17Feb

Around the Office: Interactive Charts, Bent Photos, Lost Reviews, more

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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.

Looking to show some compelling data? Daveed recommends using the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit to not only set people see charts and figures as visualizations, but also to interact with them. Sure, it takes a little extra work than a typical pie chart, but the InfoVis Toolkit makes a huge impact. The White House even used it to break down the 2012 budget.

Eva took a long look at Terry Border’s unusual photo gallery, which use bent-object sculptures and photo scenes that bring to life anything from peanuts to pill bottles. Border told Wired the photos play with “our preconceived notions of shapes and objects.” Some of our favourites include a marshmallow walking the plank over a hot chocolate mug and a growing ruler being measured. Check out Border’s blog, Bent Objects, for his latest images.

After seeing some Kobayashi Online reviews suddenly disappear, Brent found out that Google review removal is often arbitrary. There are a few known issues resulting in dropped reviews, such as them being lost through as data spread across multiple databases gets lost, and when a giant housecleaning update to Google’s listings database happens resulting in temporarily dropped reviews. At least person-to-person word of mouth is bug-proof.

We also got out of the office this week and had lunch with a couple wonderful people from the Music Industries Association of Canada (or MIAC), which is Canada’s national, not-for-profit trade association representing retailers, manufacturers and distributors of music products.

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11Feb

Around the Office: online piracy, video marketing, great site design, more

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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 was a busy week at Online Friendly since Kobayashi Online moved on Monday to its new location at 1200 Eglinton Ave. in Toronto. KO will now be under the same roof as Finesilver Design, giving clients access to all the insights, ideas, social media tools and technologies they need to communicate their brand amid changing consumer behaviour. Talk about a good move!

Daveed is hoping for a peaceful solution to the war on content piracy. A Forbes editorial argues that the big film and music organizations should consider whether the war on piracy should be pursued, given that it may be impossible to win. Writer Paul Tassi explains that piracy is a service problem, and the industry could save itself by making it as easy to download and watch movies legally as it is on The Pirate Bay.

This week, we explored some of the best ways to make online videos resonate with Internet audiences and passed on seven tips for online friendly video. Capturing the viewer’s attention early and offering something of value is crucial, as well as sharing your video on social networks and easily found by search engines. Check out the post for more tips.

We also took a look at the website for UK type design firm Fontsmith. We were impressed by their use of their own fonts, their organization of content, and their use of carousels for dynamic presentation of images and information. Our analysis focused on how their site draws attention to their fonts, as well as the stylish and dynamic organization behind them.

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04Feb

Around the Office: Kobayashi Online moves, email marketing lingo, and more

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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 haven’t heard yet, Kobayashi Online is moving to a new Toronto location at 1200 Eglinton Ave. East, Suite 801. Everyone has been busy packing and getting organized for the move in addition to making the online world friendly.

Roberto invites you to learn his language with the help of 25 email marketing terms. Some terms include: false positive (when a legitimate permission-based email is incorrectly filtered or blocked as spam), open rate (the percentage of emails opened in any given email marketing), and targeting (selecting a target audience or group of individuals likely to be interested in a certain product or service). If you don’t know these terms or short forms like CTR and UCE, this guide will help you brush up.

Great photography is crucial to most websites. Eva is passing along a 20 per cent off coupon on purchases of $25 or more at istockphoto.com. If you can’t get a professional photographer, high-quality stock photos are a good option for your website.

Having the right domain can give your brand a leg up on the competition. Roberto found some pointers for those new to domains. Should you go with a .com, or a country-specific domain like .ca? What to do if your ideal domain isn’t available? Should I buy other extensions and redirect them to my site? Check out Alexander Dawson’s article on understanding domain names to find out.

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27Jan

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

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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 of new plugins, the Plugin Performance Profiler (or P3) will measure the impact of your plugin on your site’s load time.

Daveed is a little weary about Google’s changes to its privacy policy that will let it track consumers across its many online products such as YouTube, Gmail and Google Search. According to a Washington post article, Google will be amalgamating its data to create a more complete picture of its users. Many think this goes too far, especially because they won’t be able to opt out of being tracked. It may be little consolation, but Google wants to use this extra information to do “cool things”. (If you want to know what Google already thinks of you, check your interest and age profile.)

Brent was able to exchange some ideas on how to use Facebook to drive engagement at Dx3 Canada, a Toronto trade show dedicated to digital marketing, advertising and retail. One company that is using Facebook well is Etsy, an online marketplace that created an app which suggests items to you based on the likes and interests of your Facebook friends. This is supposed to make shopping for gifts easier, but it also helps make Etsy a more attractive site to buy from. With 18 million Canadians active on Facebook, companies stand to benefit from using the platform — preferably with a some elegance and creativity.

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20Jan

Around the Office: Fontsmith at 10, an HTML5 Doodle, Eyeing Social Media, more

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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.

Kobayashi Online – Around the Office

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 our attention to a Google case study of how the Stanisław Lem doodle was built. In celebration of Lem’s impressive career as a science fiction writer, philosopher and satirist, Google created an interactive animation that demonstrates some of the considerations that went into programming the doodle using HTML5, the Internet’s new Web standard.

Roberto found out this week how people look at Facebook profiles — literally — thanks to a study that tracked where peoples’ eyes went when looking at social media profiles. According to the study, profile pictures garnered the most attention on Klout, Facebook and StumbleUpon, however, on LinkedIn, unsurprisingly, job title gets more interest. People are also very interested in who you know based on the attention they pay to the thumbnails of friends seen on social profiles. And, finally, people are most likely to see content close to the top of each page, so if it’s important, don’t make them scroll down.

Daveed found out that Google is making its search results more social. When signed into Google+, Google searches now include posts and uploaded items like photos from you and your friends. So now when you search for “Awesome things you can do with a paperclip”, for instance, you’ll find out what the budding MacGyvers on Google+ have done with a paperclip. We’re partial to the paperclip helicopter.

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15Jan

Around the Office: Better Page Titles, Backing It Up, Landing Pages, more

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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 media updates, cloud services, and WordPress blog. We liked Pamela Vaughan’s breakdown of Web design and usability guidelines which include making a great first impression, consistency, and solid navigation. We followed along with HubSpot’s examination of five real-world landing pages that some show some ways to make landing pages that help drive more conversions. From leading customers to your product and sealing the deal and all places in between, 352 Media Group design director Daniel Alves broke down sales-focused e-commerce site design — which more-or-less align with our own e-commerce guidelines. We were inspired by 30 unusual, fresh and creative WordPress site designs chosen by wplift, and 23 Interesting HTML5 and CSS3 sites picked by Rocket Graphs.

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07Jan

Around the Office: 2012 Trends and Predictions, Social Spam, more

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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 mobile isn’t an added feature; it’s a necessity. We found it touching that a Kleenex PR campaign finds sick people via Facebook and sends them Kleenex care packages in the mail. We agreed with Scott Stratten that marketers should be ashamed of spamming their social media contacts — and stop immediately. Our heads were turned by some very creative and memorable logos compliled by Vandalay Design. And the UnderConsideration 2012 Holiday Card helped keep us motivated for the new year.

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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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16Dec

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

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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

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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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