Mobley Law Firm
The Mobley’s needed a website but they wanted something that reflected their “fun” personalities.  They contracted with Getz Creative to take some great photos of themselves, aka, “Get Smart” style, and Eric Benjamin painted a whimsical depiction of their office in the Pettigru Historic District.  While these enhanced the look of their website, we were able to create a great layout to make these family court attorneys shine.   If you are in need of an attorney for any family court issues, the Mobley Law Firm is ready to help you navigate those muddy waters.

The Greenville County College Fair is held every year in Greenville. This is the first year the college fair has had its own website and Giraffe Web is excited to be involved in the new launch! The nonprofit organization wanted an easier way for colleges to register and view information about Greenville and the groups of students that will be attending the college fair. The site is set up so that the client can update the pages as colleges register, and also can post any other updated information. Brian Erkens of Reel Video and Stills provided the photography for the banner. Here’s what they had to say after the site was launched:
“…you did a wonderful exceptionally professional job on this website and our committee most especially appreciated the artwork on the website. ”

You can visit the college fair website at: http://www.greenvillecountycollegefair.com

” Hmm…  Looks like some deprecated code to me, “ I said quietly to my friends from Morrill Technology Group during a recent group meeting to determine pricing for reworking a prospective client’s site for organic search engine optimization.

You would have thought I’d have said something scandalous, obscene, or just plain funny with the snorts and chuckles I heard from Victor Morrill so I asked him what was so funny.

He thought I had said “defecated code” rather than “deprecated code”. Naturally I laughed…and laughed even more…  Well, with all of us in the meeting being parents from the Diaper Genie generation, the conversation digressed to the “diaper sausages” from the Diaper Genies.

Oops… Let me get back on track…  Hold that thought about defecated code and the Diaper Genie for later…

Deprecated code really could be viewed as “defecated” code, because with the onset of style sheets, there shouldn’t be any font or bgcolor tags in your site’s code. According to the widely-accepted html standards established by the world wide consortium (http://www.w3.org), deprecated code, such as font or bgcolor tags, should no longer be used in website page coding.

Giraffe Web only designs websites that conform to the w3c standards, because we want our sites–YOUR 24/7 marketing vehicle and business card to the WORLD–to have every chance of being viewing correctly across multiple browsers.  What this means is that we want your target audience to view your site in the way that it is intended, regardless of the browser used.  Additionally, we also review and run every line of code in your site through the validator tools available at the w3c’s site (http://validator.w3.org/) before uploading new code to your site’s server.  This is like another level of insurance for making your site as effective as possible.

Why do we check and recheck your site’s code for errors? In plain and simple terms, errors in the code of your website pages can cost you business.

Errors in your site’s code can cause the search engines to stop crawling your site, or not crawl it correctly.  If the search engines cannot or will not crawl your site, your site will not show up well in the search engine queries by your prospective clients or customers.

You should know that many web designers do NOT bother to review and validate your site’s code against the w3c codes. Many web designers simply don’t care enough to write code that allows sites to be viewed correctly across multiple browsers.

Here’s a case in point… I was in a recent advisory meeting at a local technical school, and we we were discussing the needs of Upstate businesses regarding website development. We wanted to make sure that the school could make certain they were focusing on teaching the correct classes to accommodate the community needs. One of the school advisors had the audacity to say, “We can get a web designer anywhere – a dime a dozen -  but we need JAVA and ASP.NET programmers. We have standards we have to meet.” This is a common misconception by most everyone because web designers have standards they have to meet, but most of them don’t bother.

In a perfect world in which all web designers write all of their html code to standards, all sites would be crawled regularly and correctly by all of the search engines, resulting in websites having good ranking with Google, Yahoo, et. al.

If current and prospective customers can always find your site in the search engines, you have a better chance of strengthening the profitability of existing customer relationships and building new relationships.

Giraffe Web is ready to help you develop a site for you that complies with standards.

We want to help you grow your business… Not throw away precious working capital on sites that don’t work.

If you are curious about whether your website is coded correctly, run your site’s pages through the validator at w3c: http://validator.w3.org/.

If you are a Giraffe Web client, rest assured that all of your pages will validate.  But hey, feel free to try out the validator anyway.

If you’re not a Giraffe Web client, you better get that Diaper Genie out of storage… just in case…

Cheers,

Judy

http://www.giraffeweb.net

Yes, I still have IE6 on this laptop because my server logs show it still very highly ranked as the browsers that are visiting my client’s websites, but I have IE7 on all the other systems we have, as well as the latest version of Firefox.

I also have an entirely different reason for wanting the browser to be upgraded. As web developers, we are constantly having to deal with client’s websites displaying properly in the various versions of browsers out there. Not only do we check the sites in IE7, but IE6, Firefox 3 and Safari. If we really want to torture ourselves, we also look at the site in Opera.

In a previous post I touted the great resource at http://www.tools4noobs.com/picasa/ that will convert the RSS feed for an album so that it displays better when embedded in your html pages.  However, I have a flyout menu on the site and it was flying out behind the Flash slideshow.  I was having to manually add the transparent parameter to the embed code which the client will not be able to do easily when they start to update the site.  So I e-mailed Tools 4 Noobs yesterday, and this morning I have a reply where this parameter was added to the generated code.

Thanks Tools 4 Noobs for being so responsive!

The main reason I wanted to use Flickr is because of a slideshow program that will work embedded in your html pages and if you have the photos up at Flickr, you do not need PHP to run this slideshow. One of these clients does not have PHP enabled on their server, so this looked to be the perfect program to use: http://www.flash-gallery.org/.

The premise is that my client could update their photos themselves and they would present themselves in a more ‘professional’ manner on their website.

However, one of my mantras is that you cannot expect much for free, so if you are not willing to pay, you have to settle for what is available. And from what I have seen so far, Flickr and Picasa offers much more for free than you would think!

I first started with Flickr.  It is easy to set up an account but the monthly limit is 100Mb, and the program does not automatically resize the photos so after uploading one set of photos the client gave me, I was at 50% capacity.  I still had 12 sets to upload.  I uploaded 3 more and was then informed that the ‘free’ account only allows 3 sets.  If you don’t need any more than 100Mb and no more than 3 different sets of photos, then Flickr is for you.  There is no software to download onto your desktop, you just upload.  Then Flickr gives you several options for sharing or you can embed the slideshow into your html page.

When I realized Flickr would not work for these clients, I switched to Picasa.  I had to first set up a Google account for the client.  I then logged in and once I clicked on the Picasa link, it became obvious that I had to download the Picasa software as the upload feature only allows a few photos to be uploaded at a time.  I then ran the automate feature in Photoshop to resize the hundreds of photos, by sets, imported them into the Picasa program, they are easily uploaded to the website.  In addition, the free version allows 1GB of photos and up to 250 sets.

The embed code was a bit screwy, so I found a great tool that changes the embed feature. You can view your album, then click on the rss feed button to the right. Cut and paste this into the appropriate box on the website and it will give you the code you need. http://www.tools4noobs.com/picasa/.

Convert existing or create new e-mail accounts. We will import contacts to mailboxes provided receipt of CSV file.

* Set up MX, CNAME records

* Help with Mail Client setup

* Help with Treo/Blackberry setup

Pricing details

One-time fee of $499.00 for 10 users/mailboxes. Additional users can be added for $40 each. Additional support at $60 per hour can be purchased upfront. *See terms and conditions.

Let our experts set up your Google Apps quickly and efficiently!

These are steps to get started:

1. Pay on our website here: http://www.giraffeweb.net/solutions.php

2. You must provide us with your domain information:

a. Domain Name (ex: mydomain.com)

b. Domain Registrar URL (ex.: godaddy.com)

c. Domain Registrar Control Panel Login and Password

d. Hosting Account Login Details (in case we need to view DNS settings there)

e. Google Apps Control Panel Login Details (If already signed up).

f. If you want your contacts imported, you must send us your exported csv file. (For directions, contact us).