Author Archives: Innovise Creative

Embracing Interactivity

Internet users do not stay on web sites for too long unless something catches their attention. Building a website that contains some animation its going to attract more people than just a static page and it is more likely for them to stay longer viewing all the information if infographics are displayed. However, overloading your site with animations is not good because it might overwhelm the visitor and make your site heavy, confusing and increase load time. Keep it simple and professional but add interactivity to it.

Infographics are a great way to show a big amount of information without boring the user. Nobody wants to read a long dense text. People expect developers to simplify information for them and display it in a cool easy way. Check out this link to see why your brain craves infographics.

Today anyone has a website and also a lot of people are becoming web developers. Some of them better than others, but building a website is not a mystery anymore. That’s why you need to know what to do different in order to catch the viewers attention and make them explore your information . Scroll down navigation is a very useful and attractive tool. It will make the viewer to keep looking at the page and go further down. Here is an example of a very cool site that uses scroll down navigation. Viewing a site that has endless information in just one page without any kind of interactivity wont make you want to stay for too long, you wont go through all the information.

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Google Webfonts for WordPress – Forget Coding!

Fonts come in a wide variety of types and styles. Everyone likes to have several options to choose from at the time of creating a site and no one likes messing with too much coding unless necessary.

Google Fonts has a wide variety of fonts that you can use. Those who are familiar with it probably think that is a very useful tool but know that when it comes to WordPress sites it can be an issue unless you have some coding skills. Before this plugin existed you would have had to know how to change the fonts directly in the CSS file and change a few lines of code. Some people tried it but others, just had to keep the ones that came installed at first because they simply do not feel comfortable editing the stylesheet. Generally, an overall font is set in the body of a website as you can see below.

body {font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, 
     Futura, sans-serif; 
     font-size: 1em; 
     padding:0; 
     margin:0; }

The fonts which normally come with operating systems when installing, such as Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, Georgia – using CSS in styles.css, you can define a font-family for an element on page. Also, you can use external fonts – this means users don’t need to have that font on their system. Normally to use the @font-face rule to define your own font family you can put it in the top of style.css like this:

@font-face {
	font-family: Museo300;  
	src: local('Museo300-Regular'), 
		url("fonts/Museo300-Regular.ttf") format('truetype');  
	font-weight: normal;  
}

Then later on, you can write:

.post-item {font-family: Museo300}

Now, the new Google Webfonts plugin will do all of this for you and you don’t need to worry about having to mess with any CSS. All you need to know do is download the plugin, install and activate it, that’s all.

In the following video you will be able to learn how to install the plugin and get it ready to use. Get creative! there are thousand of different fonts you can use ! Below the video you will find a link that will take you to the wordpress site where the plugin is available to be downloaded.

 

References: Fonts info - WordPress plugin

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Shazam’s Future is Growing

shazam-app-iphoneShazam is an app that allows you to find information about any song you hear, anywhere you are. Everyone has listened to a song and asked themselves who sings it and what is it called. Shazam shows you all the information you are looking for in just a few seconds.

Last week a Mexican billionaire, and the world’s richest man, Carlos Slim invested $40 million in Shazam. Carlos is investing in the future of Shazam. More than a third of a billion people use it to identify music today, in the next few years, Shazam is plotting to become one of the largest names in tech.

Today, if you tag a song you have a ton of options. You can comment on how much more you like one specific song, share it on Facebook, watch its YouTube video, read its lyrics, find out if the its playing near you, read the artist bio, buy the track on iTunes, or play it on streaming services like Pandora, Rdio, and Spotify. By playing around with the locations and times where users tag songs, Shazam now shows you your own tags on a map, and what other people are listening to in every country, region, city, and even block around the world. It’s beginning to create lists of the most popular songs in different areas.

Music may have gotten Shazam this far, but it’s television that is helping it attract a wider audience. Though there have been Shazam-able commercials for a while, last fall, it added TV show tagging to its arsenal. Tagging a TV show – like The Daily Show – will let you see all the music in the broadcast, view the cast, connect to IMDB, read about it on Wikipedia, read the show’s latest tweets, and connect to its official site, among other things. Though it sounds strange to say you’re going to Shazam a show, the TV service is taking off.

Carlos Slim, the multi-billionaire Mexican said he’s investing because ”Shazam is defining a new category of media engagement that combines the power of mobile with traditional broadcast media and advertising.”

The goal of Shazam is to continue adding more audio, help you tag it faster, and deliver everything you want to know about it. Keeping this mission in mind, Shazam’s next phase is to eliminate the few seconds it takes you to tag things. It has already launched a new autotagging feature on its iPad app that will constantly listen (without draining the battery) to every TV show or piece of audio that your iPad comes in contact with, even while the app is off. Soon, this feature will roll out to other platforms, allowing Shazam a near 24/7 window into your listening habits, and ensuring that you have a complete record of everything you hear.

There are a lot of scary or annoying things Shazam could do if it listened and tagged all the audio we encounter on a daily basis, but the benefits are even more interesting. With such complete access, Shazam could recommend music or TV better than Pandora or Netflix; after that, all it has to do is deliver on those recommendations. Eliminating the need to tag and predicting what you want before you want it could set up Shazam’s next big achievement: to go public in the next two years, becoming one of the first apps to grow into a major tech player. By being everywhere, listening to everything, and helping us identify the audio in our lives, Shazam may end up being the next big thing in tech.

References: Digital Trends

 

 

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Social Messaging is the new SMS – Whatsapp

WhatsApp-Messenger-for-Symbian-Updated-to-2-8-22

Social Messaging has brought some problems to cell phone companies. Many analyst are saying consumers will stop purchasing unlimited text messaging plans very soon when they realize that by just having internet access on their phones they can make use of free text messaging. The most common app today that allows people to text for free all over the world is whatsapp. For those who doesn’t know much about this app, this is a great  post to be looking at.

Whatsapp has been around for a long time and is extremely popular around the world. Still, it has been slow to gain traction here as most Americans are used to having unlimited text. In other countries, unlimited SMS is just not possible. Most carriers charge more money when you SMS someone that doesn’t have the same carrier as you do. It is a way for them to make more money and to try to get everyone to use the same carrier. Since text messaging has become more popular, especially in teenagers and young adults, everyone is switching to Whatsapp as their main way to text.

This awesome app costs only $1 and on some phones it’s even free. After downloading the app you don’t have to worry about paying anymore. You just need internet access and you are good to go. Whatsapp allows you to text, send videos, images and also voice messages. You can also create group messages and there are plenty of settings that you can play with. A cool feature the app has that most people find interesting is that whenever you send a text, it tells you if the text was delivered by showing you a green checkmark next to the message and if the text was seen, it shows you two of them. You can also see when your contacts are online and when they were online for the last time.

If you are out of the country you don’t have to worry about spending money on roaming. Whatsapp allows you to text from any part of the world, to any carrier. The interaction is very fast and it’s very easy to use. Roaming will definitely become obsolete soon, if it hasn’t yet.

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Responsive vs Adaptive Web Desing

Nowadays Desktop and Laptop users are becoming a minority. Web developers need to adjust their sites so that people can have access to it in their mobile devices as well as their tablets. In order to see a web site in different screen sizes developers are taking the One Web approach. The most used are Responsive Design and Client-Side Adaptive Design.

Whats the difference between these two approaches?

Responsive Web Design

Responsive design is the most common One Web approach. This approach uses CSS media queries  to modify the presentation of a website based on the size of the device display.

A key advantage of this approach is that designers can use a single template for all devices, and just use CSS to determine how content is rendered on different screen sizes. Plus those designers can still work in HTML and CSS, technologies they’re already familiar with.

Additionally, there’s a growing number of responsive-friendly, open-source toolkits like Bootstrap or Foundation which help simplify the process of building responsive sites.

On the other hand, there are few shortcuts to a sound responsive design. To go responsive, organizations often have to undertake a complete site rebuild.

Client-Side Adaptive

Adaptive design builds on the principles of responsive design to deliver user experiences that are targeted at specific devices and contexts. It uses JavaScript to enrich websites with advanced functionality and customization. For example, adaptive websites deliver Retina-quality images only to Retina displays (such as the new iPad) while standard-definition displays receive lower-quality images.

A client-side adaptive approach means you don’t have to rebuild your site from the ground up. Instead you can build on existing content while still delivering a mobile-responsive layout. For expert developers, this approach also enables you to specifically target particular devices or screen resolutions.

Unlike responsive design, adaptive templates ensure that only the required resources are loaded by the client’s device. Because device and feature detection is shifted to the mobile device itself, CDN networks like Akamai and Edgecast can use most of their caching functionality without disrupting the user experience.

The client-side adaptive approach has a higher barrier to entry than responsive design. Developers need to have a solid grasp of JavaScript to use this technique. It also depends on a site’s existing templates as the foundation. Finally, because the client-side adaptations are a kind of layer on top of your existing code base, you need to maintain them as your site as a whole evolves.

Have you worked with any of these approaches? Tell us which one do you like the most! We want to know!

References: One Web Approach

 

 

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