Everybody’s happy with a little extra cash in their pocket, and we’re happy building great websites and applications! Let’s work together and make some happy!

Announcing Wagger’s New Client Referral Bonus Program

Throughout the months of August and September, Wagger is offering a $250 referral bonus to anyone who brings us a new prospective client leading to a signed agreement for $1,000 in work or more. We also aren’t putting a cap on the number of referral bonuses you can collect, so feel free to send us anyone you think could benefit from our services!

While anyone can make a website, our team specializes in truly cultivating the growth your business’ website.  What does cultivating a website even mean?  Excellent question!  Our process of website cultivation is an end-to-end process to continually evaluate the needs of your customers, your business, and — very importantly — your budget to maximize the Return On Investment (ROI) a website can bring to the success of your business.  The constant assessment of our website cultivation process is especially important in the Northern Virginia DC Metro area where so many start-ups and small businesses are competing for the attention of the same customers.

1. Interviews & Information Sessions

I’ve always thought this first phase to be the most important of all, as it sets the tone for everything else moving forward.  This phase is a lot like a first date because we want to know about you, your business, your customers, and anything else you feel like sharing, along with answering as much as you want to know about us.  Among the questions you should expect us to ask:

• Where did the name of your business come from?
• Why did you start a business, and what sets you apart from your competitors?
• What types of customers do you currently attract and do you want to attract other types?
• How do you currently advertise, and how successful to do you think that is?
• What are your expectations from a website?

These questions help us gain a better understanding of your goals and help you to get to know us better.  This type of interview will be ongoing throughout each phase to ensure the process, progress, and project milestones are understood and agreed upon by all involved.   Our stance of open communication, supported by our customer portal, helps avoid unnecessary changes down the road caused by uncomfortable requirement and functional misunderstandings.

2. Website Design and Web Architecture

Once we’ve got an idea of the design and functional requirements of your site, our graphic artists come aboard to start creating website design mocks while our web architecture team gets the ball rolling with technical specifications and wireframes.

For the majority of websites, this will be the most time-consuming phase of development because this is where the website is actually designed.  While large scale revisions can and should occur in this phase, we’re experienced with empowering you to make the decisions required to move smoothy and efficiently through the process.

3. Functional Specifications

With the big concerns tackled in the website design and web architecture phase, this phase is the nitty gritty details such as navigation effects, CSS enhancements, JavaScript and jQuery behaviors, and advanced enhancements such as Flash.  While we are hashing out these details, our development team is busy staging your testing environment, identifying hosting requirements, and readying the troops for the next phase: Website Development.

4. Website Development

With the other phases behind us, the website development is surprisingly fast.  Historically, this marks is a little more than the 3/4 point of a project budget and is a lot like approaching 3rd base on the diamond.   With the design mocks, wireframes, and functional specs in-hand our team of industry-leading developers translate the site requirements into an actual website.

Starting with a Content Management System (CMS), such as WordPress, our application developers and graphics designers work in parallel to execute on the website design and functional requirements to build the site to our agreed-upon specifications.

As this phase progresses, our usability team steps up to make sure the site meets usability standards and is easy for your customers to use.  Depending on the scope of the website, this may include marketing surveys and beta testing to make sure your customers can find your services and ultimately do business with your company.

5. SEO/SEM and other Marketing

Towards the halfway point of the website development phase, our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) team kicks into high gear to identify content and editorial requirements and begin optimizing the site for search engine visitors.

While SEM and other marketing – such as email marketing or print media – are optional site enhancements, we do not believe that SEO is an option for business in the Northern Virginia, DC Metro area.  As this area is especially ripe for entrepreneurs and is therefore rife with competition, we include a base SEO package with all of our websites and launch you with the best chances of being found.   Learn more about our SEO and SEM services from our Digital Marketing Service page.

6. Cultivation

This is what happens after your site goes live and is a lot like growing grass.  Up until this point, we readied the earth for your site by laying the foundation, placing the seeds, and preparing it to thrive.  The next step is to maintain the website by performing traffic analysis, providing regular updates, and performing routine maintenance.  While we will train you to keep your site up and running, we’re here to fill in any gaps or clear to-do’s off your list along the way.

Happy growing!

Remember Your Audience

Don’t forget that as a pediatric dentist, your website design should appeal primarily to parents with children — not the children.  Don’t fall into the trap of ignoring the needs of your patients’ parents while trying to make something childish and fun.  This means that a pediatric website must be easy to read and navigate, but should still be as fun and creative as your practice.  A website that balances the same fun-but-professional atmosphere your practice does will go a long way to setting you apart from the fierce competition amongst pediatric medical and dental professionals in Northern Virginia.

Show REAL Pictures

While seemingly cost-effective, the use of stock imagery is something that tends to turn off parents. Those parents researching professionals through their pediatric websites will pick up on reoccurring generic children very, very quickly and wonder what’s wrong with your people or practice that makes you not want to show real pictures.

Quality webdesign firms, such as Wagger Designs located in Northern Virginia, have photographers on staff who will take pictures of your actual staff and practice to alleviate the need for stock photography.

Show Images of Your Practice

Showing actual pictures of the examination area, operatories, waiting areas, and exterior location is very important for a pediatric website.  Parents who visit your site want to see that the areas are clean and in good repair.  Beyond knowing you keep up with your physical location, a sneak peak of your kid-friendly facilities also allows parents to get a feel for how you will interact with the children in your care.  Practices with kid-friendly features will leave a great impression with parents and a pediatric website is a excellent place to show these features to the parents of perspective patients.

Typically forgotten, an exterior shot, great on a directions or contact pages, make it easier for parents to find your pediatric practice by giving them a visual idea of your practice’s exterior.

Show Pictures of Your Team

Never substitute stock-imagery for your actual team members or actual patients.  One way to get great action shots of your staff interacting with children is to host an open house night for children you know well.  Throw a little party and provide exams for them while you and your staff operate like you would in a typical day.  The pictures from this event will yield incredible shots of your friendly staff and happy children throughout your practice.  When parents researching pediatric professionals arrive at your website, they will notice the uniqueness of these pictures and will appreciate having the opportunity to see you in action.

Easy on the “Fun” and “Cute”

Some “fun” deigns elements are usability nightmares for parents.  One prime example is the use of a mouse cursor trails.  These seem SO CUTE! — but they are not only incredibly annoying when browsing a site, but are also horrible for parents browsing pediatric websites with disabilities.

Another element that gets professionals in trouble is a pediatric website that plays sounds. Having a pediatric website automatically play safari noises is the quickest way to encourage a parent to leave your site — especially if they are at work.

The last “fun” and “cute” example to stay away from is overly creative navigation.   Having stared at a few pediatric websites trying to find the navigation, I can attest that parents who cannot find the information they are looking for will quickly move on.

Wagger’s Pediatric Website Packages

Contact us to learn more about how our team can partner with you to build a pediatric website that compliments the uniqueness of your practice and encourages parents to convert from a website visitor to a patient.  We know technology and also understand how to integrate with leading third-party vendors, such as Dentrix, to get new patients into your practice systems quickly.

Find out how our strategy of levering a modern website design, SEO techniques, and fully customized graphics and photography will contribute to your practice’s success today!

But how?  You can render static images or use tools like sIFR or FLIR to generate surrogate font renderings for you, but these each have their own drawbacks.

Assuming that you have a proper license or permission to embed your chosen fonts on the web (and please ensure that you do!) then the @font-face generator at Font Squirrel may be just what you need.

How It Works

Using the font-face CSS declaration, Fontspring has developed a cross-browser friendly syntax to nudge the requesting user’s browser into downloading and applying the proper font file format to the page where it’s needed.

In a nutshell (no pun intended), Font Squirrel’s generator takes a TTF, OTF, or PFB font file and generates every format necessary to support IE5+, Firefox 3.5+, Safari 3.1+, Chrome 6+, Opera 10+, and iOS 1+.

Trying It Out

Once you’ve uploaded your font files and chosen options (or ignored them — the generator works fantastically well on “Easy”), you are provided with a web kit download that contains the file formats, a CSS file, and a sample page for each uploaded font.  Opening the sample page in various browsers will show you the results before you commit to grafting the solution into your website.

Getting the Fonts Installed

When you’re ready, upload the generated font files into the same directory as the site’s CSS file.  Next, copy the contents of the web kit’s CSS file into that of your site.

It’s done!  You can now use the fonts within your site by way of the font-family declaration.  Just use the same font-family values referenced in the @font-face block and you’re off and running.

Alternatively…

When in doubt over the licensing of any given font, Font Squirrel provides a slew of free commercial-use font kits, and Fontspring (the creators of Font Squirrel) sell an even wider range of OpenType fonts which are explicitly licensed for use with this method.

Happy fonting!

The most concerning aspect of both of these bills is that our country’s decision makers stand behind SOPA and PROTECT IP as written to champion American interests and intellectual property ad, in turn, protect the American entrepreneurial spirit, our jobs, and our financial security.

In fact, both bills will ultimately fail to accomplish the intended goals and are, in the process, set to squash many of the freedoms we take for granted from a free-flowing Internet.

Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)

“To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes.” – H.R.3261

What It Does:

This  bill would allow copyright holders and the Department of Justice to seek legal action against websites accused of facilitating copyright infringement, and to force service providers to block offending sites; this would prevent gateway services, such as Google Checkout or Paypal, from doing business with such sites and would even bar search engines from simply linking to an offending website.   For streaming content, such as YouTube, Vimeo, or a self-published video blog, unauthorized streaming of any copyrighted materials would be a crime backed by up to 5 years in prison after 10 incidents of streaming copyrighted music or video within a six month period.

PROTECT IP Act

“Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011” – S.968

What It Does:

As the bill states:  “An service provider of an information location tool shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures, as expeditiously as possible, to– (i) remove or disable access to the Internet site associated with the domain name set forth in the order; or (ii) not serve a hypertext link to such Internet site.”   Additionally, the information location tool, which is largely refers to Search Engines but can refer to any site, must delete all hyperlinks to the offending “Internet site.”  The net effect is that, without an up front burden of proof, Internet sites can be censored until such time as their names are cleared, no matter how long that takes, and without remedy if falsely accused and later proven innocent.

What Does All This Mean?

The summation of both of these bills is an attempt to control the flow of information on the Internet under the guise of protecting the American Dream from “rogue websites,” plagiarizers, and other intellectual property thieves.  As an organization that both uses the Internet to share materials that our are own intellectual property and that also helps other organizations share their own intellectual property, we agree with the masses that taking anything that doesn’t belong to you without any attribution or retribution is reprehensible behavior.

The language of both of these laws, however, invites other consequences.  Consider for a moment that if either of these laws had been in effect a decade ago, the landscape of today’s Internet would be very different indeed.  For starters, we would not have YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, Etsy, Ebay, Dropbox, Twitter, Twillio, Vimeo, Tumbler, Pinterest, Can.vas, or a good number of open source software projects.

What Can I Do?

That’s a fantastic question!  Tell the House and Senate that you are exercising your right as an American citizen and say:

• You do not support restrictions upon the entrepreneurial spirit this country has been built on
• Enforcement of laws in this country should always require due process
• The United States of America is not China, and you do not support a Great Firewall of America
• That Internet Blacklist Legislation would drive jobs away from this country and will not be tolerated here

Tell Them Now!

Say NO! to SOPA by contacting your House Representative: http://www.house.gov/

Say NO! to PROTECT IP by contacting your Senate Representative: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

Contact SOPA Supporters directly: http://gizmodo.com/5870241/presented-without-comment-every-single-company-supporting-sopa-the-awful-internet-censorship-law

After reading recently that IE is finally wearing out its welcome (except in government and huge companies), it occurred to me that I couldn’t remember precisely when I had started using Chrome as my primary frontend debugger, but that it is measured in months.

Why would someone use Chrome over IE or Firebug? Well, here are the things that I like:

Always Feels Light and Fast

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but Chrome doesn’t seem to suffer from the same bog-down bloat that Firefox does over the course of a debugging session.  New tabs and windows spring open, and script debugging is snappy.   I have to close a crashed tab occasionally, but I’d rather have that happen than experience debugger lag any day of the week.

Editing is Intuitive

Altering the DOM or CSS in-place just feels natural.  Tab orders make sense and do what I expect; adding or changing properties, styles, or elements is a breeze.

Help is Just a ? Away

Typing a question mark anywhere in the debugger presents a modal dialog with common key commands for each section.  It’s not a killer feature, but it’s more convenient than having to drill into a Help menu to remember how to increment a value by 100.

Live Tutorials in the Documentation

The documentation for Chrome Developer Tools is specifically designed for you to pop open your debugger and walk through the functionality.  This is a great way to learn-by-doing, which helps retention several times over.

Revision History!

This is, by far, my favorite new(ish) feature.  After making changes to JS or CSS in the Elements tab, switch over to the Resources tab and drill down to the file.  Expand the arrow, and you’re presented with a list of revisions for the entire session that you’ve been fiddling.  You can see what has changed in each version highlighted, and ultimately, opt to save off changes or revert if something goes awry.

Drag-and-Drop DOM

Ok, I’ll admit this is more of an oddity than anything else, especially since the revision history doesn’t extend to the HTML markup of a page.  But maybe it’s useful for rapid prototyping?  In the Elements tab you can literally drag elements around on in the DOM where you see fit.  Want to see what would happen if you switched the positions of two divs?  You can do that now!

But Wait, There’s More!

Not enough? There’s also remote debugging and the ability to pretty print minified scripts, with more features added regularly.  Check out this presentation earlier in the year from gurus Paul Irish and Pavel Feldman, and happy hacking!