The Local Wisdom Blog

The Challenge
Family owned and operated, West Coast Subs brings the fresh, surf style of California to Toms River, NJ. Residing next to the family’s fashion boutique, The Cali Way (http://thecaliway.com), the owners of West Coast Subs needed to focus their efforts on quickly opening two storefronts. They contacted Local Wisdom to design and develop a site boasting West Coast Subs’ fresh and healthy ingredients along with its Cali flair. Before beginning we sampled the food, and they are accurate; the food is great.

Design
Renowned for its surfing aficionados and health conscious residents, California is the true inspiration behind West Coast Subs. Our design experts were able to create a surf-style aesthetic that complements the shop’s healthy and fresh menu, while highlighting the owner’s passion for the ocean and all things surfing. We built the site using Jquery to provide users with a fun and compelling interface.

Development
Without sacrificing design quality, we were able to develop a site for West Coast Subs, which would deploy in two stages. We shared in the company’s urgency to have a web presence, deploying the first stage of the site to showcase their menu. This put West Coast Subs on the map allowing the site to begin impacting search results, maximizing its customer potential. Next, we tackled the full spectrum, rounding out the full content migration along with design nuances which speak to the shop’s surf-style atmosphere.

How did it go
Being nimble for a customer is core to our philosophy. We were able to share in the client’s urgency and launch the menu stage of WestCoastSubs.com within two weeks then complete the development of the larger site. The rapid deployment, professional design, and local buzz exceeded the client’s expectations.

LWers:
RJay (Design)
Melissa (Develop)
Derrick (Account & Project Management)

Plethora is a great source of personally curated design and art work spanning a series of disciplines. Although the best inspiration comes from the real world, this iPhone app is a great free place to see aggregated work for: web & interactive, graphic design, branding, art, illustration, photography, product and industrial design, interior design, and architecture.

Learn more from the Plethora website or download from itunes.

James Chudley of Smashing Magazine posted a great article on How to Use Photos to Sell More Online. Its a lengthy article with great photo examples. The article was written for products, but I believe these can be put to use no matter what you are doing online. Most importantly, we don’t want to put up a photo just to put up a photo… make it do something for you like:

We curate quite a few websites where we manage the use of photography. We work hard not to “slap on a photo”, but make it have some meaning and usefulness in the grand scheme of the website. Read the full article.

Here is some video of Adobe’s Android prototype.

You can see it browsing to YouTube and playing a movie using Flash (this much iPad can do), you can see the keyboard (the “keys” look a bit smaller than the iPad), other than that, I couldn’t tell what some of the other UI’s were about. Keep in mind, this is still a prototype.

Wow, it wasn’t even 24 hours since I blogged about the Microsoft Office 2010 Beta and its co-authoring abilities. Now, co-authoring isn’t anything new, if you’ve edits a Google Doc with others at the same time, then you can understand its usefulness in business.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about how Facebook will be transforming the social web at the Facebook F8 Developer Conference. There were quite a few amazing ideas and Facebook is looking to be ubituitious across the entire web and not just on Facebook.com. Business Insider writes a better summary here: Facebook Announces Plan to Infiltrate the Entire Web.

One of the new ideas spawned Docs.com – Microsoft Office 2010 available online and tightly integrated with Facebook.

PS. I was more impressed with the expansion of Facebook Connect, but that’s another blog post.

Was doing some research today on an IPad case as I still don’t have one.  The guys at the office got the Apple one, but I don’t really like it as it’s very cheap feeling, but I do love that it converts into the stand for the IPad.  So I looked at hard/soft cases, soft sleeves, folio, folio/book-stand cases and I’m leaning towards getting protection and the book-stand functionality with a few choices I’ll show here:

1.  Incase convertible book jacket – protects the IPad all the time and gives 3 viewing angles when you’re at a table.  It’s close to what Apple released, but from what I’m seeing in the reviews, it’s of much better quality and people like it.

2.  Macally Bookstand – Very similar to Apple case, but I like the color more and it fully exposes the edges of the ipad.  No reviews to speak of, so I’m hesitate to take on for the team and buy it.  The note that the IPad isn’t included is from the legal department

3.  Marware Eco-Vue -  This one is the most interesting of the 3 as it’s very slick looking, gives you the 2 bookstand options, but also throws in a hand-sleeve where you can hold the IPad like it’s a glove, check it out below:

I think the glove sleeve sells me on the Marware one, but I’m going to sleep on this on.  So these are the one’s I’m thinking about, let me know what you’ve found or what you’re using for the IPad protection dilemma.  I also found this article at PC World that discuss a bunch of companies that are creating cases/sleeve/ bookstands for the IPad, most of which I’ve never heard of.  The custom ones are pretty cool, and there’s one in there that does decals

Looks like Saturday I’ll be playing with LW’s newest toy, the Apple Ipad   Contact me if you’d like to stop by and play with them, I’ll be receiving 2 on Saturday!   I have a feeling our expertise offerings are going to expand after Saturday…

There is a thin line we must walk between form and function. We’ll always have a bit of both.

If we had a scale from bare-bones utility versus over-the-top flashterbation, we’d be somewhere in the middle everytime. Sometimes we’ll lean towards the utility side and other times we’ll lean towards the experiential side. Usually this is a page-level decision depending on the page’s purpose.

Some examples of when we lean to the experiential side include: when we need to evoke emotion, display complex information, facilitate decisions, or guide through a flow.

We’ll lean to the utility side when we need to people to do something repeatedly, when delivering serious or sensitive information, or when we want to focus attention.

UX Magazine wrote a great article on comparing Eye Candy vs. Bare-Bones in UI Design.

Congratulations Marek and Flore! Welcome to the wonderful world of wed lock

But that’s how I got introduced to wedsite.com. My good friend and non web developer created a lovely online experience to introduce us all to his wedding plans.

Big props to wedsite.com for allowing couples to communicate their very special wedding plans.

Now, this won’t replace the formal invitation, but there are so many ways that this is a fantastic supplement.

• more information
• will keep me up to date
• photos
• music
• background (As I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting the bride to be yet)

Moreover, their pricing is great and you can get your own domain and a keepsake CD.

BTW – 4 out of 6 people who signed the guestbook complimented the website

And no, I do not work or get paid from wedsite.com to say this. Being in the web world, I get tons of friends asking me how much would a wedding site cost and this is my response.

Project Sikuli is a new automation program that can be programed using screenshots. Yes, screenshots! You can automate anything on your PC or MAC using screenshots. Don’t believe me, check out the vid. Then check out the Project Sikuli site.