Bluelime Media - Interactive Solutions with a Twist

Open ID - easier Internet logins

For anyone who spends time on the Internet and takes advantage of social media technologies in particular remembering a growing list of passwords and login details can be a challenge. Thankfully, there is a solution in the making in the form of OpenID.

Open ID is an open identity system that allows you to use one single identification (or digital identification) across many of your favorite sites. Participant sites include the likes of Ma.gnolia, pbwiki, 37 Signals, Technorati and Plaxo.

With Open ID, you register once for an ID then use that to identify yourself on different sites. The result: you don’t have to remember numerous login and password details. It makes surfing much faster, more secure and less of a pain.

Developed by the OpenID Foundation an organisation that was formed in June 2007 to help promote, protect and enable the OpenID technologies and community, the group is quickly expanding and some of the behemoths in the industry are now OpenID providers.

To claim your ID use a reputable providers such as MYID, Claim ID or Vidoop and make the process easier by using a downloadable browser plugin like Vidoop’s to manage your standard logins.

At last my brain can take a rest and doesn’t have to store all those endless password details.

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.

Inspiring Blog Designs

Smashing Magazine has published another great list for inspiration: 45 More Excellent Blog Designs. It’s a great illustration of how much variation there can be in blog design.

Perhaps the most interesting is Chris Contolini’s mash-up of Google maps with his blog.

I also enjoyed Ideate’s Television-styled YouTube player - even though the video was no longer available, it’s a nice treatment.

Google Calendar for your Website

Louise’s great suggestion for putting your business on the Google map reminded me of another way to use Google’s tools for your business: a Google Calendar. You can share your calendar with selected viewers, say, to keep your family or partners in the loop. If you want the whole world to know when your Tupperware party is, you can make your calendar public to anyone with just a few clicks. (Do they still have Tupperware parties? OK, maybe you want to list your naughty toys party instead. Whatever floats your boat…)

You can take it even a step further, and include a public calendar in your own website to list your events or schedule. When you sign up for a Google Calendar you can create more than one calendar — so if you had a Bed & Breakfast, for instance, a calendar for each room could show when it’s booked.

There are certainly more advanced and customized ways of doing some of these things, but this is some great functionality if you’re on a budget.

How to add a public calendar to your WordPress site

If you’re comfortable with the teensiest bit of HTML tweaking this is really easy to do.

1. Create a public calendar at google.com/calendar
2. Make a page in WordPress
3. Go to the Google Calendar Details screen and copy the code for including the calendar in your website
4. Paste it into your WordPress page. Note, you’ll need to switch from Visual view to Code view in your WordPress editor. You may also need to adjust the width and height to fit your page layout.

Your website calendar page will be kept up-to-date because it loads all the events you add within the Google Calendar interface, each time your page is visited.

That’s it. Neat trick, eh?

Ecommerce Holiday Web Design Gallery

Yesterday I wrote a post about Nick’s holiday icons which you can use to spruce up your website for Christmas. If you are in need of inspiration, make sure to check out the Get Elastic blog. Linda Bustos has put together great examples of ecommerce websites, logos and holiday gift cards.

Miracle product solves design problems

If you’re unhappy with your current website or your latest brochure, why not try the Make My Logo Bigger Cream. Who says design takes skill and creativity? Pshaw!

Thanks to Karole for sending the link.

Web Marketing is about Serving Searchers

If you’ve read our blog for a while you might have noticed we often quote Gerry McGovern. His article Honest Marketing Works on the Web contains not only a good rant about the frustrations of airline ticket pricing, but some words of wisdom as well:

The Web shifts the balance of power away from the organization and towards the customer. It is the customer who searches. It is the customer who compares. It is the customer who evaluates. It is the customer who is highly impatient, with their finger always on the Back button.

Web marketing is not about finding fools. It is rather about serving searchers. We go to the Web because we have a question and we want an answer. Please answer the question, Mr. Marketer.

The importance of the text on your website cannot be overstated. You might be tempted to focus on how pretty or cool-looking it is. But if your text isn’t doing it’s job, there’s less of a chance that people will find the site in the first place or stick around once they get there. Here are some of the things we recommend to make the most of your site’s content:

• Ensure the important text is visible to search engines in the way the site is built. Your site should be built with current web standards and including text alternatives to any images or flash that contain important text.
• Avoid linking to PDF or Word documents, which the search engines can’t scan as well as a web page (if at all).
• Consider using the services of a professional writer who’s experienced with writing for the web and search engine optimization of content.
• Aim for a design that supports the text rather than undermining it. Part of that is making it easy-to-use: clear navigation, standard scrollbars, allowing the text to be resized without breaking the design, etc.

Highlights from An Event Apart Seattle

One of the things I love about being a web designer is that there is always more to learn, be it from other web specialists or your clients. Last week at An Event Apart Seattle Christine and I had the chance to learn from some true experts. The speakers were not only masters in their fields, but engaging and generous with their knowledge.

Here are some highlights:

• Watching Eric Meyer write CSS (you know you’re a geek when…)
• Jeffrey Zeldman’s talk on “Writing the User Interface” confirmed my experience: the words in a web design matter much more than you might think and can really make a difference in how visitors use your site. So long as it invites clicking, it matters more what a button says than what it looks like.
• Peaking into other designer’s processes, from beautiful sketchbooks to user research.
• I enjoyed Jeff Veen’s succinct message which shows the benefits of doing your design research up front vs. the cost of changing your mind partway through the build. He also discussed why web design is so much more complex now than it was in the early days of the web, when everyone using the web were of the same type (geeks).
• Shawn Henry shared insights for ensuring your site is accessible to varying abilities; from folks who read the web with braille or speech readers to limited vision users — who magnify screens to an amazing degree, but want the same site that was designed for regularly sighted users. Bottom line: there is no substitute for engaging disabled users in the design process if you want to build truly accessible sites. Her book on accessibility is free online.
• Andy Budd shared how a delightful user experience is worth more than the sum of it’s parts in the loyalty that can create.

Enhance your website with video footage

We recently launched a new website for an innovative new development project on the Fraser River in Coquitlam. The Village at Fraser Mills will be a mixed-use community that integrates industrial and employment uses with residential, commercial, and recreational opportunities. The purpose of the website is to inform the community on the progress of the development as well as educate. One way this is achieved is by displaying a link to an interesting video which talks about the history of the Village.

Adding video is a great way to enhance your website and is simple enough to do. Professional organizer, Linda Chu, has appeared several times on TV and using her VCR, recorded the videos on tape, we converted them to Quicktime and posted them on her site. The process couldn’t be more simple.

More and more, we’re seeing video that has been integrated in flash. I recently discovered the RouxBe website which does this superbly. RouxBe is the ideal resource for people looking to expand their culinary repertoire and improve their skills in the kitchen. They offer online instructional cooking videos that walk you step by step through each delicious recipe. Their videos are some of the best I’ve seen on the web.

And more importantly, my husband has been doing much more cooking these days!