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January 20, 2014

Google Updates Play Services

Atomic Development mobile, programming, spotlight

Google rolls out it’s updated Play Services with features such as Google+ integration for customizing user expreience, in-app purchases, multi-player gaming, and more. Big news for the Android world it would seem, but I must say that I am not impressed. They are all definitely “must-have’s” for the Android world, but these are all things that Apple has done for years.

I’ve used both Apple and Android devices for years. There are things about both types of devices that I like and do not like. However, I must say I’m surprised to see all of the hype surrounding Google’s latest Play Services update. Am I misinterpreting all of the fuss being made? Is it not hype but more of a, “It’s about time!”? It’s hard to tell.

One thing about the new update that I do like is that you will be able to access your Google Docs from any app that takes advantage of the new Google Drive API, update your docs, work offline on them, and have them automatically sync with your online files once an internet conenction is made again. I don’t personally use Google Docs just because I have no need for it, but I can definitely see where this would be a huge bonus for those users who do.

All-in-all, any Google app developer will be happy about the update in general, and the update appears to have lots of updated features to improve upon current apps or allow you to make that app you’ve been wanting to make but just didn’t have the functionality to do so. So head on over to developer.android.com and check out all of the services available to you.

November 1, 2013

Vicarious takes on the human brain

Atomic Development

Vicarious, a startup company looking to reproduce aspects of the human brain, has recently announced that it’s algorithms can accurately solve modern CAPTCHAs, including Google’s reCAPTCHA, with a 90% success rate. According to a Stanford University paper, they “deem a captcha scheme broken when the attacker is able to reach a precision of at least 1%” using automated means. A claim of 90% accuracy would therefore render the current CAPTCHAs relatively obsolete.

However, an automated script to read CAPTCHAs is not Vicarious’ primary goal. The purpose was to show that a machine could learn to “see”, and others believed it could be done. Vicarious was able to raise $15 Million Series A, led by Dustin Moskovitz’s (co-founded of Facebook) “Good Ventures”. “The technology that Vicarious is developing has the potential to improve all lives and revolutionize every industry,” Dustin said.

Dileep George, co-founder of Vicarious, stated that there are still years of research ahead before he sees this new technology having any wide-spread use, but that his team, as well as his investors, are ok with waiting for this product that they all believe will change lives. But until then, they will take the project one step at a time as they attempt to teach the machine.

October 29, 2013

Having More Pages Is Not A Ranking Signal

Atomic SEO

Matt Cutts, Google search spam head, recently released a new video in which he debunks the myth that having more pages will cause your page to rank higher.

He stated, “I wouldn’t assume that just because you have a large number of indexed pages that you automatically get a high-ranking. That’s not the case.”

With this in mind, he did go on to elaborate that having more pages is still a good thing. More pages leads to more keywords, more long-tail ranking opportunities, more content to be linked/shared. These factors will end up affecting your rank. So while the page number itself plays no role, the benefit of having more pages will.

September 24, 2013

Ghost Rank 2.0 Penalized by Google

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Google continues in their efforts to remove unnatural linking strategies from the web. The link network Ghost Rank 2.0 is the latest casualty  to the search engine’s penalties.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s search spam team, was recently tweeting vague ghost themed puns on his Twitter account. “Thinking of ghost-related puns for a spam network.” and “They try to look super natural, but using them will dampen your spirits.” Pretty witty tweets to reference the network’s name of Ghost Rank.

Shortly after these tweets came a series of complaints from a variety of webmasters stating they had been penalized.It appears that Google has targeted Ghost Rank and other link networks, and has put a penalty on any links within those networks. Clients using these services have, or can expect to see a drop in rankings in the near future.

These tactics are part of Google’s ongoing efforts to combat paid link spam.

September 18, 2013

GTA V Got Trolled Hard

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Grand Theft Auto V (GTAV) was released yesterday, but despite its hype and large sales numbers it was not the number one trending topic on Twitter.

Volition, the developers of Saints Row 4 came up with a creative marketing ploy to promote their new Downloadable Content Pack, Gat V. The naming of this DLC pack seems to have been made with the pure intention of trolling Rockstar Games, developer of Grand Theft Auto. As Grand Theft Auto was trending on Twitter, under the #GTAV, the GATV DLC pack was released for free on Steam. More

September 9, 2013

Best of Both Worlds

Atomic Case Studies spotlight 0 Comments

The Challenge
Our client needed to update their web presence to help supplement advertising and sales at their physical location. Their existing website was based on older technologies and a table-based layout. The site desperately needed to highlight the products being offered and have a more clear visual hierarchy. This would allow customers to be directed to the products more quickly and have a better user experience overall.

The Solution
With the use of color & css/html, we were able to give the site a full make over, removing the old table-based layout and updating the user interface to allow for ease of navigation.

We also gave “The Best of Both Worlds” some instruction on how to better photograph their product line so users get a better representation of what they are buying.

We reorganized the data structure of the site using the proper html tags to allow for better SEO and site indexing.

We were able to maintain key parts of their shopping cart software, and used a bit of PHP magic to update some of database queries and search features to improve the site speed as well as keeping the cost of the project lower.

The Results
The new, much more vibrant color palette and site branding really helped to showcase our client’s overall passion for their products and better represent their sales niche. Theatre costumes and props should NOT be boring.

The improved menu systems and user interface allowed the customers to find what they were looking for quicker and easier. This led to a lot of customer compliments when the site was launched.

The content management system we provided allowed our client to dynamically change all the products and spotlights on the index page, “The Best of Both Worlds” was able to specifically target upcoming plays and events in the area. This, coupled with their better product shots led to an increase in overall sales for the site.

September 6, 2013

Marginally Great – Quick Design Tips: Margins

Atomic Development, Web Design spotlight 0 Comments

Keeping consistent margins in your layout, copy and basic design is one of the easiest things you can do to produce a cleaner site.

This comes as no surprise to someone who has been designing sites or using a grid based layout system for years but a lot of times someone new to the profession may overlook this basic design strategy.

Using consistent margins can help your site design in simple yet effective ways.

  1. It typically creates a design that is visually clean.
  2. Consistent margins add a layer of unification to your entire layout.
  3. The readability of copy is improved when the content is divided into well-spaced columns.
  4. Clean margins can help the visual flow of your website from top-left to bottom-right.
  5. Once defined, you can cause visual impact by breaking your own margin rules to highlight important ideas or imagery.

Cramped designs can benefit greatly by using margins to “air” the site out, adding negative space to the overall layout and relieving the visual tension cause by elements sitting to close to one another or having uneven borders.

By doing this you can created order from chaos and have a much better looking final product.

August 28, 2013

Google’s Not Provided Reaches 49% and Higher Across Niches

Atomic SEO SEO 0 Comments

BrightEdge has posted a report showing that 49% of the queries done for the 8400 brands they track, returns Google’s ‘Not Provided’ result. This figure is the average across the brands, with the technology field having a higher percentage. BrightEdge stated that, “56% of traffic to computer, electronics, software and technology sites is coming from Google secure search.” The lower end of the spectrum is in the entertainment and consumer niches which returns ‘Not Provided’ around 46% of the time.

Google’s ‘Not Provided’ result is still an area of soreness for web marketers who miss out on this valuable information.

August 19, 2013

Understanding Web Programming

Atomic Development programming, web programming 0 Comments

There seems to be a large misconception about what programming is and what things can be done on a website.  Technically, anything that can be thought of can be made to “appear” to be done.  However, it is not always so simple, or so quickly completed.

Visual Effects
Javascript/jQuery, along with HTML5, has replaced flash animations and have become more and more commonplace.  From simple drop down menu navigation to full-screen interactive masterpieces such as https://beta.theexpressiveweb.com, programmers and designers are coming up with more ways to attract and interact with visitors of their websites.

Unfortunately, making these effects is not always a quick and simple process.  They can take hours or even days to create a good animation sequence or interactive design, especially when working on a site made by someone else.  This makes it hard when working within a budget and needing to split costs between design and actual functionality programming.

Functionality and Post Processing
Post Processing, in this sense, is the act of performing some sort of action with information submitted in an online form.  This could be a contact form, registration form, or anything that would require data to be submitted.  Post processing can take a range of different times to perform on the same form submission depending on what the client desires the form to do.  For instance, a “Contact Us” form where the user submits their name, email, subject, and message.  If the client just wishes for the form to send them an email, this is fairly straightforward and easy to do.  The whole thing may take 20 minutes, if that.  However, when you add on field verification, email structure validation, a “thank you for contacting us” email sent to the user, and database entry for record keeping of the contact message, the time it takes to process the form is substantially longer.

On a “Contact Us” form, this still isn’t so bad, taking maybe an hour to an hour to do.  But what about a registration form for a website that has a multitude of products that could be registered for? Processing large forms can take a few hours to program and may require bug fixes as they are tested.

Programming other site functionality has it’s own ranges of times it takes to perform different tasks as well.  Anymore, most websites are database-driven, meaning they pull a majority of their content from a database.  That alone usually means that there is a management system for the website to allow the site owner to change content on their website as needed or desired.  A lot of the times that clients request manageable content, they do not understand that a mini-site to manage that content is then created on top of the pages that they are requesting to be made for their website.  A management section can add many hours, and possibly take longer to create than the website itself.

Can you make a “Quick Change”?
Most clients do not understand how much is involved in a “quick change” when requesting a site update.  I often get requests to make these “quick updates” that will take hours to complete due to the fact that the change being requested technically changes the base structure of the entire website.  By contrast,  I also get requests where the client thinks the change will take hours to complete, but really it only takes 20-or-so minutes.  Understanding what all is affected by the change can help you better understand how long a change could take.

For instance, let’s say you have a website with users and member-only content, and you have different reports that can be pulled for your users.  A year goes by where you’ve had to delete a user from the database completely and you decide that you no longer want to delete them but just mark them as inactive.  Simple?  Not in the least, I’m afraid.  You would first need to update any login script to check to see if they are active or not and give them the appropriate feedback if they are not active.  Then, you would need to update the user management pages to add the new active/inactive option.  Next, update all of the content areas where it checks if the user is logged in to also make sure it is an active user (because what if they are in fact logged in when you make them inactive?).  Next we would update all of the reports to make it show only active members, or inactive if needed.  Lastly is creating a new report to show all inactive members if requested.

Depending on your website, there could be many more changes needing to be made, all over a “quick change”.

Things to keep in mind
There are many things you can do to try to save yourself some money when having programming work done for you.  Here are some of those things:

  • When requesting work, try to think ahead to future changes or options you may want to make and have the programmer develop the site with those things in mind.  This will cut down on work needing to be done later so that they do not need to completely change the way the website works.
  • Can the programming be phased out?  If you can, come up with a list of everything you want done, then discuss with your programmer to find the things that would absolutely need to be completed first due to functionality and what you would like completed first for aesthetics.  After coming up with a list of tasks to be completed prior to the site launch, you can then discuss additional phases to be completed at a later point in time.  This will help get your site up and running at minimal costs and is great for sites on a budget.
  • How much data do we really need to keep?  Although it is nice to keep all of the data flowing into your website, it is not always necessary.  If on a budget, try to find ways to cut down on programming time by cutting out additional database calls.  For instance, if you do not really need to insert “Contact Us” messages into the database, leave that functionality for another point in time.
  • Do you know exactly what you want?  If you only know in general what you want out of your website and leave it up to the developers to determine what all you need to accomplish your goals, you are adding more time to the project.  Now the developers need to spend time on thinking about what you need.  Then, if they come up with ideas and implement those ideas and it turns out that you do not like them, time has been wasted on something that isn’t even going to be on the website.  So take your time, come up with all of the data you want to capture and track, what all pages you want for your site, and what each page should display or do.  Give your developers as much information as possible.
  • Do we need that intro animation?  Special effects are nice, but if you are on a budget, you may want to consider holding off on them until a later point in time.  Slideshows are easy enough to do if you still want “something”, but full screen animations, interactive imagery, etc. should be pushed back to a later phase in the project.

So remember, its true that pretty much anything can be done, but make sure you fully understand the time and costs involved in any requests being make to ensure you’re not overestimating the ease of a project.

August 16, 2013

Sometimes More is Less – Web Design Trends

Atomic Web Design trends, web design 0 Comments

We’re always keeping up with the latest trends in web design, and thought it would be appropriate to highlight a few of the biggest things we’re seeing as we peruse our clients’ sites as well as those in the rest of the interweb.

Clean and Simple
This is a trend that we particularly enjoy. Clean, simple sites like Chef’s Choice Catering illustrate a concept of not being too “busy” but still having plenty of room for information and photos, drawing the user’s eye to the important parts of the site. Spacing and colors are important as always, which leads us into our next point.

Bold Colors
We use a variety of colors in different web sites, of course depending on what the client wants. When possible, it is a great idea (and also a trend among web designers) to use bold colors to bring attention to a specific section of the site, adding to a clean look and feel. Even just a few years ago, not every company had a web site. Now, it’s quite common, but clients want their sites to stand out. As bolder colors have made their way into the marketplace more often, so too has the desire for a bolder look to client web sites. Standing out from the pack can definitely help your image, and it’s still a challenge to come up with something that isn’t loud, but does have a unique look and feel. We’re up for it!

Web Fonts
Another way to help sites stand out is the use of Web Fonts. This enables your site to use more than just the few standard fonts like Times New Roman and Arial that appear on tons of other sites, and really express the personality of the site and its message to your viewers. Giving your site personality can definitely come through in the style of text you are reading, whether you’re going for a fun, exciting, engaging look or a professional, on-point message.

Whatever your goals are, and however you want to get there, Atomic can help. We stay on top of trends like these so that you aren’t merely a follower, but a leader in whatever interest you choose to pursue through us. We hope you’ve enjoyed our spotlight on the latest trends in web design!

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