By Joshua Riddle on May 9, 2008 at 12:06PM
Just when the Web 2.0 trend begins to subside, everyone starts talking about the next "age" of the internet: the Semantic Web. I'm not going to bore everyone with a description of how Web 3.0 is different that Web 2.0 and why or why not you should invest $500K in the next popular site. Rather I would like to address the new technologies that will become more popular in a very simplistic low-level language so that everyone knows what it is without losing their heads.
Read | Comments
Tags: web 3.0, semantic web
By Aaron Riddle on April 22, 2008 at 06:31AM
When we begin a new project, our clients are always excited to begin promoting their services and/or product via their new Web site. One challenge that always presents itself with our clients is their desire to place everything on their home page. Their rationale is that if their potential customers happen to visit their Web site, the client wants them to see everything they have to offer as soon as the page loads. The client's fear is that if their customers are not presented with all the information up front at once, then they will navigate away from the page. In reality, the opposite is true.
Read | Comments
Tags: web site tips, best web practices, web site advice
By Joshua Riddle on April 3, 2008 at 02:50PM
Blogs are all the craze these days, not only because of the freedom and opportunity, but because there are a lot of great systems out there to get you started. So many, in fact, that the list can be overwhelming:
TypePad,
WordPress,
Blogger,
TextPattern,
LiveJournal,
Drupal,
MoveableType, and the thousands of customized systems (take a breath). So when a client mentions they are interested in a simple blog system to get started we are obviously faced with many factors including flexibility, customization, goals, and budget. In the end however, our recommendations are usually dwindled down to three systems, each of which caters to a particular need.
Read | Comments
Tags: blog, wordpress, drupal, blogger
By Joshua Riddle on March 14, 2008 at 12:29PM
Large projects are great because it not only gives you a guaranteed income for the next few months, but also because it allows you to test your current management skills and learn a bit more about your strengths and weaknesses. While every project is a learning experience, I have found that larger projects teach you 10 times as much as a basic front-end-only site. In this post I would like to go over a few strategies we used in our most recent project,
SocialRoster.com, and how they benefited our schedule and final product. Rather than give you the generic "here is how you should do this" soap-box talk, I will just review some key points that I recommend you try in your next project.
Read | Comments
Tags: management, large projects, development, tips
By Aaron Riddle on March 13, 2008 at 09:12PM
I wanted to take a break from some of the more serious entries I have posted on our blog as of late and share with you a recent experience of mine. I have come to pride myself in being able to avoid the strong influence of most forms of advertising in one way or another. When a commercial is shown on the TV in my home, I usually pay no attention. My wife, who is pregnant with our second child, is a different story...
Read | Comments
Tags: family, advertising, humor
By Aaron Riddle on February 22, 2008 at 07:30AM
I recently read a post over at the freelancing blog
Freelance Switch that I strongly agreed with and want to share to our readers. Being a business owner, husband and father of one (with another on the way), the act of balancing work and family time is very important. This article by
Allan Branch highlights some notable points about work and family life.
Read | Comments
Tags: family, work, scheduling
By Joshua Riddle on February 16, 2008 at 02:08PM
There was a recent post over at Freelance Sprout naming the "7 Things Not to do Before Starting your Freelance Business". After reading it I felt compelled to write a reply to the post and offer some constructive criticisms and an alternative opinion in the topic. Most of my points are situational depending on what a freelancer's plans and goals are but I have tried to explain these as well as possible. My intention is not to dispute the valid points of the author, but to offer another point of view and help guide readers further.
Read | Comments
Tags: freelance, planning, reaction
By Aaron Riddle on February 12, 2008 at 06:50AM
While most of the work we do at Riddle Brothers is relegated to electronic medium, there is a good portion of our work that is devoted to print media. Even though the World Wide Web seems to double its size daily, there is still an absolute place for printed materials within a marketing plan for all businesses.
My first entry in this series shares presentation points I received at a recent conference by Brenda Foster and Domencia Genovese of GCF Marketing Communications for Education. During this presentation, Brenda and Domencia investigated how printed and Web-based materials can work hand-in-hand to help successfully market higher education institutions (and businesses as well).
Read | Comments
Tags: print, publications, design, marketing
By Joshua Riddle on January 28, 2008 at 11:52AM
Web sites have come a long way even in the past couple of years. I can't even remember the last time I created a static HTML/CSS site. Now online applications are the next step in the connected world, and as a result it is necessary for developers to learn a back-end language in addition to keeping up with updated front-end languages. One thing that I have found
necessary in being an efficient developer is creating a custom library (or framework) that fits your commonly used modules.
You don't have to start from scratch as their are
more frameworks than you can count. What you will want to do is try them all out and see which works best for the types of sites you most commonly develop. Of course there are times when your requirements will cause you to use another framework, but for those projects you do over and over, you will want to increase you turnaround time where possible. Then you will begin incorporating these 3rd party resources into your own custom framework as needed. There are a few attributes you will want your new framework to have which I review after the jump.
Read | Comments
Tags: framework, library, modules
By Aaron Riddle on January 11, 2008 at 04:55PM
I prefer using left justified / ragged right type for body text (especially in newspaper articles). Justified type looks nice from a distance, but can really throw off the tracking of your type when you look at it up close.
When working with InDesign and laying out publications, getting ragged-right text to flow in a visually pleasing manner can be a pain in the neck. Due to the various length of words in the English language, I sometimes find myself having to insert soft-returns to flow text to the next line so that you are left with neatly organized, easy-to-read columns of type.
That is where this tip comes in handy!
Read | Comments
Tags: indesign, quick tip, adobe
<< Previous Articles