Webdesign Stories

By Bruno Rony | Published March 10, 2010

Welcome! Yes, this blog is about web design because that is what we do! Since 1995, when Cybird inc first settled in Los Angeles/Pasadena, we have been servicing dozen of customers and projects: plain HTML web sites,  database driven websites, web design makeover, new features, e-commerce solutions, Customer Management Systems, SEO…etc you name it.  In the coming weeks and months this blog will highlight selected moments in the life of  the 1-stop webdesign center. We hope you enjoy reading and writing back:-)

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Add video to your website

By Bruno Rony | Published March 10, 2010

When David de Hoyos from DH media in Los Angeles first contacted me I was curious to hear what kind of video package they had to offer. And very surprised when I heard their numbers. So far all attempts I had made to see how much it would cost a small business owner to incorporate video in his/hers web site were disappointing to say the least. Who would want to spend 2 grants and up for a 1-2 minutes video?
Considering what it takes to produce a decent video I surrendered to financial realism and gave up on finding better offers. Until several weeks ago…
David and his dad came up with a very affordable package. Sure, they are making efforts to promote their business and in these days of economic difficulties, they had better come up with attractive prices like we all do, right? The result is $500 for a company presentation video that is now in the making but will soon appear on our Home Page. Who can beat that?
DHMedia worked with me closely and we came up with a detailed script allowing me to convey the essential of who we are and how we work . We had two shooting sessions to record the bits and pieces that will be put together and edited to create a professional look and feel. They gave me valuable professional tips on the purpose and content of this video and advised me on the acting which was a necessity as I am not a natural to say the least!
Shooting with these guys was a pleasure as they are the kind of video professionals without an attitude. And they made it very easy to work with them.
Small video clips can be very useful to present a company or a new product on your website. It enriches the content of the site by making your company personable. After all, when you google for web design companies, it is difficult to know who’s better or who is more reliable in the long term… We all have very attractive websites and we more or less offer the same services. So how can I make a difference? Well, watch our video and you will hear it from me and from another client (special thanks to Claude Delgado from DGraphicsolutions for playing his own role in the video!). As we all know it, the strength of a small business is the personality of its owner. A video can definitely help promote a different style and most importantly let people hear and see who you are! And if they like you, chances are you’ll get the phone call:-)
To be continued.

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Internet Mall to launch this Spring

By Bruno Rony | Published March 8, 2010

RDS Innovations has chosen the 1-Stopwebcenter to build a sophisticated Internet mall dedicated to the San Gabriel Valley. www.aliofthevalley.com is geared towards retailers who need more exposure to drive customers to their store without having the need for a full blown website of their own. The site offers a basic calling card to promote consumer awareness, an active calling card to advertise sales, show assortments, communicate with customers and full e-Commerce for those retailers who want to sell online. It comes with a very intuitive Content Management System (CMS) that allows retailers to update their page(s) at will. This first online mall of its kind was developed with two concerns in mind: provide the management of the site with tools allowing them to create as many stores as needed, edit and customize each store based on a selection of options  and allow subscribers to manage their store profile.  The site offers  standard promotional areas such as the “Featured stores” and “Features products”. Other promotional areas and tools  are also available during Holidays. Last but not least, RDS Innovations advertising and branding campaigns will promote consumer awareness drawing customers throughout the San Gabriel Valley to the mall and retailers web store.
The one challenge we encountered during the development and test phases was the configuration of the text editor used to publish key text information: we had to maintain consistency in the content display  among dozen if not hundreds of individual pages. So we needed to frame these text areas to prevent store owners from over filling them. We could have used Flash to do that but  for many good reasons, we decided to use an HTML editor  and we created a Preview feature to show exactly how much content is publishable in the designated areas of the store page. Then we had to make sure that most platforms and browsers would be rendering the  content  without (noticeable) discrepancies…ah! Macs and PCs, Explorer 6,7,8, Safari 4 and Firefox 2 & 3+…you make our webmaster’s life so exciting!

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