Bloggity by Josh Orum

In 1440 Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press – a milestone in printing technology. The printing process has evolved through the centuries, and in 2008 the potential of such technology was fully realized. Behold the EM-Assist marketing kit!

Learn how Loud Dog uses Print Style Sheets to make sure our websites look as good on paper as they do on the screen.

As part of almost every web-related project, we write code. Here’s a brief description of the different types of standard deliverables we frequently use in our process.

A website redesign can leave you with nightmares of broken links. Learn how to sleep easy and keep your visitors happy.

At the very end of last year, we relaunched louddog.com. Now, barely two months later, we’re releasing the next version. In this article, Josh describes the decisions that led to the initial design, and what’s changed in the latest iteration.

We launched a refreshed Loud Dog website last night to great fanfare and the sounds of The Final Countdown playing in our offices.

All the JavaScript in many “Web 2.0” websites makes them hard for search engines to read (and index). Search Engine Land’s Chris Silver Smith describes how to make Web 2.0 websites in this article about Why Many Web 2.0 Developers Are Search Morons.

Entrepreneurs occasionally ask me about e-mail best practices, both informally and during the course of our website projects. Since I started Loud Dog in 2001, I’ve had the opportunity to get a broad overview what works and what doesn’t, both observationally and through experience dealing with our own internal e-mail, and I’ll try to share what I’ve learned here.

Local search engine marketing is different than normal (“global”?) SEM, and it requires different techniques to get your local site to the top, whether you have a single local presence or many local presences. Josh explores the ins-and-outs of this new arena and identifies the four key steps to the top.

If your website is important to your business (and we hope it is), it’s critical to have a disaster plan in place. Josh takes us through what happens in a disaster, and what plans we should have in place.

When most people think of design, they think of Visual Design - the stuff you see - rather than other aspects, that I’ve addressed elsewhere. Still, the value isn’t always apparent. My friend Jon uses a great analogy to explain the importance of visual design.

Loud Dog shines at building web sites that expertly accommodate both the technical and visual requirements of the web, including those that aren’t immediately obvious without years of web development experience. Here’s how we do it.

Until you are in the top two results for your keywords, it pays to invest in creating an enticing, compelling description for your site - it may be even more important than other techniques.

Websites should be built with search engines in mind, although not as top priority. Happily, a basic level of optimization is relatively easy, and will help your users as much as it does your site ranking.

When it comes to design, less really does equal more. If you have a great product, you don’t need to plaster it with bells and whistles.

When working to improve your website’s search engine ranking, it’s easy to get focused on coding and technical details and forget that they actually play a relatively small role in your overall results.

Andy Rutledge responds to Milton Glazer’s essay at AIGA with this comparison of art and design:

Art involves no responsibility to anyone other than the artist’s ideas, ideals, vision and purpose. Design, on the other hand, involves a responsibility to everyone and everything other than those things. For example: to the client’s needs, the client’s aims, the client’s expectation of result, the clients’ customers’ expectations, needs and concerns, …even to the public at-large.

Kathy Sierra writes about “The Happy User Peak” on her blog. Not only do I love diagrams like that, but I love that diagram! It nails it: we are so obsessed with new features that few things are easy to use.

Good communication is part of good design, and part of good corporate communication is a pithy tagline. Our tagline is “We make websites easy to use.” An article in this month’s UPA Voice gave me some food for thought.

The article is nice, short and to the point.

Roy Peter Clark, a “Senior Scholar” at the Poynter Institute gathers together his Fifty Top Writing Tips for our purusal. Recognizing that design is more than looking good leads naturally to embracing good writing as an integral part of good design. Thanks, Roy!

E-mail is definitely one of Loud Dog’s critical business tools. It touches everything - from project management to developing new business. In fact, our first contact with new clients is frequently through e-mail.

Unfortunately, if your company displays an e-mail addresse on its website, it will be found by a spambot - an automated program that scours the web for e-mail addresses. This article explores how we can defeat the spambots!

I don’t like spam. I don’t know anyone that does. Luckily, there are a variety of tools and techniques that help me win the spam wars. The most obvious - or at least the most well known - are the variety of programs that filter, sort and block spam headed for your inbox. Less obvious are the ways you can prevent spammers from getting your e-mail address in the first place. Since the first is really the domain of IT folks and System Administrators, this article focuses on how to prevent spammers from getting your e-mail, or at least lessening the possibility.

Mark Logic announced the launch of their new corporate site on Friday, June 3. Designed and programmed by Loud Dog, the site features clean, straightforward design, fully standards-compliant programming and an easy-to-use architecture.

One of the most important challenges facing owners and managers in our user-centered world is moving design to the forefront of their company’s culture.

Many decision-makers still think that design is about “making it pretty.” Companies with this attitude are shortchanging their customers and will be left behind as design-centric organizations continue to surge ahead.

Webster’s Dictionary defines information as: “The act of informing; the communication of knowledge.”

Information design is a highly specialized area of design that involves making large amounts of complex information clear and accessible to audiences of one to several hundred thousand.

From the AIGA website.

I recently saw a prominent blogger post a request for “diagramming software.” He wants to illustrate a concept for a book he’s writing. This is a good thing: diagrams and illustrations are particularly adept at communicating complex concepts; while scenes and emotions can be communicated through words alone (frequently poetry is more emotive than a picture), when it comes to a concepts, a diagram can make the difference between a logical maze and clear communication.

We talk about usability a lot here at Loud Dog - it’s the foundation upon which our designs are built. Our philosophy is that attractive designs can be easy-to-use and usable designs can be attractive. We rarely talk about accessibility, however. I’d like to clarify what we mean by accessibility (versus usability), why it’s important, and how we can make sure our sites are accessible.

Loud Dog is happy to announce the launch of theclearbead.com.

Cal Insure, a San Francisco-based Insurance Broker, wanted to give their customers online access to their accounts. Loud Dog came through with an easy-to-use hosted solution.

Poker Mountain, the Internet’s Friendliest Poker (tm) has launched. Loud Dog designed an easy-to-use standards-compliant site, made recommendations and some contributions to the downloadable application, and is managing all online marketing efforts.

Amelia Catalano has joined us as a part-time advanced front-end developer. She’s going to be working with us to create outstanding standards-compliant websites using cutting-edge XHTML and CSS techniques.

Designers need to remember that part of the customers’ experience is finding and returning to the website. Josh explores the various aspects of search engine marketing in this article originally written in 2004 and updated throughout the years.

Loud Dog extends a warm welcome to Jonathan Adams, who joins us as a Designer.

We’re moving our San Francisco offices to a new, larger location in the heart of North Beach.

If you’re reading this, you’re on our new website. Under construction for the better part of two months, we’ve completely updated the look and feel, implemented a variety of cool new-ish technologies and are feeling happy about it.

Loud Dog founder Josh’s younger sister Ally is getting married in September, and she asked him to put up a page about the wedding. Getting carried away, it turned into a proving ground for some ideas we’ve been working on.

After Loud Dog returned to work after the July Fourth weekend, we were shocked to learn that Andy Glazer, star Poker Author and centerpiece of Final Table Poker had passed away, apparently from a blood clot in his brain.

We recently helped Mark Logic, a Bay-Area startup that’s developed an XML-based database solution, design and build a website focused on supporting their growing developer’s community.

XQ:Zone was designed to be a friendly, easy place to visit and navigate, and supports whatever content the editors want to put inside the main body.

Loud Dog Media is proud to announce the launch of Final Table Poker, just in time for the 2004 World Series of Poker!

On January 30, Medical Eye Services launched Phase One of their new website, allowing their doctors to process their claims online.

Loud Dog client EuropeASAP celebrates their one-year anniversary in February 2004. We worked with EuropeASAP during a year-long project to design and build a website selling discount vacation packages to Europe.

Although we're no longer actively involved with them, they still offer some fantastic prices and we still see them at occasional barbecues.