On Friday we will discuss issues to be aware of when creating or upgrading your website, including:

• What questions to ask the during the web developer interview.
• How to protect yourself.
• Self-administration or self-destruction – who’s in control?
• How to avoid sticker shock.
• Who manages your social media?
• Levels of control/ownership in:
• Domain name,
• Design,
• Content,
• Data.

Date: Friday May 25.
Time: 12:00 noon.
Place: Radar Hill boardroom, Top Floor – 3301 Douglas Street.

There is no charge for this talk. An RSVP is required as seating is limited. Please call: 250.477.6395. If the session is full we will add your name to the wait list.

Vinnie’s dad Amarjeet was standing bedside the casket looking sad but stoic, having recieved several hundred people with dignity, I was so impressed at his strength.  His mom too was reaching out to each person individually with thanks, her hand on Vinnie’s head.  It was so sad and so sweet, having just lost their son.  They were totally in the moment, as sad as the occasion was, and Vinnie’s mom noticed my company shirt and made the connection, “oh yes, you’re from Radar Hill, he mentioned you”.  “Yes,” I said, “he called me on Thursday. I didn’t get a chance to tell him that my wife and I are expecting our first child”.

I think he would have enjoyed hearing that.

-Dan

You:

• Are an intelligent, enthusiastic individual with a solid knowledge of PHP 5 and MySQL, a passion for usable application design, and a borderline OCD for web technologies.
• Are constantly improving to become phenomenal as a programmer. You read blogs and tutorials, listen to podcasts and anything else you can get your hands, eyes or ears on!
• Are able to troubleshoot and hand-code clean, compliant, and semantic HTML 5 CSS, AJAX and JavaScript.
• Are a responsible, hard-working team player who pays atention to the little detials
• Love making sure code works, and works well.
• Love collaborating and learning from your peers and must be comfortable interacting with a motley crew of designers, carnivores, clients, smoothie drinkers, coders, vegetarians, writers, cake sniffers, support staff, and animal lovers.

Bonus Points:

• Have knowledge of technologies related to web programming including online application development, cross-platform scripting languages, data modeling, and database construction and administration.
• Have knowledge of work flow and processes for common online applications such as content management systems, forms, shopping carts, payment transactions, log-in authentication schemes, bulletin boards, etc.
• Have knowledge in Javascript frameworks such as JQuery, Prototype, and Mootools.
• Are familiar with FTP, Shell, TCP/IP, MySQL, Apache etc.
• Are experienced with a version control system like Subversion or Git.

We:

• Offer competitive salary and benefits package. You always get paid, twice a month.
• Work Monday-Friday, 9 am – 5 pm with time off for lunch.
• Are fun, but love to work and junk.
• Feed you: Frequent breakfasts, BBQs, lunches and snacks.
• Have great coffee.
• Have comfortable desks (not drab and windowless cubicles) in a beautiful office, three decks, and great views of the city.
• Whip you into shape: gym membership to work off the BBQ.

To apply, send an email to hr (at) radarhill.com and include:

• A catchy subject line.
• A list of your top 3 skills.
• Samples of your PHP code, and ideally links to a working version of the script, but not necessary.
• What you offer, how you are unique, and why you want to join us.
• Your resume and references.

Closing Date: Tuesday May 22, 2012, at 12:00 noon.

Pristine Gemstones

Pristine Gemstone’s website is sparkling with images of their beautiful jewelry and gemstones, available through their new online store.  The website features a slideshow and a Flickr feed that show off more gemstone/jewelry photography.  Pristine Gemstone’s owners Rogerio and Andrea can update their products and other website content using Radar Hill’s Pyramid Content Management System.

Ok, here we go. You could immediately start off by shouting out your sales pitch (selling by yelling). You’re not wrong for wanting to let the entire cocktail party know about your project (what you’re selling), you simply need to be subtle about it. If you keep yelling  people will begin tuning you out. Ignoring you.  No audience = a failed message delivery.

In your particular case I would encourage you to begin with Twitter for these reasons:

• It is fast. Your message/engagement can begin right away. Sign-up for free and begin!
• You get immediate delivery. There is no delay between what you Tweet and the audience receiving it. (Most serious Tweeters have the conversation going all day.)
• Your message has a short shelf life. Each message is only ‘on-screen’ for a limited time. This affords you the opportunity to message with some frequency but with very little concern about repeating yourself or over exposure. Letting your audience know about an upcoming open house twice during a single day is probably a good example.

Now, you need to know who’s on Twitter and you’ll want to know who’s on Twitter in our area. Use a Twitter search with the Victoria hash tag: #yyj [ https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23yyj ].

These are the people you immediately want to begin following. By following them, you hope they will follow you thereby expanding your audience. It takes some time and work but get at it!

By building an audience (your Twibe – sick!) you can begin to engage them. Don’t start off with a sales pitch. Here’s a simple formula you can follow [1]:

• Ask Questions – 30%: we all like to be asked questions as if we are the expert or if we have information to share. It makes us feel important. Remember, you’re trying to encourage participation.
• Be Useful – 30%: share information about the community, about topics you care about. These Tweets can be as useful as traffic reports (so popular!) at an intersection to avoid, an accident or whatever. Upcoming community events are also very useful and well-intended.
• Appear as an Expert – 20%: be generous when asked a question or volunteering expert information. Example: “Meta-data in webpages has little or no effect. Disagree? Let me have it.”
• Humour – 20%: never be anything but pleasant and humorous if you can.

I hope this information helps. I also hope it demonstrates the value of social media. This is just the start. Good luck!

[1]  There are other ‘formulas’ for employing Twitter [ http://www.radarhill.com/presentations/benefits_social_media/5.html ].  These are only basic guides.  Tinker.  Find what works best for you.

A responsive web design is one that adapts to each form of media. In non-geek chat that means your website is easily readable and accessible regardless of what kind of computer you’re viewing it on:  desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.  Think of the layout of your website being fluid.  The entire architecture will be adaptable to any kind of screen size.

There’s more than a fluid layout behind the magic of a responsive design. The imagery employed within your design and content also plays a significant role in the user experience.  Sophisticated sites will use dynamic imagery to further enhance the site.  This will primarily fall into two types of dynamically generated images:  created at upload or created on the fly.  Both techniques have merit.  (To avoid a long debate here, that’s really off our topic – discuss with your web development professional which scenario best suits you.)

Lastly the media query – what size screen is currently viewing your website?  And which stylesheet should be engaged?  This brings up another term: scalability.  If you’ve been around computers long enough, you’ll have heard server techs complain about hardware being scalable and programmers complaining about the same with applications.  The scalable stylesheet is a similar concept.

Within your stylesheet you can program tests for variable size media (screens).  This approach affords the web designer greater flexibility while constructing your site.  An unfortunate downside to this is stylesheet bloat.  Bloat translates into a larger file for a mobile device to download, making your site slow to load.  A secondary, better tactic is to use several stylesheets.  Then the media size dictates which stylesheet is employed.

Now let’s focus on the dollars.  A responsive web design – professionally constructed – is going to cost more.  Probably twice as much as a standard desktop design.  Wait!  Keep reading!  With that doubling of cost you now have yourself covered for an unlimited variety of media views.  Instead of having one separate site for tablets and another one for smartphones, you’re now covered for the entire spectrum of screen sizes out there.  What a deal!  But wait – there’s more.

The best part: you may have had a website and a companion mobile site long enough to have suffered maintaining both simultaneously.  Updating your regular site, then having to copy over and update the mobile site.  Nuts to that!  With responsive sites, update once and you’re done.  You’ll never have to worry again about maintaining content over multiple sites.

Hope you’re ready to move into the new web.  It’s ready for you.  For a further confirmation check your Google Analytics.  The numbers are sure to show a double-digit percentage of your site visitors viewing your site from a mobile device.

Edit:  here’s a couple of our most recent responsive site designs http://www.joenewellarchitect.com/
http://www.themastersgroup.ca/

Doug Read, REALTOR®

Doug Read is a Sooke BC REALTOR® who specializes in waterfront and country real estate.  His new website features testimonials from satisfied clients, information about Sooke, and real estate resources such as a mortgage calculator and home search and evaluation forms.

This is aimed at the busy business owner who wants to know effective strategies for increasing traffic and conversion rates for their websites, including:

• Internet marketing
• Search Engine Optimization
• Building inbound links
• Ad campaigns
• Creating content
• And much more.

Date: Friday April 27th.
Times: Because of the strong interest, we are running two identical sessions. Choose one: 12:00 noon or 2:00 pm.

There is no charge for this talk. An RSVP is required as seating is limited. To reserve your place and specify which session, please call 250.477.6395.

Place: Radar Hill boardroom, Top Floor – 3301 Douglas Street. (Google map & directions).

The Radar Hill Team

Valleyview Chiropractic

Valleyview Family Chiropractic and Message Therapy believe in natural and non-invasive forms of health care based on the principle that your body has the inherent ability to heal without the use of drugs or surgery. Their new website design is inspired by nature and aims to create a relaxing mood. Not only beautiful, the website is also very functional – allowing the website owner to keep their website up-to-date using our Pyramid Content Management System.