While the Super Bowl is over we can still appreciate the best ads from the game. Here are our favorite in no particular order. Let us know what ad is your favorite! Want more? Check out our favorite ads from the 2012 Super Bowl.
Websites like many technology-based products and services, age in dog years. You may wishfully think your website is young and spry at 5 years old, but the reality of this particular life cycle reflects less of the original vibrant youth and more of the stuck-in-your-ways approach to middle age.
It isn’t that your website wasn’t awesome five years ago. It was. But look how far we’ve come since then. The very first original iPhone was released 5 years ago this June. The iPad itself was only a glimmer in Steve Jobs’s eye. Smartphones and tablets have completely reshaped the way we interact online, so much so that we can barely imagine our lives without them. And now it’s time for your website to catch up with the trends, starting with responsive design.
Web Design Ledger wrote a fantastic article with keen insight into web design trends this year. Rather than reinvent the metaphorical wheel, I thought I’d share their article “10 WEB DESIGN TRENDS IN 2012″.
I don’t generally go out of my way to change something I’m happy with, but about a year ago a friend of mine suggested that I try Google Chrome as a web browser. Now a year later, while I don’t have much bad to say about my old go-to browser Firefox, what I can say is that Chrome has changed the way I browse the internet.
If you haven’t tried Chrome yet I suggest you give it a try. Looking for Google Chrome Web Store? You can find it here.
Most of the websites you browse use one of a handful of “safe” fonts that are preinstalled on all Mac and Windows computers; the most common include Arial, Verdanna and Georgia. The benefits to using these fonts are that they scale well and they work great for body text on websites. But what about your page titles, headers, etc? Does everything need to look bland?
New technologies in font replacement now allow you to embed custom fonts, giving you the option to explore hundreds of font options rather than a handful. The gap between a web designer’s concept and a coded webpage grows smaller every day thanks in part to font embedding technology.
What’s our favorite solution? We’ve been using Google Web Fonts, the service is free and the font library expanding daily. Let us know about your favorite service! What font do you use on your website?
I’ve shared on Google Buzz, customized my iGoogle page and even heard of Orkut (yeah, right?), so the popular tendency towards skepticism on Google’s latest attempt at social media is understandable. Facebook is huge, 750 million users and going stronger than ever! Why then am I able to say with confidence that Google+ will work?
Let’s go back to Facebook for a moment. Facebook has become the world’s largest social network and in doing so has also become a powerful marketing tool. Businesses are able to leverage the power of Facebook to stay in touch with their customer base and communicate on a more personal level than ever before. So why does Google+ stand a chance? Simple. Facebook is too large and too connected for many of us, making social media feel somewhat like your girlfriend shouting at you from the other room while the TV is on and the Brewers just went to a commercial break. There’s a lot of background noise. Now pretend that your boss just called and you accidentally answered on speakerphone. Many of us don’t want to mix our professional and personal lives together yet with the business world so prominent on Facebook while any post or picture feels like a unnecesary risk to our professional career.
Meet Google+, while still in Beta, offers a different approach to how you share or “post” content. The idea is simple, whenever you add someone or receive a friend request the person must be put into a “circle” which is essentially a category like “Friends”, “Family”, “Coworkers”, etc etc. When you post a photo, video or write something you choose which group/s of people see your information. Rather than try to explain everything that Google+ is doing, check out the video above for a more thorough explanation!
To get Google+ head over to their website and sign up. If you’d like to add me as a friend on Google+ search for the name “Jared Chelf”. Cheers!
