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Site: www.wealthstrategiesgroup.net
Client: Wealth Strategies Group
Location: Costa Mes, CA
Industry: Financial

Technologies used: PHP, XHTML & CSS

In the works for over a year, the official website for Saves The Day has finally been released to the public. Saves The Day, under label Vagrant Records, just released their new album “Under the Boards” and is touring the country for their new Bug Sessions album.

With strategic partners, Voltaic Brothers and Syosoft, Chico Web Design came up with a content management solution for the band to create and manage a community of fans to share videos, music, and photos.

LuLus.com, went to New York this week to speak with Good Morning America about their online store, fashion trends, and affordable clothing. Congrats LuLu*s!

Client: Sierra Pacific Packaging
Location: Oroville, CA
Industry: Consumer Packaged Goods
Spotlight: Maintain all Dynamic and Static Content

Technologies used: PHP, MySQL, XHTML & CSS, Flash, XML, JavaScript

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“Here you go, I’ll send the logo over in a Microsoft Word Document!” As a designer, I hear these words far too often and my fellow creative artists will we agree with me when I say it makes us all cringe just a little bit. Let me tell you why.

A well-designed logo is the corner stone of your business. It’s a staple of who you are, what your business stands for, and it’s brand recognition you want associated with your company.

A good logo is

• Simple
• Recognizable
• Scalable

Simple

Think logos such as Nike, Target, or Apple. When you break down the fundamentals of their logo concept and execution, it’s quite effortless. A simple logo communicates a clear message; brand recognition and readability. Nike’s logo was originally created for just $35 and is recognizable worldwide.

Recognizable

Possibly one of the strongest, most identifiable logo internationally, may be the Golden Arches of McDonalds. Our children are more likely to recognize the McDonalds Golden Arches before they can distinguish their own name. The logo is essentially 2 rounded arches fused together.

Color

Often times, a logo will be seen in more then one color. For example, it should work in black and white, as well as color. It should be readable in any format. Your letterhead may be faxed, copies will be made, so you want to make sure your logo is readable in various color formats.

Scalable

A logo should work at any size. Whether you want to place it on a business card, or a billboard, the logo should be scalable in a vector format.

File Formats

You’ll want your logo to be in a vector format. Without getting into too much detail in our beginning article, vector graphics use geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and polygons, which are all based upon mathematical equations to represent images in computer graphics. Since they are mathematical equations, this allows us to have the scalability of a logo that is .5 inches or 15 feet. A raster graphic is a representation of an image as a collection of pixels, mostly used to represent photographic images.

Possible Vector Format

• .AI (Adobe Illustrator)
• .EPS (Encapsulated PostScript)
• .PDF

Your graphic designer should provide you with these original files and potentially a .JPEG for your personal use. Most computers will not be able to open these file format unless you have specialized graphic software.

We prefer receiving logos in vector format. We “can” work with your rastered logo images, but if at all possible, we’d prefer them in vector format.

In terms of content, there are two different aspects when pondering the design and development of a new website for your business. When I think of dynamic, I think of something that is changing, moving, or interacting. The first thing that comes to mind when I think of the word static is; stays constant, fixed, something that really isn’t interacting.

My same theories can be used to determine your site requirements. The context in which we will be discuss dynamic and static is merely for website content.

Static

Static content is often referred to as an “Online Brochure”; the content is there for the taking! A static website is a great, inexpensive tool to convey the basics of your business to an end user, create/recreate an online presence to keep up with or surpass your competitors, or simply post your contact details. When I think of a static website, I think of a 5 page website. For Example:

• Home
• About us
• Contact us
• Products/services
• Miscellaneous page (testimonials, terms of service, missions statement, etc)

A lot of web sites can be broken down into this static category, as a matter of fact Basque Norte’s brand new site couldn’t convey a static web site example any better.

Dynamic

Dynamic content can be defined as content, products, photo’s, etc that are constantly changing depending on user interaction. For example, when you think of an e-commerce website, you first select a category, perhaps a sub-category, then you see a list of products. Once you see a product you are interested in, you select the details to determine whether or not you would like to purchase that item. Well, you may not know it, but you’ve just browsed through what would be considered a dynamic web site.

Uses for dynamic content:

• E-Commerce
• Easily Managed Photo Gallery
• Content Management
• Online Forms
• Career Postings
• Etc

The uses are virtually endless. You can introduce infinite dynamic possibilities to the modern day website. The portfolio section (http://www.chicowebdesign.com/portfolio) of the website you are now browsing is dynamic and it allows us to easily add and maintain new and existing portfolio items with ease.

Dynamic content, for the context of this discussion, is pulled from a database. Without making you fall asleep (although probably too late!), a dynamic web language such as PHP interacts with a database to withdraw pertinent information based on what the end user selected or clicked on.

Bringing it back to our e-commerce example, the database has relationships between products and categories so when the user clicks on a particular category it knows what products to display to the user. This is a typical dynamic interaction between the user and database.

Advantages of dynamic web sites
First and foremost, one of the largest benefits to developing a dynamic site is the maintainability. Now that the content is being stored in a database, we can easily design an interface between the administrator and the database for any novice to maintain the data, products, images, etc on there website.

It also allows us to structure or retrieve the information any format you’d like to display it to the end user. Let’s say for example you want ten products per page, 35 products per page, or view all, it can all be done since the information is already being stored in the database. It makes loading new products, photos, content to your website a snap.

Remember, content is what is going to drive people to your website. Having up to date, easy to read and understand content is what’s going to keep them coming back or call your business.