The Redesign of BigTunaInteractive.com

May 31, 2010

After three weeks of usability testing, we are proud to officially announce the re-launch of BigTuna Interactive’s site! The features of this site are a product of our San Diego web design skills that we have advanced tremendously over the past few years.

Here are some images of the old site. Please click on them for a full screen graphic.

We used these technologies and design techniques on the new BigTuna Interactive website:

CSS Sprites

We really went nuts with CSS sprites on the redesign. Sprites are images with various usability states. These states could be either current, active or hover. Sprites are a great way to increase page speed and reduce server calls. In the past, you had to use javascript to accomplish the effects of sprites. However, you can develop them using strictly CSS today. The first sprite that you will see is our navigation.

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Writing Plugins for WordPress

May 1, 2010

There were several plugin sessions at WordCamp San Francisco. Naill Kennedy, Joseph Scott and Michael “mitcho” Erlewine gave two different presentations during the morning esssion.

Naill Kennedy gave a high level overview of writing plugins for WordPress. Naill’s main points were:

Why would you write a plugin for WordPress? First of all, it can serve your own needs. Google and Salesforce.com just developed new plugins that integrated with WordPress. This allows you to improve customer engagement outside of your original site.

A second reason to write a plugin is to increase traffic back to your site. In the plugin admin center, you are given a link back to your site. While this link is not indexed by the search engines, it is a great way to drive traffic back to your site. You do get a link from the WordPress plugin directory. Continue reading

Facebook Social Plugin API Tips

Apr 27, 2010

Facebook social plugins are becoming a core component of social media campaigns. Facebook’s api is very robuts; however, their documentation needs some work.
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New BigTuna Interactive Branding

Apr 27, 2010

BigTuna Interactive recently underwent a branding update. We updated our logo, collateral and this website. Above are some of the creative choices that we had to choose from.

Bing’s Online Marketing Launch Strategy

Mar 18, 2010

The launch of Bing in June of 2009 was a very thought out and integrated online marketing strategy. Below are the key learnings from Tuesday, March 16’s SXSW session titled “Bing: admit it, you thought it would suck”:

Bing had a strong online marketing campaign to launch their product which emphasized an emotional connection to a brand. Word of mouth, relationship marketing provides 40% emotional proximity to the brand. Tactics to pull this off are talking to friends and family, writing for blogs, participating to the online conversation through social communities, etc. Continue reading

Twitter At Platform

Mar 15, 2010

Evan Williams was the keynote speaker on Monday’s session at SXSW. Evan announced Twitter’s At Platform to which allows twitter into websites. This feature shows a jquery tooltip when you hover over a link with a twitter name and allows you to follow them directly without going to your twitter tools or twitter.com directly.

The at platform gives a platform to have you juice up your network and pull more twitter streams into the conversation.

Beyond Algorithms: Search and the Semantic Web

Mar 14, 2010

The Beyond Algorithms session at SXSW was filled with with an All Star cast. Danny Sullivan, Editor for Search Engine Land and one of the most respected thought leader was a surprise addition to the panel.

The semantic web has been the most emerging topic in search engine optimization and the overall usability of search engines. The term semantic web has a lot of different meanings from different people. My definition of semantic web is that it is a higher level, or more concise matching the search query to the user’s intentions. Continue reading

CSS Framework Battle Royale

Mar 13, 2010

I recently sat in on a CSS framework “Battle Royale” at the 2010 South by South West conference in Austin Texas. CSS frameworks really speed up the web design and development process.  We have designed sites with both the 960 grid system and blueprint before.  There are a lot of differences between the five main css frameworks, which I will discuss below. Continue reading

Optimizing a WordPress Post

Dec 9, 2009

Click to Watch!

This video the shows the proper on page optimization processes for a WordPress post. It covers the correct title structure, category alignment, more tag positioning and use of the All in One SEO plugin. There are hundreds of other factors that go into optimizing your WordPress pages. This tutorial shows the basic best practices for what to do with the default settings and the all in one plugin. Continue reading

SlickMap CSS Site Map

Sep 16, 2009

I added a SlickMap CSS site map to this site today. Slickmap provides a “mind-map” like sitemap. Surprisingly, you would think that this site map would have been written with jquery. However, it is written in pure CSS, with no javascript.

Site maps are a staple web usability feature. They give visitors a quick way to find information. Site maps are also great link juice for search engine spiders. Continue reading