Utah Web Design Blog

Last day at the SEO Conference in Seattle. Learning some great landing page, twitter, seo, and traffic conversion tips!

I’ll share a few quick tips from @tim_ash, lose the address field on your form and gain potentially 17% more conversions. Also get those trust logos above the fold!

The Tuscany restaurant is a  high end italian restaurant located in the Holladay Cottonwood area near the base of the canyon. The restaurant is owned and generally managed by Mark Eaton, formally of the Utah Jazz.

It’s not everyday you get the opportunity work on a web project for one of your favorite restaurants, we were stoked for the opportunity. The design was nailed right out of the gate, it represented the high end brand superbly. Some interesting features of the site are; fully content managed, flash advertising area on the home page, fully integrated news and events system, randomized content backgrounds that match the page topic, gift card ordering system, self managed gallery tour system, and full menus.

Check out the website when you get time, we love feedback.

YouTube has been building an HTML 5  mobile version of their site which offers videos in native H.264 format, which if you have paid any recent attention to Apple are both technologies that will render Adobe Flash obsolete. Not a chance mister Jobs, but it is a cool and very clean technology, and very useful especially if you have an iPhone.  Check out http://m.youtube.com on your smartphone.  I have been testing for a while now and decided to give them some feedback on the project.  Really the only complaint I had was that they didn’t have a “New Videos” category under subscriptions.  This is a real time saver if you subscribe to say 30+ content providers like I do because it sorts all the videos across all your subs by date.   Anyway, within 2 business days, tada a new button titled “New Videos”, pretty cool.

This feature was already in the native  iPhone app but with the addition of all the iPhone users out there the iphone specific streaming servers have really taken a beating to the point where  2:00min clips now take 5 min to load if at all during peak times.  Enter – m.youtube.com.  With it you can select high def, not an option in the native iPhone app, and most importantly it utilizes different servers so it loads wicked fast.  So there you have it, faster load times and better resolution video that will play with very little processor demand on H.264 hardware compliant smartphones.  my old embedded youtube  iPhone icon is now replaced by the new YouTube icon.  Yep, they even make you a cute iPhone specific icon if you bookmark it to your homescreen.  I have no idea why Apple decided to use an old console TV for that icon in the first place.

Red Olive was invited to be part of the Art Institute of Salt Lake City Professional Advisory Committee (PAC). This committee meets twice a year and reviews the schools facilities, curriculum, and student work to determine how well they are meeting professional needs and trends within the Graphic Design community and/or what they can improve in.

Thinking about getting into the design biz and need to learn how? Take a look at Art Institute of Salt Lake City. Great resources at this school, a library any designer would kill for. A top notch computer lab and access to printers I only dreamed about in school. They are adding new resources everyday based on the needs of the students. The teachers really seem to care about the students, if you put in the extra work you will get extra opportunities to do some great work. Check them out and tell them your friends at Red Olive send you.

A lot has changed since I graduated from the Art Institute of Colorado, but so has this industry. Thanks guys for letting us be involved.

Logo Lounge — a prestigious compilation of logos from around the world — chose four of Red Olive’s logos to be included in their upcoming 2011 Master Library Collection. We are both honored and stoked to say the least. The award and recognition is for our logo & brand identity for The Mini Brochure, Rock Cosmic, neScience and Speculate.

Salt Lake Concierge launches new website – designed and developed by RedOlive. The website features some nifty jQuery with a nearly 4000 pixel wide slider and awesome photos from various Utah attractions. Salt Lake Concierge is a premier lifestyle management and concierge service company. Check out the site:

We all know that iPhones are for people who just think they need one to be cool, am I right?* Does an iPhone scream “DROID!” at you everytime you get a text though? No, it doesn’t. Therefore a lot of people are making the correct change to the open source and lovable phone, the Motorolla Droid. How hard is it to set up your email though? It’s as easy as saying “DROID!” in a high pitched robotic voice (well maybe a little more difficult).

Step One: Open up the “Mail” application from your menu. (note you can drag this icon to your desktop by tapping the icon and holding it for about 2-3 seconds)

Step two: Once the email application is open you will be prompted to enter in your email address and password for the account you are setting up. If you host email through us your username and password were provided to you at some point during the process. Remember that it will always be your FULL email used for any login regarding email. Click next after you have entered in the required info.

Step Three: now you need to pick the type of account you are going to set up. For this tutorial I’m going to set up an IMAP which basically mimics your real inbox on your phone (i.e. if you delete a message on your phone it is deleted from your computer as well).

Step 4: After you select IMAP from the choices you will be given a few more fields to fill out. The username / password / and IMAP server fields should be automatically populated, however if you are using Red Olive for your email you will need to change them. Remember your username will ALWAYS be your full email address and the IMAP server will change to mail2.redolive.net (mail1.redolive.net if you are an older client 4 yrs+). The port will be host specific so change it to 993 and the security type to SSL (Accept all certificates) — if you host through Red Olive. Click next and it will check to make sure it can connect successfully! If it does yay! If not make sure you double check your password and all settings.

Step 5: Now we need to set up your outgoing mail settings. The server is the server you used in the previous screen (either mail1.redolive.net or mail2.redolive.net). Make sure you change the port to 465 and the security type to SSL and that “Require sign-in.” is checked. Click next and the Droid will verify these settings as well.

That’s all there is to it. After the Droid verifies this info you will be prompted to enter in a few personal settings like the frequency to update, notification, and a nickname for the account. Once those settings are set you’ll be directed to your inbox where you can start enjoying your millions (maybe) of emails!

*note – No I really don’t have anything against the iPhone users out there. We all have fads at some point in our life :0).

P.S. – The droid really is a better phone.

50 great ideas on how to use twitter for business – From Chris Brogan
Twitter for Companies – From Me
Social Media Responsibility – From Melissa Jun Rowley

New Road’s Young Adult Drug Treatment Center website launches. This website features jQuery, php, and some good ol fashioned search engine friendly URL rewriting. We’ve also implemented a plugin created by our own Aric B. that generates the nav in "UL/LI" format with the CMS system dynamically. And the navigation works with javascript enabled or disabled. Nice work Aric.

First off, let me applaud Microsoft for finally getting a good name for their search engine. Back in July I ran the numbers on a few of our sites and Bing was sitting at about 7% of the total search engine traffic. This time I ran the numbers on a sample of 5 of our SEO sites (to save time) that have been around awhile. By around awhile, I am talking at least 4+ years old.

• 15356 hits (5 sites/30 days of traffic)
• 12,211 from google. 79.5%
• 1,730 from yahoo. 11.3%
• 1,415 from bing. 9.2%

Keep in mind this is by no means scientific, but rather a quick look at a few of our sites. With our sites, Bing looks like it improved. However, it appears to have taken hits from Yahoo and not Google. And since Yahoo and Bing appear to be merging at some point, success needs to be measured by taking hits from Google.