There’s not a bad seat in the house!
Brandon Lucas, Partner and Business Director
Made the trek down to Alpharetta/Atlanta a couple weekends ago to meet up with some old friends and visit a client venue of ours, Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre at Encore Park.
I’ve been to a lot of amphitheaters over the years (for business and pleasure) and to be quite honest I was expecting more of the same. And then I got there. My reaction was….THIS is what an outdoor amphitheatre should be and feel like.
carbonhouse has designed and developed a new website for Citizens Business Bank Arena in Ontario, California.
The site is built on carbonhouse’s Venuelements system, tailored exclusively for major event-driven facilities.
We have often wanted to take a sledgehammer or stick of dynamite to prospective clients’ websites (and no doubt they did, too).
Carhartt, maker of industrial strength clothing, has a new site design. In order to see it, first you get the chance to “blow up” their old design. From the rubble, the new design emerges. Clever! And it’s viral.
It sure beats the awful old practice of putting up an “under construction” page while a new site is being built (we’ve advised against that many times). Even if your current site is less than desirable, it’s better than no presence at all. Still, it’s fun to celebrate when you do take it down and launch fresh.
Any creative shop, large or small, will understand what happens when you ask a client to supply a Vector or EPS logo for a project. You inevitably receive a JPEG version at 72 dpi, ripped from their website or a partner’s site. This happens too many times to count. Since most of our focus at carbonhouse is web-related, we can generally address these bitmap messes and make them work. But what happens when you need to place the logo on a dark background and the supplied logo is stuck to a white ground? There are many different hacks to achieve a workable end product—some of which are more successful than others. I wanted to share an Adobe Fireworks tip that can make it easier to work with logos on dark backgrounds.
Remember, this is an Adobe Fireworks-only tip. Read the rest of this entry »
carbonhouse has launched a new website to showcase our VenuElements℠ content management solution.
VenuElements is specifically tailored for venues, facilities and performing arts centers. It currently powers the websites for a number of major facilities around the U.S., including Blumenthal Performing Arts Center, Prudential Center, Sprint Center, Target Center, RBC Center and more.
Special thanks to Jason Keath of the Design Charlotte blog, who wrote a detailed article on carbonhouse’s unique web development offerings known as VenuElements.
The carbonhouse-design website for Womble Carlyle grabbed top honors in Lawyers Weekly’s Best Law Firm Web Site competition for 2008, winning Best in Contest, Best of NC Large Law Firms and Best of SC Large Law Firms. It was the second time in two years that the firm has won best overall web site. Last year, it shared the honor with another North Carolina firm.One judge in the competition said, “Womble Carlyle stands out from the pack for its volume of original content, its innovative online techniques and technologies, and its clean, professional and inviting design.”We are thrilled that Womble Carlyle achieved this recognition once again. The site proves that adding features like RSS news feeds, videos and related blogs are all integral to enhancing any professional service firm’s image online. Womble Carlyle is in an industry that historically is considered stodgy, yet they raise the bar (figuratively) with solid design, usability and frequently updated content. They are forward-thinking and willing to experiment, which is refreshing vs. the majority of generic, online brochure sites in the legal profession.
Google’s recent announcement about their Social Graph API makes one wonder if website owners and developers will figure out new and creative ways to try to influence/manipulate/deceive Google or other search engines.
The idea is that Google is now indexing FOAF files and the XFN microformats to find and display publicly declared relationships between sites. Read the post on the Google Operating System blog for a good summary of how this works.
How linking strategies will evolve to include these self-declared links is unclear, but the idea that they will be indexed does make the effort seem worthwhile. Especially considering meta tags (keywords and descriptions) are ignored by most search engines, making other page elements more relevant. More indexed links theoretically should increase a given site’s popularity. If the “socially tagged” hyperlinks are considered more legitimate vs. meta tags by the search engines, they will indeed take off.