Archive for the 'Bluelime News' Category
It’s time to get active
I’ve been swamped lately and frantically trying to stay afloat. As a result blog postings have been few and far between and I apologize. I’m still working like a fiend trying to catch up, but I think that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
As our company grows we’ve managed to secure bigger and bigger clients. Earlier this year, we’ve not only signed on to work on a government project, but four. It’s been very exciting to work on large scale projects that require much more planning and strategizing.
UBC Vault wins CCAE award
The UBCVault.ca website won GOLD award for e-Innovation from the Canadian Council for the Advancement of Education. The UBCVault newsletter, eVault also won the Bronze Award for Best Newsletter.
Congratulations to the entire team at UBC for making this website a great success.
Karma yoga at Bluelime Media
One of my New Year’s resolution this year was to deepen my yoga practice and integrate yoga philosophy in my daily activities. I was already practicing 5 times a week, so I’ve now increased to 6 and sometimes 7, I attend workshops whenever I can with visiting teachers and went to my first yoga retreat a few weeks ago. I feel better than ever, but I still haven’t found an way to involve yoga in my Web work.
Ideally my goal would be to develop and create sites dedicated to yoga. I’ve had the pleasure to work with Barbara from Bluecitrus for many years now. When I first met her, she had just launched Chakravibe, an e-commerce website selling yoga jewelery based on the chakra colours. Built using OS-Commerce platform, the website functioned very well, but was difficult to update and maintain and the code was a complete nightmare to decipher. When Barbara approached me earlier this year and asked me to help her move the static pages to WordPress, I decided that if I wanted to get involved in the yoga community, this was a great first move.
Joseph and Ben took responsibility of the OS-Commerce component and moved everything to a sub-folder. I took care of re-creating the design using up-to-date HTML/CSS and removed all of the tables and set up the WordPress templates. I doubt that many people have noticed that the website has changed. Except for a few pixel adjustments here and there and the changes in url, the website is identical. We’ve also added a blog allowing Barbara and Teresa, to write posts and tell us what’s new. So far the results have been very positive. Barbara is very pleased that she can update the content and post new images and Teresa has been writing great posts.
I’ve spoken to a few yoga teachers and have plans on creating more WordPress yoga templates this summer. Hopefully when things slow down (fingers crossed), but if you know and yogis looking for a blog, send them my way.
And if you are visiting the chakravibe website in the next little while, enter the code code CV20122J09 and save 20% on on any Chakravibe product. This Spring special is only available for for a short time, so hurry.
Hone your business skills and swing into leadership
If like me you have the pleasure of living in Vancouver, you might be getting a bit annoyed with the amount of rain we’re having these days. Looking on the bright side, all of this moisture is great for grass and in particular golf courses. I’m not much of a golfer and in fact have never golfed, but I must say that my interest was peaked last week while working on “Swing Into Leadership“, a website for one of our clients, Jacque Small. Designed by Bill Sangalli, Jacque hired Bluelime Media to build the it.
Jacque is a business coach who offers a series of “golf sessions” where she combines golf and business coaching. More particularly Jacque assists business people look at their habits, attitude and vision. The whole concept seems very interesting and from reading the rave reviews, even non-golfers have enjoyed her sessions.
If you’re looking into “getting into the swing of things” you should check out her site. Jacque is a great coach and full of energy. Even if you don’t golf, you’re bound to improve your business game.
Job Opportunities at Junxion Strategy
We’ve been working with Junxion Strategy for a few months now and are really impressed with their level of expertise and commitment to sustainability. If you are looking for a career with a design firm that cares about the environment, you should check them out. They are currently looking for a web developer to join their team. Check out their website for full details.
Bluelime Media may need to rebrand…
One of the biggest changes that we’ve seen this year is that clients are no longer asking for a static website but instead want to maintain their own site. This has been great, but now I think that we’ll have to change our name to something like WordPressLime Media. The number of WordPress (WP) sites we’re churning out is huge. The exciting thing about working with WP is seeing how far we can push the design. We work with a lot of different graphic designers here and it’s been challenging at times figuring out how we can convert their ideas into WP templates. Here are the latest ones we’ve been working on:
Introducing W Media Ventures
We are happy to announce the launch of the W Media Ventures blog. Following a very successful career with adebooks, Boris Wertz left the company a few months ago to set up a new venture company. Together with long-term partner Burda Digital Ventures, W Media Ventures aims to partner with entrepreneurs that want to build remarkable companies in the fields of digital media, e-commerce, social networks or platforms. Their blog will provide updates from their portfolio companies, announce new investments and comment on industry news.
Survey says: Hot nerd girls take on geek topics
A few weeks ago we asked you to complete our survey and you did. We’re happy to announce that the winner of our survey is Don. Not only did Don fill out our survey but he made us laugh tremendously with his list of suggested topics:
- Hot Nerd Girls that take on geek topics
- I call it Social Networking / You Call it Stalking
- Debbie does Vista but rebounded with Leopard so why does everyone call her a Cougar?
- Amy takes calls from Rehab: Was it Ruby on Rails this time?
I’m not sure that we’ll be able to provide you with articles with such flair and panache, but we did gather a lot of useful information and we now have a better idea of who you are and what you want. In 2008 we’ll write more about the following subjects:
- examples of our work
- website optimization and SEO and traffic building
- newsletter tips
- social networking
- fresh ways to use the web and great examples
- html and css examples
- news technologies and online tools
- book reviews
Almost all of you mentioned that reading about our latest work was what you wanted, so we’ll make sure to cover all of our projects. We’ve also made a few connections last year and invited “experts” in their field to write guest posts. Liz from Market Navigators, has already contributed great marketing articles and copywriter/SEO consultant Louise and Brand Strategist Isabelle will be contributing articles very soon. We hope that with their help, we will be able to provide you with a great list of resource.
2007 was the year I fell in love with WordPress
A few posts ago I mentioned that business had changed at Bluelime Media. Here’s how. We started working with WordPress almost three years ago now but only sunk our teeth during the later part of this year. I owe it all to Haig Armen and Mark Busse over at Industrial Brand. I met with them back in the summer and we talked about possibly helping them out with some WP build. Mark assumed that the entire Bluelime website was done using WP. Only the Bluelime blog was using WP and at the time I had no idea how the whole site could be built with WP and just dismissed the idea. But I just couldn’t get the idea out of my head and if you’re reading this post from an RSS reader, you may want to check out our site. During the Christmas holiday while you we’re no doubt enjoying the festivities, I worked on setting up the whole site in WP. It was much easier than I thought and the result makes for a website that is much easier to maintain and update.
Of course this would not have been possible withouth the experience that we’ve gained this past few months. Setting up websites using WP just made so much sense. We use to build a lot of customized CMS. We’d set up the database and then build an admin interface, but WordPress just makes all that work disappear. Interestingly enough, WP can be used for sites who don’t even need to look like blogs. Threads Gazette is such a site. When setting up this website, we created a page for the home page, while posts from three different categories make up the content for the showroom, classifieds and events section. The Belvedere Senior Living website was created by setting up various pages, while the news section is the only one that using the “blogging” feature.
The best thing about WordPress is the number of plugins available. Every time myself of Tzaddi have thought, “how can we do this”, a simple search of the codex allowed us to find someone who had the same idea as us. I can’t help but feel a sense of power when working with WP and look forward to continuing building sites using this blogging platform.
Complete our Readers Survey and you could win!
Dear Readers,
We’d like to get to know you better. Who are you, and what brought you here? What keeps you coming back? We’d be so grateful if you would take our quick Readers Survey.
Everyone who completes the survey will be entered to win $100 for:
- iTunes
- Amazon
- A donation to the charity of your choice
So what are you waiting for? Take the survey now. Hurry, the survey ends on December 31.
UPDATE: Thanks to all of our readers who completed the survey. We’ll be announcing the results and winner early January.