JLB Blog

Responsive Web Design // Mar 27 // JLB

We seem to be getting this request a lot lately … “can you design our new site for a mobile phone?” or “will our new site look okay in an iPad?” or “should we re-design our website to be more mobile-friendly?”

It’s a valid line of thought — and these are exactly the kind of questions clients should be asking. Mobile web usage is at an all-time high (see insightful article and “infographic” from DigitalBuzz). Some estimate that mobile Internet usage will overtake desktop Internet usage by 2014. The way your site looks in an iPhone, on a Droid, or in a tablet matters now more than it ever has. The W3C even has a standards section devoted entirely to mobile.

WordPress Contact Forms Made Stupidly Simple // Mar 22 // JLB

Every once in a blue moon, a WordPress plugin comes along that completely knocks my pants off (or socks, since we have a family-oriented office). The last time that happened, it was Ingenesis Limited’s Shopp commerce plugin.

Facebook Timeline…(download a design template here!) // Mar 13 // JLB

Timeline is coming to Facebook. The official change is March 30. As we understand it, at that point Timeline will be the format option that you will find on Facebook. So while we understand the urge to complain, we figure it is time to embrace and ultimately have found much to celebrate about this new […]

Searching custom fields in WordPress with meta_query // Feb 22 // JLB

There have been quite a few incredibly useful features that were introduced in WordPress version 3.0, which came out over a year ago. However, perhaps my favorite didn’t come till half a year later when version 3.1 was released. Previously, searching posts, pages or custom post types using custom field required a more-than-reasonable amount of […]

GuideGuide // Jan 12 // JLB

Those of us who use Photoshop on a daily basis (literally) know how frustrating using the guide system can be. Guides are used to mark certain dimensions and points of alignment within a photoshop file. I use guides for web design to mark where a content area begins and ends and to align elements in […]

Ruby on Rails functionality within WordPress using Wordless // Jan 11 // JLB

In general, I absolutely love PHP. It’s easy to learn, can be object-oriented and is generally easy to learn. Even more, I love that it opens up the world of Wordpress. However, I often get frustrated when I see new technologies like Haml and Sass popup that simply don’t integrate well with PHP.

The Whole World Is Being Watched // Dec 10 // JLB

Have you heard of Bluefin Labs? What about General Sentiment or Converseon or Trendrr? Even if you haven’t heard of them, chances are if you talk about television on your Facebook or Twitter accounts, they’ve heard of you. Or at least, they documented your comments.

Building custom content editor layouts in WordPress // Nov 30 // JLB

Custom Fields within WordPress are no secret.  There are hundreds of tutorials out there documenting how to easily automate them by simply adding a few lines to your functions.php file. 

JLB // Sep 25 // JLB

Here at JLB we encourage all of our clients to keep Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs fresh with new content. To keep our own blog up to date we have a little schedule to make sure our blogs are posted at different times during the month. The thing is, we aren’t so good at keeping […]

Google's Search Results // Sep 23 // JLB

There’s a reason I keep finding reasons to write about Google in the JLB blog, these days. They are one of the biggest forces of influence on the Net. If you’ve been listening to public radio lately, you might be hearing more and more about Congress’ interest in the search giant. This week, Google’s CEO […]