News
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Around the Office: Great Collaborations, Automattic Acquisition, Native Advertising and More!
Around the Office is a weekly group blog of what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Being a Part of Great Collaborations A lot of people make the mistake of thinking they should take care of every element of a project, when they really would offer greater value to clients through collaboration with other specialists. Our friends (and collaborators) at Finesilver Design + Communications wrote a post on the power of great collaborations. Find out if you can collaborate with those who can make every aspect of your business exceptional – we like…
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Around the Office: I Spy at CES, Hashtag is the Word, A Toronto Symphony & More!
Around the Office is a weekly group blog of what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Future Spotting at CES We couldn’t help but pay attention to the new gadgetry unveiled at CES. Bored of his light and small phone, David was happy to hear about the new “Phablet” trend, which fuses a tablet and a phone into a device with about 5-inches of screen real estate. Andy dug some some Android phablets from US-based Vizio aimed at the Chinese market – not North America. Caroline and Daveed were impressed with “Papertab”, a…
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Around the Office: The Year’s Top Plugins, Input from out of Thin Air, the Value of Mind Share, and More!
Around the Office is a weekly group blog of what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. A Year in 100 WordPress Plugins Andy was interested in seeing where his favourite new WordPress plugins ranked in ManageWP’s top-100 list of free WordPress plugins for 2012. The top plugin was Types, which lets site administrators create and manage custom fields and post types for better site organization. Given the great volume of useful plugins, we weren’t surprised that one of the top three plugins, Plugin Performance Profiler, is one that measures the impact of…
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Social Media and Online Marketing Trends for 2012
It seems that social networks and the Internet in general have been playing an increasingly important role in our lives. While the online world hasn’t completely displaced our real-world connections, we certainly rely on it as a way to socialize, follow news and events, shop, find information, and otherwise live digitally. As we said in our year-end review of web design and development trends, we welcome new industry developments but are mindful to take them with a grain of salt. With that in mind, this post outlines some of the trends and developments we’ve seen in the realms of social…
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Creating an Online Experience for The Real Estate Experience
The Real Estate Expereince combines the knowledge and experience of RE/MAX First Realty Ltd. Brokerage Sales Representatives Elizabeth Haug and Kevin McCullough, who serve Scarborough and communities in the Durham Region (including the Ajax-Pickering area). The website and logo we created showcases the quality of service clients have come to expect from TREE. Project Details therealestateexperience.com website was created using the WordPress Content Management System. The site, which has a private area only for members, includes a dynamic News page that allows editors to create and publish press releases fast and without any web programming knowledge. In addition, all the content and images of the…
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4 Reasons Design is Crucial for Small Businesses
People sometimes think design is superfluous to something’s function – like the sprinkles on a cupcake. But when it comes to the mission of a company, great design can help bring to the surface everything that makes your business unique and great at what it does. Whether it’s the product itself, or a logo, flyer, business card, or website, everything employing design helps customers understand a business. It can be particularly useful for a small business, which doesn’t have a large budget or wide brand recognition, to invest in visual design to show why consumers should buy in. In this post, we offer four reasons why your small company…
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Around the Office: Emailing Iframes, DJ Fees, and Creative 404 Pages
Around the Office is a weekly group blog of what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Iframes and Email Don’t Always Mix Roberto would never send you an iframe in an email message because iframes don’t consistently work in email. Why does this matter? Whether they know it or not, people use the iframe tag when embedding video from services like YouTube. When you, for instance, copy one of these online videos into an email, you’re not guaranteed that it will display. Roberto recommends sending a link instead. MP3 Fees Proposed for German DJs Daveed felt German performance…
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Around the Office: Internet Freedom in Syria, Windows 8 Gestures, Email Messages that Hit the Mark, and More!
Around the Office is a weekly group blog of what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. As a believer in Internet freedom and democracy, Daveed was saddened to hear that Syria had essentially blocked its citizens from the Web, an action that many attribute to the authoritarian government’s desire to disrupt rebel communication and the online reporting of civil conflict. We couldn’t help but be reminded of Hosni Mubarak’s similar actions, just weeks before being ousted as president of Egypt. We learned that the desperate action of closing a country off from the Internet is apparently not…
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Building an Internet that Includes Everyone: Accessibility Camp Toronto
Over the weekend the Kobayashi Online team had the pleasure of attending and sponsoring the second annual Accessibility Camp Toronto. Held on November 17, 2012 at OCAD University, this “un-conference” gathered accessibility experts and those hoping to make websites and applications that everyone can use. The basic goal of accessible web design is to create online content that’s more usable to those with disabilities. But one of the great side effects is that it can also improve the overall usability of a website for all users. Accessibility practices range from general design best practices like structuring information logically to writing code to communicate with…