Communiqué

iMarc is very proud to announce that two of our clients' sites have won awards in the prestigious Interactive Media Awards!

The Massachusetts Society of CPAs has won 2007 Best In Class for Financial Services. We're excited because the team at the Society and the iMarc creative and development teams put a lot of time and energy into making their new site not only look great but provide fantastic member service to MSCPA's members and integrating it with a very complex back end business/member management system. It's great to have it recognized!

Newburyport Pedicab has was awarded 2007 Outstanding Achievement for Charity. Newburyport is our home town, and Pedicab is a great cause: they work with the Pan-Mass Challenge to raise money for cancer research.

The new site was designed and programmed by iMarc developers Jeff Turcotte and Patrick McPhail, working after hours, as a public service to the City of Newburyport and Newburyport Pedicab.

Previous IMA winners among iMarc's clients include Springstone Patient Financing, ReloJournal, Maine Maritime Musem, Seacoast Science Center, Cubist Pharmaceuticals, and the New England Veterinary Oncology Group.

 

iMarc is a skilled team of designers, programmers, and business experts. We’ve been building custom web sites since 1997. The iMarc team believes that form follows function, that value is measured in efficiency and return on investment, and that great content is key to a great web site. Contact us for a consultation without cost or obligation.

From our internal chat list this morning...

1. Craig: I dont know #$*%& about baseball, but those rockies suck.
2. Patrick: It's true and it's real.
3. Fred: The first half of your statement really explains the second half.
4. Ruks: Yes, I agree that the first part explains the second. If it's true, then it's real, too.
5. Will: To my untrained eye it appeared the younger members of their pitching staff folded under pressure. Once they got that older guy in there things went more smoothly.
6. Fred: They're just a little rusty and nervous. They've been golfing for the last 8 days, what do you expect? (Besides, everyone knows that Beckett is lights out, this was all part of the mind games. "Look at me, a lonely reliever that can't hit the strike zone.") You'll see.
7. Jeff: ...more smoothly into the pit of despair!!!!
8. Patrick: They folded just like those chairs that you can fold. Folding chairs.

While most people hate spam, I actually don't mind it. My junk filter catches most of it, and the stuff that sneaks through lately has been hilarious.

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Last year we created a 50-second info reel about iMarc for the MITX Awards show.

Coming in November... iMarc's next video will rock your world.

Until then, kick back and enjoy the '06 version:

I just graded every major Democratic presidential candidates' website. Later in the week, I'll cover the Republicans.

It's all well-and-good if a candidate agrees with you on important issues like Iraq, the economy, or building a gigantic wall around Texas, but can he or she build a half-decent website? Let's see. Unlike most of these politrickians, I'll cut right to the chase...

The Winner

Joe Biden's website ranked highest. Followed by Hillary, John Edwards, and Bill Richardson.

And now for the details...

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One of our developers sent out an excellent link today: Google designed for Google. It's funny, and really excellent commentary on grey hat search engine hacking. Check it out.

Okay, you looked? Great. That was the fun stuff. Now for the boring stuff...


There are two approaches to search engine optimization ("SEO"), black hat and white hat.

White hat SEO is simple. Write good content. Make it readable for humans. Google will reward you -- slowly, but surely.

Black hat SEO attempts to game the search engines by reverse-engineering their algorithms and then creating web pages that are custom-built for search engines. In the past, techniques included stuffing meta tags into page headers, creating pages of "invisible" white-on-white text, stuffing keywords into image alt tags, and the like.

Eventually the search engines started penalizing these techniques, and shifting to other methods of determining relevancy, such as using incoming links as a measure of legitimacy.

Today, a common black hat approach is to create "link farms" of hundreds or thousands of web sites that link to each other and are stuffed full of keywords; they rise in rankings as a block, and SEO firms sell links in these farms to their clients. Problem being that search engines have started to penalize link farms, which in turn hurts their clients.

Next black hat SEO companies have cottoned onto blogging. Earlier this year, I could hardly type a search term into Google without getting page full of bogus results from synthetic blogs hosted by Blogger, Blogspot, et al, ad nauseum. It's gotten better lately, so I think the search engines have figured out this approach too.

So what about that "Google designed for Google" example I started with? What is it?

Grey hat, I suppose. It's satirical, but it's becoming pretty common -- SEO consulting companies make recommendations to their clients which result in ugly, cluttered pages in which the content is crowded out by the attempts to stuff keywords and social bookmarking attempts. Technically, it's not gaming the search engines, but the pages end up much less usable.

Even if you do manage to get some new visitors to your site this quarter, are they going to like your page and actually pay attention to you? Or are they going to surf right back out? Remember, more than a decade after the web was created, the Back button is still the most used part of any web browser!

When the search engines inevitably start penalizing your grey hat activities and you cease getting referrals, where does it leave you?


(See also: Beware the snake oil, stick to the content.)

iMarc is seeking an Interactive Designer with a strong emphasis on graphic interfaces, web design, brand building and visual problem solving skills. Candidate should also have a solid understanding of information architecture and user interface design as well as experience in design presentations.

Requirements:

* 1-3 years prior experience
* Strong sense of design fundamentals and type
* Understanding of HTML and CSS
* Advanced knowledge of Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign and Flash (ActionScript a big plus)
* Team player that can work closely with clients
* Ability to handle a number of projects at once
* SEO understanding a plus but not a requirement

What iMarc Offers:

* Competitive Salary
* Excellent benefits including health and dental coverage
* Company-sponsored retirement plan
* A fun, engaging and creative work environment
* Located in beautiful Newburyport, MA
* Challenging, varied projects

How to Apply:
Email a PDF or Plain Text resume to designer@imarc.net / Inquiries without links to web-based work will probably be ignored.

No Calls Please.

(11:00:22 AM) craigrukatimarc: i think we're meeting about it at 10:45 this morning
(11:00:27 AM) craigrukatimarc: ...
(11:00:30 AM) craigatimarc: PPFFF
(11:00:52 AM) craigrukatimarc: i say mrrr to your ppfff
(11:01:25 AM) craigatimarc: and i say garrghhh to your mrrrr in regards to my pfffff
(11:02:15 AM) craigrukatimarc: WINNER ->

Recently here at work I took the plunge. I downloaded the beta version of Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon…gosh they have awesome names) and installed it on my workstation. Yes, it took me a little while to really get settled. Yes, I do boot up my old Windows XP install inside of VMWare in case I forgot something.

The reason I recently switched is because Wine has made some great improvements. Version 0.9.46 supports installing, activating and running Adobe Photoshop CS2. Also, my editor, PHPEd, is fully functioning. Granted, Photoshop CS2 is not running perfectly, but I don't spend too much time in there, and I know the remaining bugs will be fixed soon.

Anyway, back to Ubuntu. The only real snag I hit along the way was that the Html Validator extension for Firefox won’t install properly. First you get errors about libstdc++ not being found. I ran sudo apt-get install libstdc++5. This removed the first error, however another error appeared. Not only was I getting an error for the extension, but my back and forward buttons stopped working.

After a bit of forum reading, I downloaded the Ubuntu source for Firefox 2.0.0.6 and started bug fixing and compiling. About an hour or so later I came up with a working .xpi file.

To save anyone else from having to do this, here is a link to download the Html Validator Firefox extension v0.841 for Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon.