Old Habits and New Means: The Lonely Artist

July 30th, 2010   Posted by tyler in Friends, Inspiration

We all know that typical imagery of the tortured artist…the individual with an odd sense of style and penchant for nonconformity.

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Using and Understanding Your Demographic

July 19th, 2010   Posted by tyler in Business, Featured

So you’re a manager of a restaurant and you decided you need to advertise online. We might have a discussion like this:

Me: “That’s great! Online advertising is the best way to reach a huge customer base.  So, Imaginary Restaurant Manager, who do you want to advertise too?”

Manager: “How can I reach everybody?”

Mr. Imaginary Restaurant Manager might seem crazy but for his business he actually has the right idea.  He should be diversifying his marketing strategy.  One of the biggest challenges I face when meeting new clients is to get them to think about the demographics they want to reach.  I worked for…

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Tea Time with Sarah Rose

July 13th, 2010   Posted by Dara Katz in Friends, Inspiration, Interview, Uncategorized

Sara Rose Tea always seemed like a peculiar concept to me: put some dried leafy stuff in hot water, add saccharin supplement, and be soothed.

Perhaps Starbucks enlisted me at too early an age with Grande Caramel Macchiatos and its many variations. How could I even compare leaf-flavored hot water to a caramel chocolaty caffeinated shake that my mom somehow allowed me to drink before school?

In the last year, though, I’ve voyaged out to discover what the big deal was, why my dad, who remembers nobody’s name remembers Earl Grey’s when he’s sick, why my roommate always makes a cup of chamomile before…

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How automobile dealers and Big Ticket retailers can leverage Social Media

July 8th, 2010   Posted by joshuasinason in Business

Any agency that earns its paycheck will tell you that the first thing you want to do is find the right medium for your message. If you are advertising for an old folks’ home you certainly have a place to advertise online, but it probably isn’t on Twitter or YouTube. (It looks like the only way to trend these days is to go to jail or leave your NBA team.) Conversely if you are working with a Hot Topic-esque retailer direct mailers or newspapers are probably not going to get you in front of the eyes you want to be…

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Google Me: Can the biggest company on the internet stand up to Facebook?

July 2nd, 2010   Posted by joshuasinason in Business, Featured, Friends, News

In a nutshell Google Me is a social network that doesn’t have the restrictions that come with G-Mail like Google Buzz did.

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A methodical look at Hotel booking engines

June 30th, 2010   Posted by tyler in Findings, Inspiration, News, Usability

5 major brand hotels sites evaluated by users in a formal study. See the results.

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Myths and Misconceptions about Digital Advertising

June 24th, 2010   Posted by joshuasinason in Business, Inspiration, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing

There is so much information on the Internet that it can be hard to separate what is substantial and what are the mad ramblings of a 12 year old on his parents’ computer. It’s not surprising that amongst the photoshoped pictures of Bigfoot, fake celebrity deaths, and fan-made film trailers, there is a lot of misinformation that becomes commonly thought of as fact. This is especially true when it comes to subjects like advertising where lots of people have strong opinions and are willing to share them. (I’ve had more than a few people tell me “Advertising doesn’t work on…

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The rise of ‘Share’ & ‘Follow’ on the web

June 23rd, 2010   Posted by tyler in Design

This paradigm of large social media sites being omnipresent (even on other people’s sites!) is still a fairly new one, so it’s not surprising the design community doesn’t have it completely figured out yet…

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Social Media for Independent Retailers

June 16th, 2010   Posted by joshuasinason in Business, Findings, Marketing

It can be easy to build a social media presence when you are working with an established brand. Potbelly Sandwiches already has a big enough following that it’s really just a case of making sure your customer knows about your Facebook or Twitter page and feels that going there is essential. If you’re starting your own business working independently from the ground up, well then things get a little trickier. The bad news is that, if you are running an independent jewelry store for example, you’re never going to have the advertising budget of one of the chain stores. The…

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Frontend Optimization, pt. 5

June 12th, 2010   Posted by steve in Code, Inspiration, Tutorials

In the fifth and final part of our multi-part Frontend Optimization series, I’ll cover my notes from Steve Souder’s “High Performance Websites” and “Even Faster Websites” books that can help optimize your images and javascript code.

Optimize Javascript Code

  1. Minimize DOM Access. Manipulating the DOM is very resource intensive for browsers.
  2. Smart Event Handlers. Use Event Delegation. You can put on event handler on a container div and then figure out which button inside that div was actually clicked in the function to be executed.
  3. Reduce size of private functions (those called only within the js itself, not those called in other documents). So function foobar() would become…
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