Web Design

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Archive for category Business

Digital Flipbooks

Mar 10

Posted by El Jefe in Business, Inspiration, New Technology | No Comments

In the tech world, you’ve played with them. If you subscribe to any online magazines, you’ve probably used one.  The PDF, to some extent, is dead.

A digital flip book combines the best of the physical world, with the best of the digital.  Instead of converting your printed collateral into PDFs and dumping them on the Web, create an interactive, feature-rich reading experience for your audience.

Let’s take a look at the benefits and features digital flipbook software can bring.

Digital Flip Book Features

  • Turn page experience – grab a corner, flip the page.  This is probably it’s coolest “non-technical” feature from a usability standpoint
  • Search – keyword search for any text within flip book
  • Customizable – add your logo and/or mimic your website theme and turn your flip book into an extension of your business or personal profile.  It’s all up to you to decide on its appearance and what it should be able to do
  • Active Logo – your logo, links to your web site – shouldn’t they all???
  • News Ticker – add a scrolling news ticker with links to other websites (like your own blog)
  • Embed Video – yes, embed video directly into your digital magazine and make it come alive
  • Download – download original for offline viewing
  • Tell a Friend – email it to your friends
  • Print – print any page or the entire book
  • Pagination & Navigation – easily navigate your digital flip book with direct input, mouse, keyboard or next/previous arrows (or see the 1st bullet)
  • Overview – need a global look? View thumbnails of all the pages to easily drill-down on specific topics
  • Index – create your own custom index with active links to current pages
  • RSS – integrate RSS feeds into your digital catalog
  • Zoom – all the way to 200% – your grand-pappy can use it
  • Help & Close – buttons for help and closing out your book

Tangible Benefits

  • Go Green – cliche, yes, but its true.  Take your current companies paper usage on brochures and flyer’s and make them digital once-and-for-all
  • Save Money – well duh, stop printing on paper, you start saving a BOAT LOAD of money.  No more printers, no more die cut costs, no more ink cartridges, no more Brazilian tribes being left homeless, you get the picture…
  • Be Cool – dude, how cool will you be with your new, shiny, digital flip book or catalog?  Be a first at your next company meeting with your digital “annual reports” presentation – now no one will have to fall asleep listening to you speak EVER again

Sold! Learn more about digital flip book software here.

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Best Online Backup Services

Dec 14

Posted by El Jefe in Business | No Comments

Mozy
If your hard drive died today, would you be ready?

Most of you just read that sentence and shrugged it off. The truth is, you really don’t understand the severity of hard drive failure, until you are the casualty of one. It’s not just a matter of losing data (which mind you, can be devastating from a personal or business standpoint), it’s having to re-install and re-configure every application on your computer and re-customize all your settings and preferences.

This isn’t a 2-hour task my friends.

This can easily span days if not weeks of labor intensive work. Have you checked hard drive recovery rates lately? We contacted Best Buy, a major national brand, to inquire about their back up services. $600 to start. That’s right, you read it right. $600 to just look at your drive to determine whether or not it’s salvageable. It gets even better, your drive will have to be sent off to some lab where it will be repaired.

And depending on the level of damage and how much you want to salvage, you are easily looking at $800-$5000 in financial damages and a minimum of 2 weeks before you’ll get to see your data back. Ouch.

This is why you need to have some sort of back-up protocol in place, whether its business, personal, or pleasure you must have something in place to ensure your data is safe.

Below are what I consider Top Rated or “Best” Online Data Backup Services (visit each site for more details):

Online Backup Services

  • MOZY – Online & Secure Backup Services
  • Acronis – Imaging Backup & Recovery Software

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Website Planning

Dec 7

Posted by El Jefe in Business, Project Management, Web Design | No Comments

Purposing web design is a complex, but essential ongoing activity. Before creating and uploading a website, it is important to take the time to plan exactly what is needed in the website. Thoroughly considering the audience or target market, as well as defining the purpose and deciding what content will be developed, are extremely important.

Context

Web design is similar (in a very simplistic way) to traditional print publishing. Every website is an information display container, just as a book; and every web page is like the page in a book. However, web design uses a framework based on digital code and display technology to construct and maintain an environment to distribute information in multiple formats. Taken to its fullest potential, web design is undoubtedly the most sophisticated and increasingly complex method to support communication in today’s world.

Purpose

It is essential to define the purpose of the website as one of the first steps in the planning process. A purpose statement should show focus based on what the website will accomplish and what the users will get from it. A clearly defined purpose will help the rest of the planning process as the audience is identified and the content of the site is developed. Setting short and long term goals for the website will help make the purpose clear and plan for the future when expansion, modification, and improvement will take place. setting a goal practices and measurable objectives should be identified to track the progress of the site and determine success.

Audience

Defining the audience is a key step in the website planning process. The audience is the group of people who are expected to visit your website