In the event of an emergency (like a server outage or some other unspeakable horror) please use this form to get in touch with our support staff: http://www.mindsharestudios.com/emergency/

If our support personnel are unable to address your issue, they will contact me directly and I will see to it that the problem is solved post-haste.

Choosing Fonts

Body Copy

Generally, it is best to use “web safe” font stacks for large areas of text. A font stack is a list of fonts that a browser will use in order of preference (e.g. Ideal font, Close alternative font, Common font, and Generic font-family).

Here is a simple font stack builder: http://www.codestyle.org/servlets/FontStack

Heading Copy

Certain typefaces can be dynamically embedded using various advanced techniques based on Flash or JavaScript. Because these techniques require more processing and additional plugins they should only be used for small areas of text (like page headings).

Note that not all fonts allow embedding. Many font foundries specifically prohibit use embedded use of their fonts. We can help you determine if a specific font will work or not.

fontsquirrel.com is a good source for free fonts that can be embedded for use in headings.

Backgrounds

Web backgrounds can be made up of solid colors and/or images. If images are used they can either be repeated (tiled) along the browsers X axis (width), Y axis (height), or both.

Because we don’t know what screen resolution a site visitor will have, if you decide to use a photograph as a background image your design must also include space beyond the edges of the photo. This way we will know how you want us to handle situations where the site visitor’s browser extends beyond the background photo. See the example below:

Resources for better understanding web backgrounds:

• http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_background.asp
• http://www.webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/how-to-css-large-background/
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/09/02/backgrounds-in-css-everything-you-need-to-know/

Design Width

Every fixed-width web design must be designed around a target screen resolution. At the time of this writing, most sites are designed to fit a screen size of 1024 x 768 pixels. The generally accepted maximum page width for a design target the 1024 x 768 resolution is 960 pixels wide.

This leaves room for various browser add-ons, scrollbars, and whatnot that the site visitor may have enabled. A margin of at least 30px on either side is a good rule of thumb. So if you decide to design for a target screen width of 1280px your main content area should be at most 1220px wide.

You can get up-to-date browser display stats from NetMarketShare.

Bottom line: our current recommendation is to make the width of the content area 960 pixels wide (or less).

PSD Requirements and other considerations

• Create a separate PSD file for each page template. This keeps file sizes down and reduces the possibility of errors.
• Delete all hidden layers.
• All designs must be at 72dpi.
• Remember to include styles for link and button rollover (aka mouseover) states.
• Remember to style basic HTML elements in your templates. These may include numbered and bulleted lists, tables, form elements, block quotes and citations, inline images, paragraph text, headings, etc. If no styling is provided for these types of elements, we will use our discretion in styling them and subsequent style change will be billed to the client.
• If the design has drop down menus or some other animated element, you must include the styling and graphics for those. If no styling is provided for these types of elements, we will use our discretion in styling them and subsequent style change will be billed to the client.

Go Knights! http://www.delnorteknights.com

We at Mindshare Studios are always interested in trends amongst the most popular open source Content Management Systems. One window into their relative popularity is how frequently they are looked up on Google. Here’s a live view of exactly that data from Google Insights for Search:

Oh yeah and while we’re at it – HAPPY NEW YEAR!

L to R - Shira Greenberg, Keshet Dance Company Founder and Artistic Director; Elianna Boswell, Keshet Arts Education Student Representative; First Lady Michelle Obama, Honorary Chair of the President's Committee for the Arts and the Humanities.

Keshet Dance Company has been nationally recognized as one of fifteen youth arts and humanities programs to receive the prestigious 2009 Coming Up Taller Award. Shira Greenberg traveled to Washington, D.C., to attend a White House ceremony yesterday, where she accepted the award from the First Lady Michelle Obama.

Keshet received the Coming Up Taller Award for its work with the YDDC, New Mexico’s state juvenile detention facility. Outreach facilitators teach daily dance classes as part of the high school curriculum on site at YDDC, using dance to teach literacy skills, math skills and conflict resolution skills. Keshet then incorporates a pre-release and post-release program to continue mentoring students while they transition out of the facility, providing a structured mentorship program through the parole and reintegration process.

Coming Up Taller is a national initiative that recognizes and supports outstanding out-of-school and after-school arts and humanities programs for children, especially those with great potential but who have limited outlets for creative expression. A project of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH), in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the Coming Up Taller Awards honor programs that offer exceptional learning experiences in the arts and the humanities and that have a tangible effect on the lives of young people as evidenced through improved academic scores, enhanced life skills, and positive relationships with peers and adults.

“We are incredibly honored to receive this prestigious recognition from The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. The power of the arts to change people’s lives is something that we believe in whole-heartedly, and we strive to actuate these changes on a daily basis. This recognition brings new exposure to the work of Keshet so that our programs can serve more people and more lives can be positively affected in the coming years, building a stronger community one life at a time,” said Shira Greenberg, Keshet founder and artistic director.

Check it out: http://www.ournewfridge.com/

I often have clients ask me why they should upgrade their websites to the latest version of whatever software their site happens to be running (be it WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Expression Engine or something else).

For anyone who works daily developing or maintaining software, especially open source software, the process and reasoning behind updating seems so obvious that it almost goes without saying. But for the rest of us, software updates are, at best, an inconvenience that you must sit through, and, at worst, an unexpected expense. With that being the reality for many people, I am going try to elucidate why you should keep your web-based software installations up to date, even if that means paying someone to do it.

Software updates: what are they, exactly?

First off, let’s define what we mean when we talk about software updates, “hotfixes”, or “patches”. A software update can be simply a small piece of updated code in a text file (perhaps one individual part of a program that replaces an older version of that part). In that case, the software update might be called a “patch” because it fixes a specific issue or problem, just like a patching a hole on your jeans fixes an isolated imperfection on an otherwise serviceable pair of pants.

However, a software update can also be an entirely new version of the software. New versions of many web-based software applications can be quite involved. Rather than being one or two new text files with a handful of new or updated lines of code, a completely new version of a program can have that thousands of changed files with hundreds or thousands of lines of new code. For example, new versions of most web content management systems (CMS) fall into the latter category.

Sometimes these updates are simple to implement; but other times the task is not as straightforward because of software dependencies or custom changes to the core program code that are not upgradable (this is typically a bad practice from a development perspective, you usually want to leave core code alone and make modifications through some sort of plugin architecture).

In both cases, a software update is made up of new code that improves the software in some way. We’ll take a look at what those improvements are next.

So… why should I update?

Software updates are typically released to address one or more of the following  key issues that all programs face.

Bugs

Updates are often released to fix bugs. A software bug is a term used to describe an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program that prevents it from functioning as intended. Bugs can arise from something as simple as a syntax error (like a misplaced semicolon in a line of code) or from unintended interactions between different parts of the program. This frequently occurs because computer programs (like WordPress or Drupal) can be complex — millions of lines of code in some cases — often having been programmed by many people over a great length of time, so that programmers are unable to mentally track every possible way in which parts can interact. So over time, as these problems are identified, bug fixes get created and are included with software updates.

Security

Many updates provide fixes for security holes. The security holes or vulnerabilities can allow an unauthorized user to gain control of your website and put it to use for their own purposes. Security updates should never be taken lightly because of the real risk of having your site get hacked. We have seen websites get attacked quite a few times over the past several years, usually because someone chose not to apply a software update to their website. It is always less expensive to prevent an attack on your website by proactively applying all available security updates rather than trying to clean and rebuild a site that has been compromised by an attacker. I cannot stress this enough, it is always worth it to do the preventative care. A compromised site will mean extended periods of downtime and many hours spent reverting to a clean, uncompromised version in addition to the hassle of changing account passwords and ensuring data security for any sensitive information that is saved in your site (customers email addresses, payment information, etc).

Enhancements

Along with bugs and security updates, most software upgrades will provide some enhancements. That is to say, new features and/or improvements to old features that make the software easier to use or add in some previously missing capability. There is no limit to how most web-based software can be improved. This might mean a better way to upload images or improved text formatting controls.

Ch..ch..ch..changes

Another factor that can necessitate the installation of software updates on your website is the simple but often overlooked fact that your website does not exist in a vacuum — it isn’t printed once and then forever finished like a book or brochure. Rather, it exists in a soup of constantly changing technologies: from the web server that hosts it, to the operating system and web browser of people who visit the site, to the version of the programming language it was written in — and that is just to name a few. Indeed there are many other external technologies that are constantly changing and evolving around your website.

Because of this, staying up to date keeps your site on track with the rest of the technology that surrounds it and ensures that your visitors have the best experience possible.

Why do I have to pay for this?

While no one has ever directly asked this question verbatim, it does often get implied when I talk to clients about updates. It’s a fair question to ask I think, because people are quite used to getting some software updates for free (operating system updates from  Apple or Microsoft, for example). The main reason most web developers (Mindshare Studios included) will bill for routine software updates is that they are not in the business of selling software. Rather most web development companies install, configure, and customize software for their clients as a service. You aren’t being made to pay for the update itself and all of the countless hours that went into developing it, you are only being asked to pay for the time it takes to install it on your particular website (and ensure that the upgrade was successful).

This brings up a related issue that is often overlooked by many small businesses using open source software to power their websites. The cost you pay your web development team isn’t even a fraction of what it would cost were you to build a complex content management system from scratch. Sophisticated, simple to use, web-based software has become extremely commonplace, and because of this, many people subconsciously assume that such software is simple to build. This is, of course, a fallacy. Even so, most people have no way of knowing how many thousands of  hours went into the design, programming, testing, and debugging, of web applications that seem quite straightforward from the end user’s perspective.

While it is difficult to accurately quantify the value of a free, open source program, it is nonetheless apparent that no organization, except a very large corporate enterprise with a dedicated in-house development team, could ever hope to commission the development of a piece of software to rival WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla on thier own. This is what I mean when I say open source means enterprise level development for small business. I could say more… but I don’t want to wax philosophical on this post.

Bottom Line

Keeping your website up-to-date gives you enhanced security (patches), improved performance (squashed bugs), and increased usability (enhancements) and ensures that your website will function properly with the other technology it depends on (like browsers). And remember, it is always less of a headache to update regularly than to wait until something bad happens or to put it off for so long that your site no longer renders correctly.

Your website should be updated for much the same reasons that you take your car in for an oil change or visit the dentist — as preventative care that will offset major problems down the road.

The graph is generated by the memCron application, the recent DreamHost API contest winner.

Mindshare Studios’ Facebook Page

The tips are excellent, and all web professionals are likely to have clients who could learn a lot from Esther’s list of tips:

1. Understand what you want.
2. It costs more and takes longer than you think.
3. A Website has several pieces. Don’t cut corners.
4. Balance glitz and guts.
5. If you build it, they won’t necessarily come.
6. Avoid bit decay: the site needs maintenance.
7. Treat the Web team as professionals.

Clients often overlook some of these factors (not thinking about number 5 can be especially jarring when an new product launch fails).

Read the full article

We will never leave you in the dark wondering what’s going on, just bookmark http://mindsharestatus.com!

This is just a small way to give back to the open source Flash community. I’ll update this post once the new OS versions are actually ready for download. For now, you can read about the components here and here.

During this time we will still be accessible via email and phone. Our regular hours and schedule will recommence upon our return to New Mexico.

Find out more.

We will be gone from March 6th – March 12th.

This move should not effect our clients negatively in any way! Thank you for you patience.

ActionScript 3.0 Class files (ZIP file)

The above file contains all the sample code along with several PDFs from the class.

“… a panel of local leaders in the design industry overview the highlights of the new software release, Adobe Creative Suite 3, and show you its groundbreaking new features. This InfoByte is a great opportunity to meet some of the presenters for our new Expert Series before it begins!”

Full info availlable here: Free UNM InfoByte