By Bryan Hoffman on 31 August, 2010
Not much has been written on this site about WordPress, but over the last few years we’ve pretty much become a WordPress only shop – with 90-95% of our projects built on the platform. Here’s why.
Every site we’ve created in the last few years has been developed within a Content Management System (CMS). This gives our clients easy access to update their site through a web browser, without the need for a complete knowledge of HTML.
We’ve tried a few over the years (Drupal, Joomla, Expression Engine) and found that, while they’re all a huge improvement over static html files, they each were lacking in some fundamental way or another. Even the early versions of WordPress were not suitable for full fledged site content management.
Continue reading “Why we use WordPress”
Posted in Software | Tagged CMS, WordPress |
By Bryan Hoffman on 25 August, 2010
If you happen to host a website with Spigot’s hosting company Cinch, you’ll know that we also provide email hosting with your account that is connected to your domain (e.g. joe@joes.com). It’s a decent service, but very basic. And I mean very basic. Here’s the account specs: We limit each hosting client to 5 email accounts, and each account has a mere 50mb inbox limit (We’ll often bump those numbers up if you need it, but that’s the basic set up). We’re careful to let everyone know that this service is basic, and if a more robust email hosting is needed, there are many options that can be looked at.
Continue reading “Host your own email with Google”
Posted in Business | Tagged Business, email, Google Apps |
By Bryan Hoffman on 16 July, 2010
A recent Boagworld podcast (article here) argues that the best time to hire a web designer is now, even if you’re not currently planning on redesigning your website.
Continue reading “When to hire a web designer”
Posted in Business | Tagged Business, realign, redesign |
By Bryan Hoffman on 11 May, 2010
Stop the leaks with a CRM
As a client-based small business it’s very important to keep track of clients and prospective clients and the communication between them. Emails, phone calls, in-person meetings, tasks, follow ups, introductions, handshakes, and games of charades – losing track can mean losing business.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) apps are designed to help wrangle all this information in easy to update and easy to digest ways. Finding the best one depends on your needs and your workflow.
Continue reading “Use a CRM to Get More Business”
Posted in Business | Tagged business tools, crm, Productivity |
By Bryan Hoffman on 26 April, 2010
Note: This post is a continutation of Sorry Typekit, you’re unusable (for now).
With the launch of the new spigotdesign.com site I was very excited about the possibilities of using @font-face to spice up the typography on the site. Typekit was to be my weapon of choice here but it turns out that it’s still unusable (for now).
Continue reading “Fontsquirrel.com saves @font-face”
Posted in Design | Tagged @font-face, Design, typography |
By Bryan Hoffman on 22 April, 2010
I’m a Huuuuge fan of the Webkit Open Source Project. It’s the engine behind Safari, Apple’s browser for both OS X and Windows. If you haven’t used it, give it a try. It’s my most favoritist browser. I prefer it’s Web Inspector over Firefox‘s Firebug plugin.
Webkit is the experimental version of Safari and you can download their nightly build and essentially stay on the bleeding edge of what web browsers can do. You too can be on the bleeding edge, as long as you don’t mind daily browser updates.
With the recent update of this site, I noticed a minor bug with the way Webkit renders the a:visited {background: transparent;} style. In every other browser the background is rendered as expected: transparent. In Webkit, however, the backgrounds were rendering in pure black.
To fix the problem, I simply changed background: transparent; to background: white; and all was well.
Posted in Programming | Tagged bug, css, webkit |
By Bryan Hoffman on 15 April, 2010
This week we launched a new version of the Park City Fire District site. The design remained the same (for the most part), while the back end was completely rebuilt on WordPress. View the site
Here’s a list of the site enhancements:
- Site-wide Google Translation
- Site-wide Search function
- Breadcrumb Navigation
- Improved News layout
- Improved Archives (now search articles by date, category, and tag)
- Admin Improvements
Continue reading “PCFD Site Update”
Posted in WordPress | Tagged expression engine, hybrid, WordPress |
By Bryan Hoffman on 13 April, 2010
With the launch of the new site I decided to try once again to give @font-face another try. I’ve been disappointed in the past with how most browsers render embedded fonts, including Firefox on both the Mac and PC. So when the Great and the Good in the web community began touting typekit as the answer we’ve all been pining for, I naturally needed to know. Being the good and the great disciple that I am.
Continue reading “Sorry Typekit, you’re unusable (for now)”
Posted in Design | Tagged @font-face, typekit, typography |
By Bryan Hoffman on 29 December, 2009
Small business R&D
The term ‘R&D’ is usually heard in context of big industrial corporations and the pharmaceutical industry. It also brings to mind big budgets, big spending, big dollars, big big big. The most successful big companies in the world all have a Research and Development division who’s sole purpose is to push the limits and find new innovations and technologies. Governments give out grants for this kind of research because it’s well known that innovation drives a big portion of our economy. There’s no reason these same ideals can’t be similarly implemented on the small business scale.
Big Ideas
Let’s add another ‘big’ to that list in the context of small businesses: big ideas. Even though small business owners don’t have big budgets or a dedicated R&D division, carving out time to stay ahead of what is new and innovative in their industries is essential to staying viable and in the vanguard. Finding efficiencies; New ways to sell goods; Expanding into new markets – these are the ideas that expand businesses and drive local economies. Most business owners and entrepreneurs understand this, but knowing where to find the innovations isn’t always easy. Here’s a few things to take to ensure you’re not falling behind:
Continue reading “Small Business R&D”
Posted in Business | Tagged ideas, research & development, small business |
By Bryan Hoffman on 20 December, 2009
Is there life after MobileMe?
About a month ago I received an email from Apple informing me that my MobileMe subscription was coming up for renewal. I’ve loved the services that MobileMe provides since signing up over a year ago, and had planned on keeping it going. But with the holidays coming up I decided to look into the possibility of dropping MobileMe while retaining the capabilities that it provides.
Turns out that it’s not only possible, but pretty darn easy to replicate most of the services MobileMe provides, for free. I’ll go through each service, in order of importance to me. Note: These steps were all taken with an iPhone and a mac, but similar options exist for PC/Other Phone users.
Continue reading “Dropping MobileMe”
Posted in Communication | Tagged business tools, MobileMe, Software |
By Bryan Hoffman on 6 November, 2009
If you have a website, it’s virtually a given that you have a contact page with a form on it for collecting messages from your users. Pretty much everyone does. Which is why if you run a query for “forms” in the WordPress plugin directory, you’ll be overwhelmed with hundreds of results. Some of the most notable come up on the first page, including WP Contact Form and Contact Form 7.
The latter has been my form plugin of choice, for its simplicity and flexibility. That is, until I heard about Gravity Forms.
Continue reading “Gravity Forms vs Every Other Form Plugin”
Posted in WordPress | Tagged contact form 7, gravity forms, WordPress |
By Bryan Hoffman on 24 September, 2009
Chax 3.0
Chax comes to Snow Leopard
A while back I came across Chax, a great little add on for iChat that, among other things, allowed me to consolidate my AIM and Google Talk accounts into a single contact window. It’s never made sense to have separate lists for each account, so this little gem made iChat more useable, and ultimately allowed me to stick with it rather than using an alternative application such as Adium (I prefer iChat over Adium for the screen sharing feature).
Continue reading “iChat: Multiple Accounts, One Contact List”
Posted in Communication | Tagged Google Talk, iChat, Snow Leopard |
By Bryan Hoffman on 8 September, 2009
In the early days of Spigot Design, Flash based websites were all the rage. We’ve long since learned new tricks, and as a result have pretty much dropped Flash based work all together. Not a lot has been written on why we’ve given it up, so perhaps it’s time (although here’s an early tidbit from the Park Record).
Continue reading “Why we don't do Flash”
Posted in Business | Tagged flash, html, SEO |