Author Archive
Wieselmann Salon Web Design & Web Development
Wieselmann is an award-winning hairdresser with hair salons in South Yarra and Toorak, Melbourne. They pride themselves on providing an elite hair service, focused on quality, craftsmanship and client satisfaction so, when they wanted their website redesigned, it should come as little surprise that they sought exactly the same qualities in their web team.
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Facebook Interns Maps Global Friendships
Paul Butler, an intern at Facebook, took a data sample of 10 million friendships and mapped them, creating the world’s first map of global Facebook friendships.
“I began by taking a sample of about 10 million pairs of friends from Apache Hive, our data warehouse,” he said in a post on Facebook.
“I combined that data with each user’s current city and summed the number of friends between each pair of cities. Then I merged the data with the longitude and latitude of each city.”
The global areas that shone most brightly were the eastern half of the US, Europe and parts of Indonesia. At the opposite end of the spectrum was China, Russia and central Africa.
Read more at the Herald Sun.
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Laurastar Website Design & Development
The Laurastar team came to me with the vision of creating a site befitting a market leader. As innovators that set industry standards for innovation and quality, Laurastar wanted a website to reflect their market position. The team sought a place that, not only demonstrated the quality of their ironing products, but provided their 65,000 clients with customer service like no other, incorporating online training videos and numerous options to access their 5 star customer service team, both online and offline.
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WordPress, More Than 30M Downloads
If you’re thinking about a CMS for your website, you’d be hard-pressed to ignore WordPress, the world’s favourite blogging platform which is, of course, much more than a pure blogging platform.
Back in November, following head-to-head voting against Joomla and Drupal, WordPress won the 2010 Open Source CMS Hall of Fame award.
To give you a taste of just how many people know how great WordPress is, take a look at at the WordPress download counter. I just did and took the screengrab below.
It’s easy for me to say choose WordPress because I know how great it is – but here’s more proof of how great it is.
30 million people cannot all be wrong.
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ACMA Study, No Choice For Telcos
A new Australian Communications and Media Authority study has found that Australian telcos have no choice but adapt to the consumer appetite for iPhones, Internet TV, iPads and downloadable applications.
Global sales of portable internet devices such as Apple’s iPad are predicted to reach 150m per year by 2015 with Google’s Android likely to be the most serious challenger to Apple’s current dominance.
According to the study, telecommunications companies had responded to the new digital age by:
- Bundling content with voice services.
- Increasing their data quotas in line with increased consumer consumption of content.
- Improving the generosity of mobile telephony capped plans and packages.
- Creating their own mobile applications.
- Increasing the incentives for Australians to retain a fixed line service in their homes.
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How WordPress Themes Work
WordPress developer and all-around web geek Joost de Valk has just graced the Internet with a highly useful infographic.
For a medium that leans toward the amusing, infographics can occasionally be enlightening or even helpful for later reference.
This one serves as a sort of “cheat sheet for how your blog works” and takes the reader through the basics of a normal WordPress theme.
It’s a posts-to-plugins look at the anatomy of a typical WordPress theme.
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WordPress.Com; 6 Million More Blogs in 2010
Automattic, the company behind popular blogging platform WordPress.com, reported 6 million new blogs and 23 billion pageviews for 2010. The latter figure represents a 53% increase from 2009.
These latest stats were reported by The Next Web, which added, “Media uploads also doubled to 94.5 terabytes of new photos and videos, while new posts were up 110% to 146 million” for the past year.
Just last month, Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg and CEO Toni Scheider disclosed that the company has around 30 million total publishers responsible for roughly 10% of all websites in the world. They also shared that WordPress.com receives 300 million unique visitors each month.
The five-year-old company may be experiencing remarkable growth, but it has yet to become a commercial success. The startup reportedly makes around $1 million per month from premium and hosting services, an inconsequential figure for a company that plays such a central role in web publishing.
Users can create their own blog using the platform located at WordPress.com or download the software at WordPress.org to use under their own domain name.
More at Mashable.
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WordPress – A Blogging Platform You Can Depend On
Web monitoring company Pingdom has tested the most-used blogging services to see how reliable they are over a period of two months.
The five most popular sites used for blogging included Google’s Blogger, WordPress.com, Typepad, Posterous and Tumblr.
“For each blogging service, we monitored the uptime of the homepage and four individual blogs, so we could see how the service as a whole performed,” said Pingdom in a December 17 blog post.
“The winner was without a doubt Google’s Blogger,” reports Pingdom. “The Blogger blogs didn’t have any downtime whatsoever during the two months we monitored them, followed by WordPress.com which had very little downtime.”
The average downtime for popular blogging site Tumblr was 47.5 hours. Posterous had the second highest rate of downtime, 2.1 hours while rivals Typepad and WordPress.com were almost always online with just 0.2 hours and 0.1 hours of downtime respectively.
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WordPress Theme Styles With CSS
WordPress has many themes to choose from and many of them have customizable backgrounds, menus, content layouts, and headers you can change to suit your own preferences.
But you can also take your site’s customization a step further and completely personalize any theme’s stylesheet by changing fonts, colors, borders, backgrounds, and even the layout of the site using the Custom CSS upgrade, a paid upgrade that costs $14.97 per blog, per year.
Many WordPress fans have made a beautiful home for their content using one of the basic WordPress themes as a base and customizing the site with the Custom CSS upgrade.
Here are some examples:
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WordPress Toolbox
Hot off the press from WordPress is news of a new December 2010 theme, Toolbox. What can you do with WordPress Toolbox? Lots of great things with a minimalistic look is the short answer.
Toolbox provides all the markup you need to build your very own theme with CSS alone–with one difference.
Toolbox uses some really exciting new HTML5 elements–like <article>, <header>, and <nav>–that better describe what your content is all about. (Head over here for a demo.)
Download Toolbox at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/toolbox
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