With much more detailed information about their products and multiple ways for visitors to get in contact with GVS, the new website will help GVS grow as they expand their business.

Check out their website today to learn more about the Port-a-Probe vacuum grain sampler!

www.portaprobe.com

I think the general direction Google is headed in is great–as designers we’re happy to know that our sites will not only be judged by their technical aspects but their aesthetic appeal as well. I’m sure there will be some rough patches as they work to figure this out, but I like the direction they’re going!

To see the site in action and learn more about Officials Against Cancer’s great mission, visit their website here: www.officialsagianstcancer.com

(website) wireframe

- a basic visual guide used in interface design to suggest the structure of a website and relationships between its pages – Wikipedia

Wireframes are a great way to get ideas out into the open quickly for discussion.  You obviously don’t need anything fancy to create a basic wireframe or idea sketch (heck, a stick and patch of dirt work fine!), but we’ve found that adding a little browser chrome really helps to facilitate the process and communicate the rough ideas more clearly to a broader audience.

You can download our tool for creating wireframes for free here:

FHD Wireframe Tool – PDF

And here are a few basic principles for creating successful wireframes:

• Take a layered approach. Start by thinking about the general flow of your website or application, outlining the main actions and user experience first. Then move to more detailed sketches, creating basic layouts for each of the individual pages.
• Don’t be too literal. Your wireframes will provide the most value if they are quick sketches done in succession–broad strokes to capture main ideas, not detail oriented designs. Your pixel-perfect designs will come later.
• Embrace the power of iteration. Paper is cheap, and although you don’t want to be wasteful, going through a few sheets at this stage of the process will save boatloads later on in the process. Don’t be afraid to sketch out a half-baked idea to see where it leads.  Ask for feedback, then incorporate that feedback into your sketches. Read about usability, and follow best practices for those techniques which are commonplace and need to be recognizable and easy for users. Build upon early sketches.
• Remove all unnecessary elements. Once you’re happy with the direction things are headed, look back over the designs to see if you really need every part of the design. Chances are you have an unnecessary feature or two that doesn’t add enough value to justify keeping.  If this is the case, remove it early on (trust me, it will be much easier to start development, and, surprisingly, your users will thank you later when you give them a simple interface!).

So start sketching! You don’t have to be an illustrator, or even in the design business to gain from sketching out your ideas. If you’ve got a website and sense that some aspect should be made simpler or easier to use, use this basic wireframe tool to communicate your idea to your web developer!  They’ll thank you for the clear communication.

We were able to successfully pull in an existing RSS feed within five minutes of skimming the documentation. It then only took a few minutes of tweaks to the PHP and CSS to get a finished product. Wow. Maybe the name comes from being “easy as pie?”

Need to incorporate an RSS feed into your website? We highly recommend you check out SimplePie!

1. Copy and paste all of your content into a Word document
2. Export as PDF
3. Upload to your website
4. Modify page to include link to PDF

It seems simple enough, but one can quickly see the drawbacks of using this manual method (ex. possible errors at all stages, can’t upgrade look of documents without recreating each individually, far too many steps to be doing on a regular basis…).

FPDF

However, if you’re using a content management system you can very easily automate the entire process.  The key is to use a PDF creation library such as FPDF.  This free library (the F in FPDF stands for “free”) is easy to use and allows you to create standard PDF documents using nothing more than a few lines of PHP.

Article2pdf

If you’re using WordPress the process is even simpler.  Article2pdf is a free plugin from Marc Schieferdecker that utilizes the FPDF library.  The installation process is like all other WordPress plugins, and it comes with several configuration options and good documentation.

To use Article2pdf, you simply create a template PDF that serves as the basis for all of your PDFs to be generated.  The plugin does the rest of the work in adding the content to your template design.  With the ability to create template files, I’ve found that I can control nearly everything about the look of the PDFs that I need to.  Of the few things I’ve changed within the plugin code itselft, all were cosmetic details that bugged me as a designer–I could have lived without making any changes if I was willing to accept a slightly less refined look in the end.

So quit manually generating PDFs for everything on your website–with FPDF and Article2pdf you can completely automate the process and use the hours saved to generate more great content for your users!

Metrics – The basic WordPress RSS feed doesn’t give you much of an idea about your readers.  Burning your feeds allows you access to important metrics such as how many people are subscribed to your feed, where they are located, how many unsubscribed readers are accessing your content, etc.

Social Media -Under the optimize tab in your Feedburner account exists an option for FeedFlare–a super easy way to add interactivity to your RSS and email subscriptions.  While the options are somewhat limited, the big names such as Digg, Facebook, del.icio.us and a few others are there and easy to use.

Email – Feedburner makes it easy to deliver your content through email.  Under the publicize tab in your account settings, simply enable email subscriptions and copy and paste the snippet of code into your template.  Your emails will be delivered at a specified time every day that you post something on your blog.  While you don’t have the same degree of control as might be provided by an HTML email service such as MailChimp, your content gets distributed without any work on your part.

Future Modifications – Feedburner routes your feeds through their own servers to provide the benefits described above.  While this may be a drawback to some because your feed address is now of the form feeds.feedburner.com/FlintHillsDesignSnippets instead of something associated with your domain like flinthillsdesign.com/blog/feed, the upshot is that now if your blog moves or your feed address changes, your subscribed readers will not be lost!

You can find WP-Database-Backup here. Thanks to Austin Matzko for such a great modification to WordPress!