We’re very excited to announce the site we built for The Dining Room at the Langham has won a Magellan Award for 2009! The Magellan Awards received entries from top travel organizations and professionals worldwide, and to be selected a Magellan Award Winner is a tremendous achievement and showcases the high standard of excellence maintained by The Dining Room at the Langham within the travel industry.
Tatu Digital Media created the website as well as a Wordpress blog and Twitter presence for the restaurant and Janet worked with them as a social media coach. The site showcases Chef Michael Voltaggio’s cuisine (Yes, he’s the one from Top Chef!) and The Dining Room’s elegant ambiance with beautiful photography.
The Hess Collection is one of our favorite websites, and it’s just had a re-birth of sorts. We converted the site to offer better SEO, ease of updating with Contribute and heavy use of includes and PHP to make it easy to update the ever changing variety of wines that is Hess Collection. We also used some Ajax to spiff up the section for the amazing art collection housed at Hess, complete with an audio tour with information on each piece. Check it out.
When it comes to configuring your blog sometimes it’s easier to watch somebody else do it, and screen capture videos make that simple. WordPress.tv has loads of how-to videos and videos from WordCamp. As Michael Pick says in the blog…
Our goal with WordPress.tv is simple: To make it easy for you to find up-to-date, WordPress-themed video content within a couple of clicks. Without having to wade through spammy promotional videos, out-of-date content, and missing chunks of presentations.
What more could we ask for? WordPress.tv is a site to watch.
Instead of gifts from friends and family this year, I’m asking everyone to donate a dollar or two to bring fresh, clean water to a village that desperately needs it. We tend to take the abundance of clean water for granted, we fill wading pools for our dogs to play in on a hot summer day, but in many small towns around the world they don’t have clean safe water to drink or bathe in.
I’ve just posted this page where you can learn more about the cause and donate a small amount and make a huge difference in someone’s life. Just $20 can provide clean water for one person for an entire year.
Please take a look at the site and help me spread the word about this wonderful organization by sharing the link with your friends and family too. 100% of your donation will directly build freshwater wells and fund basic sanitation projects for people who would not otherwise have safe drinking water.
1.1 billion people on our planet lack access to safe, clean drinking water. That’s one in six of us. 80% of all disease on the planet is attributable to the lack of water and basic sanitation. I hope you can take a moment to help me spread the word and make a difference.
Happy holidays!
We are excited to realase a new website for Barbara Means Fraser PHD., Ms Fraser is an accomplished playwright and an Associate Professor at Santa Clara University where she served as Chair of the Theatre and Dance Department from 2003-2006. Fraser’s philosophy is driven by her dedication to social justice. The plays she writes are impactful and range in topic from gay rights, breast cancer, race and societal issues to sexual harassment and abuse. Her direction repertoire includes: The Laramie Project, Twilight of the Golds, Parallel Lives: The Kathy and Mo Show, and Paul Robeson.
The goals of the site were simple: to make the body of work more accessible to the public and give her a place to send companies interested in producing her plays. We used HTML and AJAX for the main page elements and Flash for a gallery of playbills and a video player for some of her clips. As we dig more deeply into her archives and the repertoire grows the site will easily scale to allow for more work.
Let’s face it, being stuck with only a handful of fonts can be limiting for designers and frustrating for clients.Of course there’s Flash or even sIFR, but there’s another option. facelift (FLIR)is a javascript image replacement script that doesn’t require Flash or even a graphics editor. All you need is to be able to run a php config file and add some JavaScript to your page. Can’t run php? No problem, they offer a hosted solution as well.
Of course you can do a whole lot more than headings. Take a look at the quickstart and see where your instincts take you.
Anybody who knows me is aware that I love Flash. Say what you will, but it’s grown a long way from the baby animation tool it was when I first started using it. I admit that sometimes it’s use is not warranted, but the way that Flash is being used for graphing and visualization tools just can’t be beat.
If you don’t have kids yourself, it can be intimidating to go into a maternity store or a kids store to find that special gift for a new baby, or even a young niece or nephew. What does a newborn infant wear? What size do you get? What kind of toys are safe for a baby?
That’s where Savvy Auntie’s Melanie Notkin comes in. She’ll help you find the cool stuff for kids of all ages and look cool doing it. She’s also creating an online community that will offer advice from a range of experts so you can learn the ins and outs of raising kids so you’re not totally in the dark when the kiddies come to visit.
The website is due to launch soon, but Melanie Notkin, Savvy Auntie founder has her blog up here, with stories of her adventures as an entrepreneur and her inspiration for the site, as well as her Cafe Press shop with lots of fun logo items to show off your Savvy Auntie-ness. Check it out and sign up for the beta launch of the new site!
Hey, I’ve got a new tutorial up on MacInstruct. This one is on how to create sitemaps using SiteOrbiter. It’s part of the new “Code Mojo” series I’ll be writing for. SiteOrbiter is a native Mac freeware app that not only helps you see your site from a high-level view, but it will create a Google Sitemap for you too, something every site should have. MacInstruct has a lot of info for you Mac addicts, so get over there and check it out!
If you’re a Mac love and you’re looking to learn the secret tips and tricks, or you’re looking for new Mac software to optimise your work-flow. MacInstruct is the place to be.
Let’s face it, being stuck with only a handful of fonts can be limiting for designers and frustrating for clients.Of course there’s Flash or even sIFR, but there’s another option. 
