YOU are invited! 4pm 10/04/12

Halloween Greetings from
Your Plan B Company!

Come enjoy a trick or treat with us at our Open House
at 4pm on Thursday, October 4th!

Our NEW address:

3759 N. Ravenswood Ave.

Suite 228a

Chicago, IL 60613

Tricks, treats, great new space and meet some new faces! 
Looking forward to seeing you there!


THANKS!
JameyB and DavidB
yourplanb.com

Countdown to Talk Like a Pirate Day - Sept 19th

Mark your calendars!
And it is the 10th ANNIVERSARY of this great day!

What will you do to celebrate?
Sing a song, wear an eye patch, sail the 7 seas?

We will be celebrating all day in our office - be warned arrr!

Join us and all other pirates at the TLAPD FB page: http://www.facebook.com/InternationalTalkLikeAPirateDay
 
To help get you in the mood here are some salty pirate sites:
TLAPD youtube
Cap’n is on Twitter
http://pirateaday.blogspot.com/
http://www.talklikeapirate.com/links.html#piratename
http://www.talklikeapirate.com/links.html#apps
http://www.blackbeard.co.uk/
http://www.dresslikeapirate.com/

Yo ho! Yo ho! A pirates life for me! ;)

Why we love Drupal!

Drupal is an open source Content Management System (CMS) that hit the scene in 2001 and really gained momentum in 2005.  It has a community of 630,000+ users and developers. Your Plan B Company is part of that number - we love going to DrupalCamp Chicago! Other groups using Drupal are: NATO, World Bank, Amnesty International, MTV UK, Sony's MusicBox, The Onion, Spread Firefox, and several political sites such as Vote Hillary and Draft Obama. IBM, NASA and Yahoo all use Drupal for their intranets (see " Why Yahoo! chose Drupal for an internal site"

Drupal is a great tool for complex and giant websites as well as smaller ones. Just one of the plusses for using Drupal is the easy to manage permissions and roles for the different types of admin and editor options. Drupal is also SEO friendly! Many of the SEO elements are installed by default.  Things like generating meaningful titles, meta data management overall and per page, specific modules just for managing SEO (like the SEO Checklist), and friendly URLs. Not to forget - the search tool! All you need to do is add your custom content and keep it fresh! Good SEO is more about content and less about trying to cheat the search engines IMHO.

So now you know a little more about Drupal, about why we love it and here are some current clients using it:
http://boccentral.org/
https://www.c4chicago.org/
http://www.caregivinghelp.org/
http://www.cje.net/
http://cvscaremarkspecialtyrx.com/
http://www.kruzinusa.com/
http://www.mwalliance.org/
and soon HVACsave.com!

If you are ready to convert your HTML, Flash or other CMS site into Drupal, give me a call to discuss your ideas and get things rolling for you 773-665-2552

And if you are ready to upgrade your 6.x Drupal site to the new Drupal 7.0 - give us a call to coordinate the upgrade planning. Read more about Drupal 7!

Learn More:
http://drupal.org/
http://drupal.org/features
http://www.searchreadyseo.com/blog/wordpress-vs-joomla-vs-drupal/

Personal note from JameyB: One fun sidenote is that I love the name Drupal because it is Dutch for "drop"! Having lived a year in Flemmish speaking Belgium, I think it is great that I can use a Dutch word everyday at work :)

Goodbye Flash

Flash was once one of our favorite ways to add movement and interaction to a website. But with technology always moving forward, now it is not the case! If you have flash on your site (like we do on our homepage - the awards that scroll) it is time to rethink and revamp. If your ENTIRE site is in Flash now is the time for a full remodel!

So, since we are changing out Flash on our own site, we thought this would be a good time to share with you all about options and why Flash is no longer a recommended solution. (Mind you there are always exceptions to the general rule, for example gaming sites...)

First, what is Flash?
“Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash) is a multimedia platform used to add animation, video, and interactivity to web pages. Flash is frequently used for advertisements, games and flash animations for broadcast. More recently, it has been positioned as a tool for "Rich Internet Applications" ("RIAs"). Flash manipulates vector raster graphics to provide animation of text, drawings, and still images. It supports bidirectional of audio and video, and it can capture user input via mouse, keyboard, microphone, and camera. Flash contains an object-oriented language called ActionScript and supports automation via the JavaScript Flash language (JSFL). Flash content may be displayed on various computer systems and devices, using Adobe Flash Player, which is available free of charge for common web browsers, some mobile phones, and a few other electronic devices (using Flash Lite).”  (thank you wikipedia)

Second, why shouldn’t we use it anymore?
The big reason is that you cannot see it on Apple products.  More importantly on the 15M+ iPads out there! That is a HUGE bunch of potential customers that you are alienating with outdated information/animation/functionality. For reasoning why Apple won’t allow Flash, read Thoughts on Flash, by Steve Jobs.
Other reasons include:
- issues with Mac and crashing
- poor performance on mobile devices
- usability issues on touchscreen devices
- not effective at SEO (search engines have issues with Flash)
- costly to update or make changes

Third, what are the options now?
There are some options out there, not each one is perfect but it could work to meet your goals. Refreshing the information in HTML5, CSS, HTML, PHP5 and JavaScript is a start.  Check out WebKit’s CSS animation abilities too! What this tells us is that it is time to stop and review your website content, does it really need motion?  Is it time to focus on content vs. movement?  Content is and will always be king!

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us to discuss. Call 773-665-2552

Read More:
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/02/20/an-adobe-flash-developer-on-why-the-ipad-cant-use-flash/
http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/design/adobe-flash-future/
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/
http://seb.ly/2011/01/html5-vs-flash-the-aftermath/