WordPress saves costly testing time. There are many benefits WordPress website content management software offers. This article discusses one of its biggest benefits when implemented correctly and efficiently: it saves costly testing time. In 2001, I began specializing in custom built-from-scratch websites for businesses and organizations – big and small. I was fascinated by the…
A top 25 web design firm AdVenturesDesign.com has been named for the 7th year in a row in the Puget Sound Business Journal 2013 Book of Lists. To put it in proper context, that’s #22 out of about a jillion web design firms in Seattle, land of high techies.
Happy 2-year anniversary in our Seattle Phinney Ridge office space. Still cozy, still have great neighbors, still loving it! We’re at 302 N. 72nd Street, Seattle, WA 98103. That’s right across the street from Ken’s Markets, home of the best pizza on earth.
A chain of events over a two-day period brought smiles to our faces and made us wonder if there was a little serendipity in the air.Here’s how they unfolded… ThursdayAd Ventures writes an article about GTmetrix, our favorite website testing tool, and how our new site at TakeYourBusinessPlaces.com scores a double A / A when testing with…
Our office neighborhood is hot! How cool is that? #1 in Seattle and #7 nationwide! See for yourself – we’re at 302 N. 72nd Street, in the heart of Phinney Ridge. “Phinney Ridge neighborhood is Seattle’s hottest neighborhood and the seventh-hottest …in the country, according to Redfin.com. The Seattle online real estate company said it determined…
Our site, TakeYourBusinessPlaces.com, speed scores rock.Page speed score is 96% (A).Yslow score is 90% (A.)Pingdom performance grade is 98/100. High Speed score = better user experience, better SEO. How’d we pull that off? – Not by compromising the site by limiting graphics or page count. (Our page count in this site is 66+ pages and loaded…
For the 7th year in a row, Ad Ventures has made the top 25 graphic design and web design firm lists for 2013 in the Puget Sound Business Journal – Seattle! We’re thrilled! The Business Journal serves multiple cities nationwide from Seattle to Phoenix to Washington D.C. and is an industry leader covering business news from a local, regional…
While at the “Bing Ads Connect” agency seminar in Seattle on Tuesday, I heard that some of Bing’s employees don’t like Bing’s new logo. Well, if it weren’t for the logo, Bing’s new power point presentation and other marketing collateral wouldn’t be so killer. Wow! Hundreds of pages of unique templates with infographics that delighted…
How to tell if an internet marketing company is likely a miss…before you hand over thousands of dollars for the intangible. For a true SEM professional, it takes less than five minutes to review a so-called internet marketing specialist’s website to determine if they know their stuff or not. After all, it’s logical to think that…
Add Your Heading Text Here Here’s a tip I just learned today: As soon as you get your website copy written and posted live to your site, hurry and post it to all your social media sites before a copycat writer beats you to it. That way, if all goes as planned, Google and Bing…
I’ve noticed over the years that website owners don’t seem to give their website’s hosting much thought. They should. You might be surprised to learn how much the quality of your hosting directly impacts how Google and Bing rank your site. So if SEO and website user experience are important to your business, you should…
An 8th grader named Safaa Abdellatif from Evergreen Middle School sent a letter to our office today asking about design and photography careers and what graphic designers do on a daily basis. Normally, a letter like this would go on that “to do later if ever” pile because we get hundreds of letters and calls…
High fivin’ is one of our favorite themes on the Ad Ventures’ website where we highlight all our great customer feedback: http://backupadventuresdesign.xyz/high-fives/ So our tales started waggin’ when we found out today is National High Five Day. (really, yes it really is!) . . . .
It ain’t pretty. You think you contracted a custom WordPress website, only to find out three months into it that you’re locked into specific photo dimensions and layouts . . . You complain, ask for changes and three weeks later the changes haven’t been done yet. This cycle repeats, and repeats again. Why? Probably because…
So you want a custom website design. And you want WordPress installed so you can edit it. To get this exact combo (custom +Wordpress), you have to ask for it in just the right way which isn’t as easy as it sounds . . . Ask for it one way, you might get “template,” ask for…
Adventurer Web Developer, Kyle Dalan, enjoys a sunny day of Friday skiing on a much-deserved day off.
What a difference a new work location makes! Since moving our office from Shilshole to Seattle’s Phinney Ridge – Greenlake neighborhood, the sun shines on our office every day (well, almost every day – it is Seattle, after all.) In the back, we’ve got a big deck with a view of Greenlake and lots of…
…A new website for The Napoleon Company, a 4-generation family-owned business since 1903 that specializes in fine foods for cooking in everyone’s kitchens! The planned launch date is April 2013. .
Congratulations to Washington-based Kiel Mortgage for their new venture into California and Oregon Markets. And to celebrate, up went their new website, designed by AdVentures, where applicants can apply for a home loan online
It’s such a challenge, I’m putting SEO to work right in this blog to announce our new address, because our new address isn’t taking at Google’s place. Here we go: “Ad Ventures Design & Marketing has relocated their offices effective May 1, 2012 to 302 N. 72nd Street, Seattle, WA in the heart of the…
A celebratory luncheon at Ray’s Boathouse, conveniently located across the street from Ad Ventures’ design studio, starts with a round of cell-phone inspired photos. And it follows with one round of drinks, and multiple rounds of jokes, stories, laughter and getting to know each other even more. Congratulations to Heather on her 8th anniversary as…
If you’re not sure you have all the rights to your website images, stock photo companies have vastly improved their capability to let you know if you don’t. They’ll let you know you are in violation in the form of a letter…and a potentially hefty bill for several years of back usage. To protect their…
A good website design company with integrity stays on top of design trends to create websites that are modern not just in visual appeal, but also in functionality and programming. This is all done to extend a website’s shelf life in order to maximize a client’s investment. Of course, every business and their project is…
With CSS3 support coming to all browsers, the newest web service to hit the internet is font embedding. Sites like TypeKit, FontSpring, WebINK, and even Google allow you to embed custom fonts into your website with just a few lines of code. THE HISTORY OF WEB FONTS The ability to add custom fonts to websites…
I get an average of 75 – 100 emails per day at work. I research and read up on industry technical info and trends online every week. I started a hard copy book two years and haven’t finished it. (And it’s really good, can’t wait to see how it ends…) I can often be heard…
Google’s font library has grown rapidly since it started with just a handful of fonts. The library encompasses over 80 fonts from every genre – handwritten to serif, script to monospaced. These fonts are available to use for free on any website, commercial or private. They work across allmodern browsers and nearly every version of Internet Explorer still…
So you like their portfolio? Here are some questions you should ask when interviewing a design firm or freelancer to avoid contracting a skillset that isn’t exactly what it appears to be. What part of the work did you do?2. How many people worked on it and what were their roles?3. Do you still work with…
Bing, Bing, Bing. Gotta love you because you are my laptop’s default browser. And I loved you even more when I saw that our company website recently arose to position #1 in the Bing local listings for a very competitive industry keyword phrase. But delight turned to “horrors!” when I clicked on the listing’s website…
People use Google to find things, but use Google to help your hard-working, highly valued employee be found? Yes, that’s what you do when you know how to work the search engines, and you know it’s time for your employee to grow her career outside the walls of your own business. That’s what we did…
A big congratulations to “Mollie Mac” for her promotion from marketing coordinator to project manager at Ad Ventures. “Mollie Mac” started as a design intern from University of Washington five years ago and was hired upon successful completion of her internship. She has diligently taken on more responsibilities over the years and is a key…
The following data points were gathered from 4 different sources, using North America or US statistics where available. They were then averaged together for the final row. Because each company uses different methods about how they collect stats, the numbers vary, sometimes wildly. In the case of Internet Explorer 8, as much as 16.4 percentage…
With 2 new major browser versions to be released in the next couple of months, it’s time to start looking seriously at CSS3 and HTML5 features which will soon be available to a majority of web users. While Firefox has had support for many CSS3 properties for over a year now, it’s newest version, 4.0,…
Every once in a couple of years or so we run into business owner or department manager who contracts us for our web design services, who fancies himself a website designer. (I can see the smile on your face now as I write this….) Our challenge becomes keeping the site on track without it becoming…
Designing for screen resolution is a must-do component for successful website design. Choose what your minimum standard pixels should be based on your target audience. For example, the below statistics are reflective of WC3School students with an interest for web technologies. So naturally, their computer screen resolutions will skew higher, since this group is more…
Ad Ventures’ “welcome waggins,” Sammie and Taco, howl with goulash stare-downs. (We howled too trying to wrangle up doggies for photo shoots.) Thanks to Bonnie, Executive Director of NW Yacht Association and self-described “more of a cat person,” for her tip to buy the “really cute” bat wings for Sammie from ‘All the Best Pet Care.’ “We…
In the past it’s been presented by some almost like it’s a “magical” inside, proprietary knowledge that SEO “experts” have that they can’t share. Well, it is inside knowledge that comes from years of studying and most of all, keeping up to date with Google guidelines, which are non-proprietary. At Ad Ventures, we research SEO and…
From conceptualization to planning media to delivering the call to actionWith the gigantic movement of ears and eyes to the internet, its formidable presence commands reconsideration of planning traditional media campaign mixes in print, radio, TV and outdoor. A well-strategized website should play a key role in every advertising campaign regardless of selected advertising mediums….
What exactly is “Marketing Strategy” To some, it means putting together a marketing plan where to focus your resources for the best return in results. To Wikipedia, “Marketing strategy is a process that can allow an organization to concentrate its limited resources on the greatest opportunities to increase sales and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. A…
Social networking has been around forever. And today it’s bigger than ever. Social Networking has arrived at a new level from connecting in person to connecting online through a variety of key social media resources. Simply put, every active business or organization should evaluate social media for social networking now. There are pro’s and con’s…
