Just launched — Face­book App Con­test for West­shore Town Cen­tre! Designed by Cre­at­ing Excel­lence and pro­grammed by Blender.  This con­test exists in the con­text of Face­book and runs in con­cert with West­shore’s in mall contest.

Note­wor­thy fea­tures include: mobile friendly, Like gate, Face­book login, Face­book shar­ing, Tweet­ing, Pinning.

This project brings together sev­eral technologies:

• Face­book SDKs to inte­grate into it’s social media network
• Pin­ter­est + Twit­ter sharing
• Javascript + jQuery for interactivity
• PHP for server side coding
• MySQL for stor­ing con­test entries

Face­book appli­ca­tions are great ways to engage peo­ple with your brand or busi­ness.  Vis­i­tors inter­act with you and can eas­ily share out to their friends.

Face­book App Con­test for West­shore Town Centre

A 6+ mil­lion pass­word list has been released to the wild which is strongly sus­pected to have orig­i­nated at LinkedIn.  The pass­words are not matched to any account names in this list, but it would be dan­ger­ous to assume some­one does not have them as well.  It is very impor­tant you change your pass­word at LinkedIn.  Since that account is asso­ci­ated with your email you will want to change that pass­word every­where you have used it.  LinkedIn is sus­pected as many of the pass­words in the list con­tained the a vari­a­tion of ‘linkedin’.

One part of this inci­dent that makes it inter­est­ing is that the pass­words were stored using a pro­tec­tion called hash­ing which con­verts the pass­word in a way which is sup­posed to be dif­fi­cult to reverse — but as of this writ­ing likely over 75% had been extracted.

To pro­tect you accounts you should:

• choose long com­pli­cated pass­words includ­ing cap­i­tal let­ters, num­ber, and punctuation
• avoid words
• not use the same pass­words for dif­fer­ent accounts

You can read the entire story at arstech­nica

Web Design Ledger (WDL) has a short arti­cle on includ­ing a social com­po­nent within the design of a web­site to encour­age vis­i­tor interactions.

Social web 2.0 trends have taken over many of our mod­ern sta­tic web­sites. Nowa­days it’s dif­fi­cult to find a com­pany who isn’t on Face­book or Twit­ter or Foursquare, or any of the other increas­ingly pop­u­lar social net­works. It’s impor­tant to con­sider this expe­ri­ence and how you can por­tray social con­nec­tion in the eyes of your visitors.

Opti­miz­ing your Web­site for Social User Experience

Web Design Digest lists 4 rea­sons your great look­ing web­site isn’t gen­er­at­ing any heat — tar­geted land­ing pages, clear call-to-action, direct home­page, and per­sonal connection.

Top 4 Rea­sons Your Beau­ti­ful Web­site Doesn’t Convert

Long­time client Gary Mitchell first hired Blender in 2006.  He recently wanted to update and re-brand the web­site for his core busi­ness GEM Com­mu­ni­ca­tions.  His exist­ing web­site was dated,  per­formed poorly from a Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO) stand­point, and used tech­nolo­gies such as Flash which are no longer suit­able for gen­eral web­site design. Gary wanted a mod­ern web­site that would give him all the advan­tages the inter­net offers.

Our redesign stayed true to the appear­ance of the old, but com­pletely replaced the foun­da­tion and back end.  Blender rec­om­mended using the Word­Press Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem (CMS) so that Gary could main­tain the con­tent of On Trac on his own ensur­ing his web­site was always up to date.  Word­Press offers well struc­tured web pages where search engines are con­cerned and scales well to any size website.

Another focus was an expan­sion into social media includ­ing LinkedIn, Face­book, and Twit­ter.  On Trac would have a pres­ence on all three with the web­site act­ing as a hub from which con­tent would be shared out.

The suc­cess of the re-design will be tracked using inte­grated Google Ana­lyt­ics for traf­fic mon­i­tor­ing.  Vis­i­tors can give feed­back through web­site feed­back forms, a blog post com­ment sys­tem, and  through social media integration.

Tech­nolo­gies: Word­Press, PHP, CSS, Javascript, jQuery

Visit On Trac Coaching

Face­book is the most pop­u­lar social net­work with 750 mil­lion active users, roughly 10% of the world’s pop­u­la­tion.  Like all social net­works it con­nects users together, and if you are a busi­ness it con­nects you to your clients and more impor­tantly to their friends.

Crys­tal Munro, mar­ket­ing con­sul­tant, hired Blender to build a Face­book appli­ca­tion to encour­age vis­i­tors to “Like” Fix Auto’s Face­book page.  Together we cre­ated a cheeky plea for sup­port that uses a fun ani­mated car crash to get a vis­i­tors atten­tion.  Once liked a new page is dis­played that will con­tain spe­cial offers as a reward.

You can see the results on my Face­book page, but you will need to “Like” me to see the result­ing reward page…

visit Blender on Facebook