Fresh

While sorting through the cupboards in my bathroom this past weekend I was puzzled to discover that I owned 23 bottles of lotion: some of these nearly empty, some barely touched, and others well past their expiration date. This got me thinking as to why I seem to forget about all the products I already have at my finger tips, and instead go out and buy the first new item I hear about promising firming, moisturizing, and/or bronzing benefits in a bottle. Like myself, I often witness clients honing in on new technology, overly excited to snatch it up and apply it to their own online marketing objectives, before first asking themselves the question “Do I really need this?”

While change is good, there is something to be said to having a purpose behind each change. We are consumers by nature and always want that new best thing, but why not first take a look at the tools you already have at your disposal and assess if you are indeed using them to their full potential.

Here are some questions to ask when considering whether or not to invest in the next latest and greatest marketing tactic. These might help you figure out if your money is best spent on what’s new or if it’d be better spent fine-tuning what you’re already utilizing.

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While much of the country is still reeling from the effects of massive winter-ness, PDX has had an untimely run-in with Spring for the last week or so. Our cabin fever has been relieved for the moment, and so our thoughts turn towards happy hour on the patio and unplanned use of vacation days.

Now, some of us have a not-so-healthy idea of fun (spring cleaning, anyone?). Of course, often it’s necessary to purge clutter and bad habits, and spring is as good a time to do that as any. In this spirit we wanted to take a moment to talk about some of the best practices we’ve found when working with your design files. Good habits can make the difference between a seamless development process and a complete nightmare, one that will try everyone’s patience and waste valuable time. We’ve even included a little treat at the end to help get you started. Ready to clean house?

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Because we have a team of developers here at eROI and a plethora of projects to build and maintain, it is more than likely that the code written by one individual will need to be edited by another developer at some point in time.  When an edit to a site comes in, the original author of the code will inevitably, at one point or another, be on vacation, be sick, or no longer work here (yes, it happens, sadly).  This is why it is so imperative for our team (and any development team) to follow certain guidelines to keep our code clean and legible, so that anyone can jump onto a project, easily see what the code is doing, and start making edits quickly.  Here are five ways to keep your code readable and maintainable:

1. Indent Your Code
   This is number one on the list for a reason.  No other thing you can do can help or hinder the readability of your code than the indentation style (or lack thereof).  Nested child elements should be indented one level more than parent elements in order to show a visual hierarchy.  Opening and closing tags in HTML should be on the same indentation level in most cases; items inside the opening/closing tags need to be indented one additional level.

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When I was down in Miami for a recent conference, I had the good fortune of staying a few extra days to visit my grandparents in Southern Florida. Despite being in their late eighties, my grandparents are full of life and still have their wits about them. And, after being married for almost 65 years, they’re still completely in love. They’re incessant bickering over the years is legendary, and is one of the most hilarious things to experience.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that my grandma pretty much runs the show. Upon my arrival I usually have a small list of chores to help them out with. On the list this year were the usual suspects: dusting light bulbs on the ladder, lifting heavy stuff, a lot of Windexing…and replace the computer!

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I am the bridge between two very different users of technology – my mom and my daughter. The thing they have most in common is that everything in this digital world is new to them. My mom has the advantage of living through inventions such as a car phone and answering machine and just about everything is new to my 2 year old daughter. My job is to help them navigate through this fast paced, hands free, Google alert world.

I am about to make a visit home and my mom wants a new phone. Frankly, she barely uses her existing phone but she wants to start communicating with my younger siblings the only way they know how – via text. I don’t want to send her into the phone store alone because she will walk away more confused then when she walked in. Just throw out a few buzzwords like tweet and app and she’ll be halfway to the car.

Nothing “makes sense” to her and rightly so. After doing a few trainings on Windows, how to double click the mouse and avoiding the pop up ad I have come to see that not everything is as easy-to-use as it claims. With her I like to eliminate the clutter and focus on just a couple features that will truly make her life easier and more fun.

Making my daughter’s life more fun is the easy part. She has a blast copying everything we do and part of that entails trailing us around with her fake phone and pushing buttons, or as she calls them “butts”. The amazing thing is when she has my touchscreen phone in her hands she already knows how to navigate through the icons and slide the windows up and down. She can pull up the pictures and scroll through them by herself. Very impressive and a thumbs up to user interface designers. It seems we are finally at a point where working these gadgets is intuitive. At least for a toddler!

While I’m not actively pushing digital devices and Internet browsing upon her, we’re still happily watching the old standby television, I do need to be aware of what is happening as one day she will be showing me what to do.

Keeping  up with new inventions is top of mind. So far so good as I work in the interactive field but there will be one day when she is taking me to some store to decode and translate what to do and what to get as if I don’t speak the language. If the world seems fast paced today, I don’t know what it will be like tomorrow… but I am sure it will hit me over the head in the form of an eye rolling teenager.

For now, I am good to go, channeling my efforts as a happy medium minding the generational gap. I’m confident I can find my mom the right phone (so there won’t be a need for the technical support package) and keep the electronic toys at bay for my daughter so we can control the pace… for now.

Perhaps I should just send the two of them out for a day of shopping and stay home with a coffee and that large, smudgy black and white package that my parents call the newspaper.

My parents have a love affair with technology.

Let’s take my dad, for example. He’s in his sixties and super tech-savvy when it comes to computers, software, and general computer hardware. If the computer isn’t working, he’ll find a way to troubleshoot it, reboot it, reinstall something, call Apple Support, or whatever it takes to get it up and running again. He subscribes to MacWorld magazine, loves to learn new tips and tricks, and helps his co-workers when their computers begin dying. He does not work in the technology field; he just has a passion to learn new things, think analytically, and solve problems.

My mom is pretty savvy when it comes to using technology to connect with people. She was one of the first people I knew (outside of eROI, that is) to create a Facebook profile and use it to stay in touch with friends and family from across the country. She’s connected to some of my friends (that’s an entirely different story and post) and will quite often know about what’s going on with them before I do! Crazy, but true.

I would imagine that my parents are pretty similar to a lot of other folks from their generation. They love technology – to a certain extent – but shy away from things that they either deem irrelevant to them or that are daunting to learn. My folks tend to have a hunger to learn and try new things, so they adapt really well to new technology.

These two clips below – the first paying homage to the fathers and the second to the mothers – were funny representations of parents trying to adopt new technology, and using their son, Darren, as their teacher. They come from a video series on Current, called SuperNews!, and I found them particularly great because they poke fun at what I’m sure many of us twenty- and thirty-somethings have experienced with our own parents.

I’m curious about those real-life technology scenarios that you’ve experienced. Anything similar to these videos? Any funny Mom and Dad situations? Please share and commiserate!

Recently one of our designers came by and and asked me about how much actual control we could have over the aesthetics of scrollbars. I told him what I often respond with: “If you can design it, we can build it.”

Although this statement is fundamentally true, stylizing scrollbars creates a unique set of obstacles. Since scrollbars are handled by the browser window itself and not the website, controlling their appearance and functionality becomes more work than simply using CSS to skin the elements. Fortunately, there are plenty of options out there but finding the right one for your project isn’t always easy.

Styling scrollbars with CSS

One way to start stylizing the scrollbar attributes is to use CSS. A quick cross-browser test will show you that this isn’t a viable route. Ironically (to us developers) Internet Explorer is the only browser to fully support the scrollbar attributes allowing for an easy, quick way to customize your scrollbars’ look and feel. This may have been acceptable when IE had a 90% browser market share but those days are over and let’s face it — the designers pushing for these changes all use Macs.

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In honor of Valentine’s Day’s impending arrival, I’ve compiled some images that I found inspiring in a sweet, adorable, lovey-dovey sort of way. We’re working on incorporating more posts which are image-based and simply put – inspiring to us, so you can expect more content like this from Fresh in the upcoming weeks!

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Three years ago I began working on websites as a young account coordinator/project manager. I did not understand what CMS (that’s Content Management System for you kids at home) stood for or let alone what the difference was between open source and proprietary software. But, that didn’t matter because clients wanted a way to update their content that didn’t involve them taking classes at community college. Back in those days eROI had three CMS options to offer:

Marqui – A hosted proprietary system, which wasn’t terrible, but definitely was not worth the money and developing for it seemed to be a pain. I averaged 10 calls a month from two sites that had been live for years.

CMS/MS – An open source solution that served the purpose of a basic CMS with the best price around (FREE!). The only problem was that it was difficult to use from an Admin perspective, and was not as flexible for developers to be a truly powerful CMS.

Contribute – A trimmed down version of Dreamweaver by Adobe sold on Amazon and came in a real box. I won’t go into those forgotten nightmares too deeply, but let’s just say the software in the box had about as much value as an old AOL CD. The amount of time wasted trying to get this software to function as it was billed to could have been used to go to Mars by now.

Having had clients on all of these systems made me completely hate CMS systems. (more…)

Who has a phone with a mobile browser? Um…EVERYONE! Yeah, nowadays, people don’t just have cell phones, they have a mini computer in the palm of their hand able to find anything online within seconds.

On the top of everyone’s priority list, in the web world, is how to go mobile. One option is to build a whole new version of your site so that it will look good on a mobile device, but not everyone has the time and/or budget for that. If your site is already in WordPress, then you have another option…plugins!

There are several handy plugins that will make your current site mobile friendly. I’ve been tasked to find a plugin for our blogs here at eROI. After doing my research, I’ve found a few that seem to top the list and do a great job out of the box.
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