30Dec

The Top 10 Digital Marketing Trends of 2011 + Some Predictions for 2012

Posted in Website Marketing Tags: , , , , , ,

The year 2012 leads to many different directions

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, and what to expect for 2012. Read the rest of this entry »

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23Dec

Happy Holidays from Online Friendly and Kobayashi Online

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seasons greetings from Kobayashi Online

At this joyous time of year, we’d like to wish you happy holidays. Read the rest of this entry »

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20Dec

Why e-commerce? 3 Reasons Why an Online Store Makes Sense

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A keyboard with a shopping cart key

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 also moved online. E-commerce has been used for services in some innovative ways such as Lulu’s easy self-publishing plaform, or Dukits, an online service that lets people commit to buying concert tickets to assure that events have a significant audience.

A service like Dukits could hardly exist as an offline service, but a business like The Thorpes of Gosforth Fireside Shop also has a lot to gain from offering their services online. In this post, we explain three ways that e-commerce can benefit any business. Read the rest of this entry »

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16Dec

Around the office: Modern SEO, Comic Sans Remixes, WordPress 3.3, more

Posted in Around the Office Tags: , , , , , , ,

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.

Pictured: targeting local SEO, Kobayashi Online logo in Comic Sans, WordPress 3.3, Louis CK

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 you can’t fool Google; your content and backlinks should be authentic.

While we all have reservations about Comic Sans, Brent found a gallery that re-imagines some of the most iconic logos had they chosen the clip-on tie of fonts. And while the Star Wars logo may look closer to the current brand promise, we’re not recommending . Check out some of the other logos on the Comic Sans Project Tumblr page.

We were very excited for the latest release of WordPress, the content management system estimated to be behind 15 per cent of all websites. Sitepoint provided a rundown of the features in version 3.3 such as a revamped interface that will work on small-screen devices like tablets, a drag and drop media uploader, and a new Tumblr importer. According to tests done by Dev4Press, the changes in WordPress features have also been accompanied by considerable optimization that make sites faster.

Comedian Louis CK has broken with convention by selling recordings of his stand-up performance, Live at the Beacon Theater, directly to his audience. Louis CK was able to make the same money on his video while selling it for less, and Daveed takes this as one example of how this new business model works. Instead of partnering with a large company and charging $20, he made his show downloadable for just $5. The only people that lose out are the traditional movie companies.

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09Dec

Around the Office: Colour Gradients, Coca-Cola Changes Colour, more

Posted in Around the Office Tags: , , , ,

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 drew attention to the company and its cause. Coca-Cola unveiled a white colour scheme as part of an initiative to promote sustainable living as a way to fight climate change and protect the polar bears’ habitat. The company, of course, knows how the public reacts to changes to its product, having gone through a fiasco when it changed the flavour of Coke in the ‘80s. Likewise, many consumers were upset over the image change, but the attention around the campaign, some say, may have been ultimately good for the cause.

Being fans of the game Angry Birds, we were happy to hear its creators, Rovio, have launched a new campaign in support of real-life angry birds — those facing extinction. Rovio is encouraging people to learn about endangered birds and donate to The BirdLife Preventing Extinctions Programme, which helps the 189 species on the very edge of extinction.

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03Dec

Around the Office: Japan’s Colours, Web Activity Maps, Hiring Immigrants, more

Posted in Around the Office Tags: , , , , , , ,

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 found nipponcolors.com, a website that shows the colours traditionally used in Japanese literature, textiles, and other Japanese arts and crafts. Created by Tokyo-based Web designer Ono Takehiko and drawing upon the book Traditional Japanese Color Palette, nipponcolors.com shows 250 of the Nippon Colours of Japan’s ancient, hierarchical color system in a modern way. The site makes picking colours for use in print and Web design easier, but it also provides the colour values that can be used in Photoshop, and hexadecimal codes for Web design, making it even more valuable.

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 likes that it breaks down the net usage by traffic type into categories like retail, news, and financial services. Another company that knows a lot about the Web, Google, has also opened up its data on traffic to its services, helping show where the free flow of information has been disrupted — whether by a government blocking information or a severed cable.

Earlier this week, Brent was at the Top Employer Summit to help demonstrate hireimmigrants.ca, an online resource for helping Canadian employers hire immigrants. Hireimmigrants.ca is an initiative of ALLIES, a non-profit that supports local, Canadian efforts to adapt and implement programs that further the suitable employment of skilled immigrants. Hireimmigrants.ca was recently redesigned by Kobayashi Online with users in mind. The site easily guides employers step-by-step through the various stages of hiring immigrants: from simply getting started; to furthering efforts to recruit, integrate and retain skilled immigrants; and finally to becoming a model for other organizations.

Finally, Scott and Daveed both participated in “Wear Your Old Band T-Shirt To Work Day”, representing the bands The Hyena Dog Robbery and No Means No respectively. By wearing their old band shirts on December 2, 2011,  they joined countless music fans celebrating the importance of the good old fashioned band T-shirt. The idea for this day was conceived by Steve Lamacq on his BBC 6Music program, and is now in its sixth year.

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