Willakenzie Estates is a jewel of a boutique winery nestled in the hills of Oregon. They didn’t want just any website. They wanted one that gave visitors a sense of how special this place is, how the vintners carefully craft an array of rich Pinots using old world techniques and sustainable farming practices. At Willakenzie it all matters, the people, the land and the grapes themselves and it shows.

We think this website really allows Willakenzie Estates to shine. We used Flash where it needed to be used to enhance the experience, and the rest of the site is in HTML with rich visuals and a nice clean design. Check it out.

Oh, and, just a suggestion. Check out that cellar club. You can get wonderful pinots available only to club members and judging from the tastings we’ve had we’ll stay club members long after this project is done!

It seems that the Cambridge University Light Blue Touchpaper blog got hacked not so long ago. The security team repaired the damage but the hacker had assigned himself as an admin and they wanted to find out his password. All they had to go on was the data in the MySQL dbase which was encoded using the MD5 hash.

That’s fairly good encryption unless you have banks of computers at your disposal to de-crypt it. Who has that kind of resource? Well Google actually. The security team took the stored hash from the database and entered it in Google. Google handed him back the password pretty as you please. The password turned out to be “anthony”. Go figure. A hacker using such an insecure password?? Appalling.

Want to try this for yourself? Go here and enter your favorite password. Click MD5 to see the encoded password. Then paste the password into Google and see what you get.

If your pass comes back at you, get a new one, preferably something more secure. If it doesn’t show up then BRAVO! Your password may be more secure than Anthony’s. Not that that takes much.

Another interesting find was this site that shows commonly used passwords as MD5.

Having a hard time coming up with a password you can remember that is also secure?
If you’re on a Mac you can use 1 password to create strong passwords and remember them for you. It can also stop keyloggers and phishing sites from saving your passwords, and it works with your OSX keychain.
Well worth checking out.

This is just too cool. For those of you who bought Painter years back and played for hours with the cloning brushes, here’s a new twist.

I.O Brush - Click here for more blooper videos

We are quite proud of this site. It really shows off the amazing cuisine, the well deserved world-wide accolades to the chef and their amazing staff. It’s always good to know that our colleagues at the Web Marketing Association think so too. Congrats to the design and coding teams on an excellent job!

We are always happy to work with the Exploratorium, and we’ve just designed a new look and feel for their webstore. The idea was to design a site that reflects the experience of visiting the museum and the innovative items you can get in the store that extends the learning experience through books, educational tools and toys you can find in their on-line store, and to do it all within the tight confines of the established store’s structure. It was a challenge but our designers pulled it off!
Check it out.

Hey, we got a design award way back in June and plumb forgot to tell you about it! It’s a nice award because it comes from our peers for a site that we are quite proud of, the Ritz Carlton Dining Room in San Francisco.
Check out the award here.