordPress-based site. Some tips include never using the default “admin” user name, installing the WP Security Scan plugin, and protecting the wp-config.php file. Choosing a secure password is also important, so pick something better than “guest”. Daveed is interested in the…
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Around the Office: Beezix tips, footnoting the Web, sharing trends, 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. Imagine if the Internet were peer-reviewed. Daveed found a project this week, hypothes.is, which is designed to let you easily slice through misinformation online. Hypothes.is is seeking funding to create something like as a browser plug-in for Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome, which will support comments on all Web pages. Hypothes.is…
Design Focus: Better Place’s online home
The site for electric vehicle technology firm Better Place happened to be so stylish and well-organized that we thought we’d feature it on Design Focus. It’s a clean and focused corporate website that shows a progressive, professional, and practical company — exactly the image an engineering firm would want to present. And it incorporates a lot of design, marketing and SEO features that make the site notable. It also incorporates the content management system WordPress, which makes updating content easier, and…
Around the Office: Google’s comment crawling, the business of themes, 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. Roberto found Sawyer Hollenshead’s tips on building WordPress themes as a business to be a great resource for developers who are considering getting into designing themes around the WordPress content management system and blogging platform. Among the important takeaways was to build a solid user base by prompting whoever downloaded his…
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…
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…
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…
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…