News

Around the Office: New WP Plugins, Google to Up Tracking, Ideas from Dx3

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 lot can happen in five months! Roberto is interested in testing out at least some of the 35 most interesting and useful WordPress plugins released since September 2011. Included in the list is: a plugin that replaces the default comments widget with the Facebook Comments widget; a plugin that regularly backs up your website; and a plugin that helps secure your WordPress page. And now that you’ve got a bunch…
Marketing on the Move: Exploring Your Company’s Mobile Marketing Options

Signs and billboards often vie for our attention while we’re out and about. These can be thought of as predecessors of mobile marketing. As our glances turn towards our own smart phones and tablets, these devices have become a natural destination for advertising and engagement. Mobile marketing is marketing that engages people where they are, and when they’re interested in making a purchase. No wonder it has gained status as a business buzz term. But what is mobile marketing? It can be thought of as a catchall term for practices including mobile websites, QR Codes, text messages, mobile apps, and…
Around the Office: Fontsmith at 10, an HTML5 Doodle, Eyeing Social Media, 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. Eva is impressed with the minimal and clean site Fontsmith created to celebrate its 10 years creating custom fonts. In addition to the great website, Fontsmith has published a limited edition box-set of booklets it has produced over the past decade. What better way to celebrate beautiful fonts and 10 years in type? As further proof that Daveed appreciates HTML5 on a deeper level than the average Web surfer, he drew…
Shopping’s Better When Sharing: 5 Ways to Make E-commerce Social

Our innate desire to socialize has helped make the Internet a platform where people share information and their life experiences. The social nature of the Internet is something that institutions like governments, universities and businesses, cannot ignore. Having been a by-product of this network revolution, e-commerce businesses have much to gain from taking a decidedly social approach to businesses. First off, consumers have made online shopping an opportunity to socialize — not unlike going to the mall with friends. As we’ve pointed out before, even if your e-commerce site doesn’t have a community of its own, the opinions and advice of…
Around the Office: Better Page Titles, Backing It Up, Landing Pages, 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. This week at Online Friendly, Roberto reminded us that search results can often boil down to writing better page titles — the world’s top search engine agrees. Eva got a glimpse at the state of social media thanks to a new infographic that shows its influence by the numbers. Duct Tape Marketing posted a great reminder on the importance of backing up data, and introduced some backup options for your social…
Around the Office: 2012 Trends and Predictions, Social Spam, 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. In the first week of 2012, we wondered whether the doomsayers were wrong about their cataclysmic predictions about the year 2012 given the general lack of fire and brimstone. We were interested in what Nettuts+ counted as their year-end web development trends and their predictions — and we had some of our own. We were relieved when Web developer Kayla Knight in her mobile Web design manifesto echoed our sentiment that…
The Top 10 Digital Marketing Trends of 2011 + Some Predictions for 2012

Now that the year that’s nearly over, it’s a great time for reflection. Being on the edge of digital marketing, we wanted to share some of this sector’s trends that we thought were the most prevalent in 2011. Drawing upon the conversations we’ve had and overhead, the individual projects we’ve undertaken, and the news reports and blogs we’ve read, we’ve put together a list of some of the major trends we’ve seen emerging. We’ve also dusted off our crystal ball and managed to come up with some predictions for the coming year. Read on for some of the trends we’ve been seeing over the past year,…
Happy Holidays from Online Friendly and Kobayashi Online

At this joyous time of year, we’d like to wish you happy holidays. It has been a true honor working with our clients over the year, and sharing tips to make the most of your online presence. We wish you abundance, happiness, and peace to you, your family, and your business for the coming year. We’re also excited to see what opportunities are in store for you in 2012. We’d love to help you to see them to fruition. As always, Kobayashi Online will be here to make the online world friendly. From all of us at Kobayashi Online, and…
Why e-commerce? 3 Reasons Why an Online Store Makes Sense

E-commerce can be a great standalone business, or an addition to your existing sales. There are numerous examples of companies that have successfully used online retail to their advantage. The Thorpes of Gosforth Fireside Shop, an English store that supplies everything to do with fireplaces, is a great example of a traditional company using the Internet for develop their online business. As a BBC report explains, this store has been able to use its unique selection of products to drive online sales and build interest in order to get people to see the store for themselves. Many professional services have…
Around the office: Modern SEO, Comic Sans Remixes, WordPress 3.3, 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 wants online traffic seekers to know about some modern day Search Engine Optimization practices, because, after all, SEO isn’t just about backlinks, keywords, and tags anymore. The 1st Web Designer blog makes some SEO recommendations such as optimizing your local searchability; smoothly integrating your SEO and social media marketing; and using Schema.org to check that your SEO efforts look authentic to the search engines. And it’s important to remember that…
Around the Office: Colour Gradients, Coca-Cola Changes Colour, 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. Daveed has been using a new online tool from Colorzilla that creates colour gradients using CSS. Select any number of colours, adjust their position, and the Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator give you a preview of how it will look, as well as the code to apply it to your website. Brent has been puzzling over whether Coca-Cola’s decision to colour its soda cans white was a bad decision, or one that…
Around the Office: Japan’s Colours, Web Activity Maps, Hiring Immigrants, 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’re interested in Internet traffic, Wayne wants you to check out some very cool visualization tools from Akamai that show how the Internet is doing at any given moment. Akamai is one of the largest content delivery networks — basically they help speed up the serving of online content — and this position give them a lot of insight into the day-to-day health and use of the Internet. Wayne especially…