Web Of Interest | ObuWeb

Gigacrete.com Launched

We are happy to announce the re-launch of Gigacrete.com. GigaCrete is a “green building” materials company that just opened a new headquarters here in Scottsdale, Arizona.

At GigaCrete, we develop and manufacture next generation building materials that structurally, economically and environmentally outperform todayâ€™s conventional building products. Why? To positively impact human lives.

Build strong. Build forward.

giga1 GigaCrete has a very interesting product, in that they have engineered an environmentally friendly alternative to traditional portland cement which also reduces weight, waste, and dramatically increases strength and thermal insulation. I was able to learn quite a bit about their product while developing the new website.

Here is a shot of their old website, which had served its time. The new website was built upon a content management system to enable GigaCrete staff to self maintain the website, as well as post press releases and blog entries.

A thanks go to out Candace Wade at Stand4 for the logo/identity work. It was a pleasure working with Candace and the staff from GigaCrete on the project. GigaCrete is poised to make a big impact in the green building industry, and we were happy to play a part by providing a new website to serve their online needs.

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18
Aug 07

Sneak Peek at the new BestPartyEver.com

Lately we have been focusing a good bit of attention on one of our projects http://bestpartyever.com. We are in the midst of an overhaul of the current system, moving it over to Code Igniter(CI) and revamping the entire system, while adding an entirely new user experience. The CI PHP framework is nearly effortless to use, and even for a more designer-type like me, writing functional code is pretty easy.

I have been blogging a bit about the process here on the bpe dev blog.

Code is something no one will see (unless it doesn’t work) and users tend to judge on the visuals. Have a look at this screenshot of the new user profiles that are still in progress. (image scaled down, click to expand)

As you can see the screen is pretty sparse at the moment. We have a ways to go still, but the overall feeling is there. Hopefully its comes across as feeling very ‘clean’ and ‘refreshing’. Thats it for the sneak peak, feel free to subscribe to the bestpartyever development blog to follow the progress of the new site as we get closer to an expect late september re-launch.

P.S. I was 18, 11 years ago.

UPDATE: After getting a few requests for more… here is screenshot of the new registration page.

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08
Aug 07

New themes for Flare9

We have ~~just~~ launched 13 new website templates for our Flare9.com website builder. If you need a quality website, that you can maintain yourself, without breaking the bank, have a look at Flare9.com.

We have a dozen more website templates that will be up next week as well.

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05
Aug 07

Things in 3

This is a post in ode to the #3. It is a very versatile number. Lets look at famous uses of the #3, and maybe you can come up with your own.

The 3 amigos.
Einstein’s Three Rules of Work: 1) Out of clutter find simplicity; 2) From discord find harmony; 3) In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.
The movie Trilogy (LOTR, Star Wars, Spider-man, Bourne.., etc)
March 3rd (3-03)
e3 expo
Easy as 1,2,3..
Of course 3 is used in marketing
3 strikes you’re out
The triangle (one of the strongest architectural shapes)
3D
The holy trinity
The first Nuclear test was named Trinity
It is great for using in comparison of two things
The 3 branches of the US government, even if 2 are useless…
Best two out of 3
Rock, Paper, Scissors
The 3 stooges………
Name your band with it
The founder of twitter likes it.
Kermit the frog weighs in on blogging.
3 letter .tlds
Protons, Neutrons, and electrons
The Primary colors
3 is the first odd prime number
Orion’s belt has 3 stars
Earth is the 3rd planet from the sun
Freud: Ego, super-ego, and id
Cerberus the 3 headed dog
The 3 wise men
The 3 holy cities of Islam: Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem
Gold, Silver, and Bronze medals
Reading, Writing and R’itmetic
3 is pretty close to pi
The hat-trick (sports/hockey)
The 3 letter acronym (XML,PHP,NBA,NFL,USA,MBJ)
The “3rd eye” (intuition)
This page where much of these tidbits came from
Muhammad Ali was 6 foot 3
Newtons 3 laws of motion
Morning, noon, and night
The infamous 3 toe’d sloth (slowest land animal)
Three’s company
The ie 3pixel gap bug
China’a 3 gorges dam
The Impending WWIII
The boy scouts dig it
“threesomes”
The fabled 3 dollar bill
The 3 tenors
Photography: the rule of 3rds
Three card monty (not to be confused with the full monty)
Tantek thinks in 3′s
And of course the The Three Musketeers

Notable 2′s and 4′s that just don’t quite get the same love as 3.

black and white
the square
being “2″ faced
2D (boring)
4D (too out there for most people)
the quartet
4×4
The duplex and fourplex (housing)
Noah’s Ark: Animals 2×2
In rugby, the #2 is worn by a hooker
Twins
The Audi quattro
The 4 horsemen
4 letter words
4 seasons
The “fab” four

I bet you could group just about anything in 3′s. So remember, make sure you use the #3 in your everyday life as much as you can, everybody is doing it. Heck I think I might just move to the number 7842 as 3 is getting so played out, but I wouldn’t make a big deal about it.

3 is preferred of course, but when presented with an oddball, 3 can make room for a 4th

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=WUb6YZctOqQ[/youtube]

http://youtube.com/watch?v=WUb6YZctOqQ

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03
Aug 07

If Green is your thing.

Just quick note for the weekend.

There have been tombs written on color theory, and you could probably get a BFA, MA, and a Doctorate in Color Theory and still not master it.

Here is a cool website devouted just to color.Â And if you are feeling like it, here are 130 ways toÂ go green.

Easy color quiz,Â why does the website use a gray palette?

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14
Jul 07

43 Totally Awesome Retro Flash Intro’s

I came across an old flash intro I did back in the day, and it gave me a chuckle, so I decided to see what else is out there. Here is list of 43 retro flash intros for web design related companies. Some of these are still in use. I cannot decide which I like better, the ones with the thumping music or the ones with the 0101010101 animated text. In no particular order:

* Are some of my favorites.

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24
May 07

The value add of Google Analytics.

Will the real obu please stand up, part 2.

Google Analytics is a pretty slick package offered by the big G that is free to use. It gives you tombs of website visitor and traffic data to poor over. The obvious benefit is to track visits and visitor behavior on your website. But deep into a long session of analyzing data I stumbled upon an additional easter egg not advertised in the brochure.

Look at the highlighted regions of this next image. On the surface you say big deal. Wait for it…

These highlighted pages DO NOT EXIST on our website. So this then begs the question, why is our Google Analytics report showing pageviews of pages that are not present on the website.

It seems that in the act of stealing our website, a few wiseguys neglected to remove the tracking code.

Examples. (these are ripoffs of our old layout pre May,1,2007 see below)

This is a real bad rip off of our old site.

This web designer even took credit for his bad ripoff

This UofA student is probably upset with us because he was pulling our CSS file which we moved.. so all his layout went bye bye.

We had problems with this guy before

And Finally this guy

I don’t make a habit of pointing things like this out. But It really really bugs me when someone steals our stuff and passes it off as thier own. And do it poorly at that. Another good tool to use to find content thieves is http://copyscape.com

So finally here is one more way to spot interesting visits in your Google Analytics. Click Content > Content by Title, if you see any page titles that do not look like yours, grab them and then do this search in Google: allintitle:<page title> and the first or second result it probably the culprit.

Here is the real question, Does this hurt our website? We know that Google tracks all this stuff for their own reasons. They give Analytics away so they get behind the scenes access to your website, and mine that data for all sorts of Google projects. So if they are tracking data on obuweb.com that does not match the REAL obuweb.com, are we getting slammed?