Flosites

We are so happy to launch a New Project for the very incredibly talented Tara Lynn Sen this week! But what made it special was her thank you note to our team for her project below:

 

“Dear Ross, Jenny, Alina and the entire Flosites Team,

I cannot thank you enough for your artistry, expertise and endless patience to bring my new brand and blogsite to life. I LOVE it so much- it is vibrant and sexy and sophisticated and I have so much pride giving out my URL :) I feel like the complete package is ME and I have you all to thank for that- I finally feel like my online presence reflects the energy that I have for my couples and that is huge as I forge my business ahead. You guys are so talented and I am so grateful for all of your efforts.

I look forward to using Flosites as my business continues to evolve and grow and I will definitely point anyone who asks your way.

Thank you, thank you, thank you and I wish you all blessed 2012s!

Best Wishes,

Tara”

 

 

As anyone who’s talked to me within the past 3 weeks can attest, I have been slammed with oceans and oceans of new clients. While this is always glorious news, it does leave me a bit feeling like a tape recorder as I try to explain the differences between a logo and a brand countless times a day.

But I don’t think anything will do it quite like this. While shopping the other day, I got stuck on a large scale “C R E”, and I was convinced I knew where I had seen this someplace else before. It took me a minute, but then it totally hit me in the face.  Victoria’s Secret and j.crew use the same logo. Mind you there are absolutely tweaks divided up between the two brands, but make no mistake- they use the same traditional serif, in a clear, crisp way– and BOTH are masters of using the surrounding elements to speak to the overall message of the two companies.

I don’t have to tell you what to think about when I say Victoria’s Secret. Bold, confident commercials, boasting dark saturations of color, bright lights and flashy sexiness.  Meanwhile, I cannot dredge to mind a single image of a j.crew commercial.

This is branding.

The choice in how you market yourself, the decisions of a color palette; and even more than that, how you apply those colors, for what purpose, and to what end?

What is the tone of your blog posts? How do you meet customers, and even more than that, how do you decide which customer’s to work with, and which ones you’d rather gently move away from?

While these decisions and questions are far less sexy than looking at delish images on pinterest, they really set the stage in terms of how to approach branding, especially when it becomes an attempt to brand something so personal.

 

Just some things to think about!

xo,
jne

After months of planning we have finally released our first John Doe Theme from Flothemes. 

We are currently accepting only 10 first clients, as an early bird special before a full release. We will be releasing only one theme at a time, with a limited number of sales to keep our themes fresh and premium.

The John Doe Theme is not just a blog, but a blog site, with galleries, styled information pages, dynamic contact form, blog with social integration from Facebook, twitter, pinterest and google+. These are among a few neat options under the hood of the new John Doe Theme. Hop on over to the main page to take it for a test drive, or sign up to be one of the first 10 to own a Flotheme!

Once again we want to thank everyone for helping us with ideas, beta testing! this is just the start of something that will surprise and benefit many in our industry! But for now, it will be just one step at a time! Thank You!

Also look out for the chance to win a free download of the John Doe Theme from the Flothemes home page through the tweet to win option!

Flosites Team

Recently we have been creating a lot of custom calligraphy based text for our clients brands, sites and blogs… and we just wanted to let everyone know that if you are interested in any calligraphy services, please feel free to be in touch with us by clicking here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Facebook, blogging, sharing and commenting are all vital parts of your interactive connection with your clients.

Currently Facebook is not only the largest social network that was ever created (probably time waster as well) but with the help of many wordpress plugins (EG WPBook) this functionality allows you, your friends, and followers integrate and understand what you are promoting or trying to communicate easily from your blog to Facebook.

Recently Facebook updated its method of comment integration, called Facebook Comments.

So what is the point? It sounds good to have your comments integrated to Facebook, as to most it is just good functionality, but before you connect your online presence fully to Facebook, we wanted to list a few pros and cons for doing so.

Pros

• Get Connected. Integration to the most popular social network, connecting both your online presence and theirs together through an easy read to use comment system sharing both comments from Facebook and your blog together. Its a great way to attract more or new commenters to your posts.
• Connectivity. Your readers can also directly comment using an aol, hotmail man or yahoo account.
• Stop unwanted commenting. There is no need to worry about mystery comments, or to moderate, approve or to delete inappropriate comments as Facebook not only weeds out spam comments, but people must be signed in and to be an identity to even comment. This is beneficial to not deal with unknown or unpleasant comments on posts for your business or against your clients.
• Social Commenting Relevance. Facebook shows the most relevant comments from every user and relocates them to the top of the comment list automatically, optimizing the awareness and interaction for commenting.

Cons

• Customization – If you have invested in a fully custom blog/blogsite Facebook comment integration can be a bit of an eye sore. Of course this varies on your color palette you have for your site. But on the pro side, having the comment area look like a Facebook comment box, will help the interactive functionality for users to understand what it is, and may attract more comments.
• Multiple Accounts – Facebook comments do not allow commenting with a google ID, and a twitter account. Why this doesn’t work is a mystery, but for now its a one time choice, Facebook integration, or twitter.
• Old comments – you will have to say good bye to these, as the plugin doesn’t allow a smooth integration of existing comments to the new Facebook commenting plugin that overrides your comment section, meaning you should start from scratch with your comments.

Conclusion

So what is the verdict? In general apart from losing your existing comments and stylization options, Facebook for your business PR is a must. However, it is not essential and depending on how you market your business the choice may be beneficial, but if you want to harness the potential to increase your number of comments, or socialize with your followers, clients and visitors, Facebook comments are a superb and easy way to do so.

 

Here are a few examples of blogs that we have integrated into Facebook:

• http://atrero.com
• http://dpphotography.co.uk
• http://jasongroupp.com

Would you like to be next? Drop us a quick email.

Ever wonder what it would feel like if you lost all of your content? Imagine: images, texts, even seo that you have spent months, or perhaps years building up for your business, only to find that you have no method to get it back? Sadly, we know these stories all too well.  After realizing that many clients weren’t being provided with back up options, we felt it necessary to provide a secure additional system for anyone (Flosites client or not), who would like to be guaranteed that their content is safely being backed up. And not just once, but daily, weekly and monthly, acting as a secure time capsule, safely in an off-site, secure location. If the worst-case-horribly-horrific-nightmare strikes, just knowing that everything will be retrieved within 24 hours, will undoubtedly provide a peace of mind for you, and hardly a notice of a problem with your clients.

 

INTERESTED? This is how does it work?

In fact its rather simple, it will literally only take a few minutes of your time.

1. Visit the site – click here

2. Choose your package, and follow the instructions to sign up (You can see which may work best for you below)

3. After you have signed up, you will then need to login and input your information of your hosting criteria, which we will then confirm and notify you as to when your first backup will begin.

4. Sit back, and know that your content is being securely backed up, and safe, for whenever and if you need to access it in an emergency.

 

Choosing the Right Package is important! 

We have put together 3 packages that we feel work for the majority of businesses in our industry:

 

1. Basic:

If you are new to hosting your own site, or started fresh. e.g. you used blogger only, and now use movable type or wordpress, this option is suitable for you.

2. Regular:

If you have used a blog on your host for a long period of time, and have collected several months… or years worth of content, as well as other important files on your server that you would like to make sure are not lost, then this is a suitable option.

3. Premium:

If you have more than 3 years of content, or more than 10gb of content on your server, or you have a directory or e-commerce site, with a lot of content, or just generally a lot of important information on your server which you would like backed up, then this is the right solution for you.

 

If you are unsure as to what works best for you feel free to drop us an email and we can notify you which will best for you.

Win a Free Years Subscription

As it is exciting for us to launch a New Service for our customers, we would love to offer you a chance to win a Free Years subscription to our service, no matter what package you fall under, we will select someone randomly via your twitter tweets.

All you have to do is copy and paste this line below to help us spread the word about our new service, and for every 50 tweets we will give 1 person a free years subscription to FloBackup.

“Tweet to Win the Ultimate Backup Solution for your site & Content for a year via @FloBackup RT”

I’m sure most of the people I work with directly already know, but for those who don’t, I’m pretty dedicated to the quality of work I produce. But no matter who you are, and how amazingly stealthy your work ethic, sometimes forces beyond our control step directly into our path of greatness, and happily sling disasters, tragedies, and whatever else it can pile on your plate- not like you had anything else going on, of course.

I’ve written posts on the importance of balancing life and work (here) but I think it deserves revisiting-especially after the week I’ve had. Personally speaking, the last week for me has been hectic to say the absolute least (think: rain water leading to flooding, leading to ceiling collapsing, hotels-complete with our two cats, moving across town in 3 days, etc. etc); but no matter what happened, I made sure to keep my coworkers & clients directly in the loop. Not to say we didn’t realize some cracks in our system, but that’s important to note too.

During the whole ordeal, it really helped me realize what the disconnects are when something tragic happens in our life, and how we handle that professionally can absolutely make all of the difference once we pick up the pieces.

 

Communicate, nay, word barf, your situation. 

Letting people know  what’s currently going on- a death in the family, an urgent sickness- whatever it is, will help allow people to be more empathetic to your situation, allowing for more support and understanding. Essentially, giving you a security blanket feeling before you even get INVOLVED. Being as open and knowledgeable as you can will also cut down on your explanation time, especially if you’ve spurned some harsh feelings for temporarily being MIA.

 

Update. Update. Update.

Remember when I said word barf? Keep this in your mind. The river of info has got to keep flowing in order to maintain any sort of normalcy with business matters, while personal matters keep spazzing out your attention span. How do you do this? twitter, facebook, email, text. The world we live in is a flurry of overextended information. Take utmost advantage.

 

Work slowly, and Build back up

This is the step I have the hardest time with. After taking a nice calm right turn out of tragedy land, I always want to hit my to-do list with mach10 force. I have to overcompensate for all of the hours I lost, I say. You know where this gets me? Overwhelmed, frustrated, and with totally bashed in productivity. After this whole hotel/moving debacle, I knew I needed to get back into high gear- and FAST.

While my french press isn’t even set up (the HORROR!), I know I can still pick 2-3 tasks, concentrate on them at a disturbing level, and I can at least have the quality of work back to normal. Today I will bring in 4-5 tasks, and repeat until I’m back to my regularly scheduled maximalized craziness I happily call my work load.  I liken the idea to juggling- who starts juggling with 6 balls? No one! And no one would expect you to, but if you start slow and build up, you will absolutely get to your awesome sauce A-game within no time.

What about you? How do you find ways to ease back into normalcy after a tornado of crazy hit your life?

Until next time!

xo,
jne

HTML5! CSS3! How many times you’ve heard about it online or from friends? Its pretty common now everywhere. It is important though to understand the benefits and how they can work for your web project before you decide to use it for your site.

Perhaps we should start from deciphering the abbreviations and tell what they stand for and what they are.

HTML5 – HyperText Markup Language, version 5

HTML is a language for structuring and presenting content on the web. If your website is a house then HTML5 is your walls, chairs, tables, etc. (the interior decor)

CSS3 – Cascading Style Sheets

CSS is a web-based markup language. It is used to describe how your website will look like. Take a look even on this page – everything you see is CSS. It’s your house’s painting. It makes any web site page in html look pretty and add all the customizations that every client requests.

Although we won’t go too deep into the history and how these codes work, but see how they can benefit you:

HTML5

Support

The most impressive feature that HTML5 supports are animations, video and audio integration and functionality.
Earlier if we wanted to create animations, show video or attach playable audio to the website, we needed to use Flash or even browser plugins to do that (eg. Quicktime). However, Now modern browsers are able to do that by themselves with support of different tags such as <audio>, <video>, <canvas> without any problems. Now you can have beautiful animated logos, integrated video and audio in any site which can also play on any device, a computer or mobile device.

New Tags

Thanks to new tags, developers are able to write clean and readable code. You can ask “why do i need that?”. Well, it improves your google seo.
For example, what is more understandable:

<div>…</div> or <article>…</article>

Mobile Devices

With HTML5 you can easily create mobile applications for every platform – iOS (apple), Android, Windows Phones. The benefits are that there is no need to create separate applications for every mobile OS – Just to create it once, and no matter what the device it will work.

Here are some examples:

CSS3

Usage of CSS3 offers you many interesting things also…

Responsiveness – or commonly known as Responsive Design.

With CSS3 you can format your website for every screen – desktop, laptop, tablet, phone etc. How many times when you open the website on your iPhone do you have to scroll or zoom in to read the text?
A good example of this is the New Boston Globe Website. On opening the site, it resizes to fit and be readable for any device.

Gradients, Animations, and Effects

CSS3 allows you to create and use different animations, gradients, shadows, rounded corners, columns and much more.
Maybe you don’t see it as the viewer, and this is the developer/designer problem but it does make a huge difference.
When you open a website the browser needs to load every image from the server. In doing so, the Browser sends the requests to download content, and gets the response with images, and with more images means more requests.
More requests equals more server load time.

More server load means that in time you need a better hosting package.

Do you see where this is going?

Though with css3, it solves this issue, so that to display all these beautiful shadows, gradients, rounded corners, browsers don’t have to make additional requests to the server. This of course means less bandwidth, and faster loading speeds, which in turn can help your sep also with google.

This is a simple example from the traditional method of creating customized effects and gradients, versus the newest methods in web design. Below is a simple example of how many images you need to display a shadow over a rounded box.

With the traditional method, a minimum of 5 images must be loaded to create one simply effect, whilst with css3, it is simply pure code, no images. This not only is more efficient for your site loading speed, but also for updates, as a coder shouldn’t have to reslice the original designs again to make a change, but just change the code to eg. make a gradient or rounded edges more circular, rather than angular.

 

Fly on the ointment

It all sounds pretty good… but sadly even with these new technologies not every browser supports them. Older browsers, which many viewers and clients still use may not be able to see your site correctly, eg. if using IE7. Of course over time, as people upgrade their browsers, this will not be an issue, though if you are ready to decide on using new technologies for your site, HTML5 & CSS3 are currently only supported fully by these browser versions:

Safari 4+
Firefox 3.5+
IE9+
Chrome

The Conclusion

With the marketplace and technology becoming more and more mobile, its important to have faster loading sites that still are unique and beautiful. With time, and as more users use tablets and phones to view online sites older browsers will phase out. Though, sadly until then if you decide to take advantage of these new abilities to get ahead of the curve, just be aware of the downsides for those clients that may not be able to view your site correctly on an older browser.

 

If you have questions, drop us a comment below!

For today’s brand board, I just could not help but collect and show off  samples of my favorite styles of illustration. Everything from vintage Mary Blair (the genius behind classic walt disney’s look) to edgy pen and ink- Illustration is seriously one of the most fabulous ways to execute expression. Ah, Expression. Seems to go hand in hand with communication, doesn’t it? Oh it does, folks. You know it does.

When I talk about using illustration to express something, I mean having a concept/idea/point of view in which to be expressed. Yeah, it may sound nit picky, but you’d be surprised! Illustration isn’t just about the look of the piece, the style or the medium, but also how the medium and style are used to further push the idea being expressed. It’s a one-two punch combo. Look at the sweet images of the deer, turtle + birds. While it’s very clear that these are more representational images of animals, rather than artistic expressions of them, what DOES stand out for me is how Mary Blair uses line to express the long, free-form elegance completely inherent in the deer. Or how she uses fun plays on color and pattern in the turtle shell. The illustration goes expressive on the elements in which the artist wants to “show off”, to make more sense of these artist’s methods.

Whenever a client comes to me with an idea for illustration, an icon, whatever the case may be, I always look to the idea and concept first– way before the style of the illustration is even talked about! Knowing what you want to say before you even start to make that message beautiful, is always going to give the starting point(AND the end point) so much more strength. Illustration without a message or a concept is honestly, just pure decoration; and if that’s the case, it would be so much better for the illustration to be replaced with a pattern, a texture, something more for look+ feel/mood purposes over expressive ones.