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  • Design, Layout, Functionality: the Basic Elements of Web Experience

    A great webpage is more than just the product of good code. Think back to the last time you navigated a website and found the information, product or service you were looking for. [Updated January 2018] If this was a positive experience, chances are that a lot of thought went into creating a site that looks good and provides you with what you want in the simplest way. This type of site uses design, layout, and functionality to create an effective user experience. The approach Kobayashi + Zeitguys takes is a thoughtful one, ensuring that before any design starts, we…

  • Kobayashi Online Supports Cut-A-Thon and Toy Drive

    Kobayashi Online is proud to be a supporting sponsor of Donato Salon + Spa’s Cut-A-Thon and Toy Drive for SickKids this weekend. Kobayashi Online handles many aspects of Donato’s Web presence, having created their eCommerce website and integrated blog, as well as a custom email gift certificate solution. A successful charity campaign needs to have a strong online element, and for this latest campaign, Kobayashi Online added a Cut-A-Thon pop up ad to both the donato.ca and donatoacademy.com websites. The pop up ensures that visitors to the website are instantly aware of the event. Telling website visitors about your charity…

  • Around the Office: Urban Type, Meta Data, Grooveshark’s Blues, 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. Want your content to be found online? Wayne wants you to know about an HTML standard that can be understood by the major search engines. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! have all agreed on schema.org as a universal way of providing meta data (or microdata) elements within HTML. This means you can more accurately label anything — whether it’s a movie, a book, song or product — in the eyes of search…

  • Around the Office: WordPress Security, Patent Peeves, Encrypted Searches, 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 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 drama that’s unfolding as Barnes & Noble claims Microsoft is trying to stifle competition among mobile devices through patent law,…

  • 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 will essentially footnote the Web. Brent wants Windows users to know about one of his favourite shortcuts: Press the Windows…

  • Design Focus: Better Place’s online home

    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 up-to-date content adds to the site’s overall value to visitors. In this post, we’ll show you some of the smart decisions…

  • 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 free themes to join an opt-in newsletter, to develop a list of people who might buy premium themes later on.…

  • 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 commuters browse and scan the items want to buy as the wait for their train. Once they’ve filled their virtual…

  • 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 future release. We’re eagerly anticipating it!This week Roberto found a great summary of some simple practices to make a WordPress site…

  • 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 anyone interested in experimenting creatively with the Web. Wayne’s been exploring 3 Dreams of Black, three virtual dream worlds which…

  • 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 on the aesthetic level, they shouldn’t get in the way of the user experience. It’s tempting to go overboard with…

  • 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…