Ok, so this is actually a second draft of this blog post. What I was writing was just a bunch of long winded horse shit that most of you wouldn’t care to read. So in short, here are a few of my thoughts on iOS 7 after spending a few days with it.
The Southern Ohioan Who Became Northernized, getting to know one of Go Grow's Summer Interns - Danielle Shuff.
From Philly to Findlay, getting to know one of Go Grow's Summer Interns - Daisy Woodside.
Day in and day out I get questions about social media marketing in the business world – everything from what ones should we use, to should we even do it. Social media is a dangerous territory. You have to remember, when your business post on social media, you are instantly tried in a court of public opinion. And trust me when I tell you that court can be harsher than any court of law (take a look at how badly it went for Amy’s Baking Co recently) and how many people engaged with their Facebook page. Out of all those comments, there were exactly 3 positive ones. I counted.
When you sit down to draw, design, or create what is it that you draw inspiration from? Maybe it’s the music you are listening to or the weather outside or maybe even a cool shirt you saw at the store. Regardless of how, you are pulling inspiration from somewhere. When you realize where that inspiration is coming from, it is much easier to channel it and be able to motivate yourself at the drop of a dime. As an artist or designer, there is always the creative rut or design block that you go through. If you can eliminate time spent digging yourself out of the rut and put that time towards awesome designs, not only will you be a happier designer, but your clients will be happy as well.
This past Friday I attended a digital marketing event at the University of Toledo. While the event did not focus much at all on web design or development, the topics did briefly come up during presentations, as well as, the Q&A sessions after the presentations. It was during one of these Q&A sessions that a presenter made a statement that really struck a nerve with me. Without directly quoting them, they said something to the effect that instead of thinking mobile first, we could venture so far to think mobile only.
Birthdays are a great time. A day of celebration focused on you. Go Grow just had its first birthday last month, and the day passed without a whole lot of fanfare. The team here at Go Grow is all about throwing a party, so why didn’t we? Because we were already focused on Go Grow. As the birthday approached, we realized that it isn’t enough anymore for people to know we are the best in our field. We have to prove it. So, we relaunched our website, and we rolled out a couple of other changes – the LinkedIn group Unraveld and
Communication is and will always be key to a successful B2C relationship. Whether your communication is face-to-face or just via email it is important to fully explain yourself as well as your methods for producing your designs. If the communication is lacking in any part, the relationship as well as the project may be in danger of an end result that is not what either party wants. There are some very basic but very important things that both the client and business can do to avoid this outcome.
I recently read an article on this new image optimization technique dubbed as "Compressive Images." If you would like, you can read the same article on the Filament Group's website.
I decided to experiment with the technique for myself because, needless to say, I was skeptical of it. What basically happens is large, poor quality images are being scaled down in size by the browser and produce a nearly retina quality image with substantial saving on file size. On a plain old desktop monitor the image looks just as it would if it were a natural sized "Save for Web" image. The magic really happens on mobile devices with higher pixel density displays.
Towards the end of last year we decided it was time to make changes to our website. Like most companies we analyzed our site to see what could be upgraded and what changes would be feasible to make. Here are a few brief takeaways from our own site review:
The old site was coded in PHP and launched without a blog. A blog was later added onto the site using PivotX. While PivotX worked great for our blog and was capable of managing an entire website, we never implemented it as a backend for the rest of the site. This site was also adaptive meaning that desktop, laptops and tablets were served the "full" website and a mobile version was served to smartphones by changing out stylesheets using media queries. Go Grow has also grown up quite a bit since the initial site launch. While we have a fondness for the cutesy child like illustrations that made up the old website, we ultimately decided that it just didn't fit our brand and market to our client base as well as it used to. Go Grow had grown up. The web had grown up too and now it was time for our website to grow up. Rather than trying to salvage anything from the current site at the time, we decided to rebuild from the ground up.