Alberta Design Blog

Everyone loves the cloud. We love the cloud. The cloud is that imaginary place where all our business problems disappear, our IT costs vapourize and everything and everyone has the a rosy red glow of ecstasy on their faces. But have you ever actually thought about what the cloud is?

The cloud is really a series of high tech data centres all over the world. People own them. Shareholders, actually, own them. Shareholders don’t generally like free services. Your company financials are sitting in a data centre in Virginia, or Mumbai. Your proprietary technology is in Africa or China. Those cloud servers physically reside somewhere.

Now, Google is the king of everything free services. Almost all of our clients use Google services. Recently, Google delisted their free apps for business. Now, new users must pay $5/month per user. Let me put this into perspective: My email has 10,000 or 11,000 messages in it. Those messages reside in Google’s data centres. Should they decide my “free” cloud-based email is no longer free… what could I do? What I can do is pay to access “my” email.

Now in an attempt to not sound cynical, so many cloud/open source products are so cool: Drupal, CiviCrm, Salesforce (NOT free!). These products power so many things, and cost so much less compared to building from the ground up. Heck. They are so free and easy, we’ve kind of forgotten people build this stuff, and eventually need to get paid to do it.

Apple is rapidly expanding iCloud, and happily offering paid upgrades, dropbox => paid upgrades, Google => paid upgrades.

I suppose the morale of the Google Apps tale is two-fold:

1. Get while the gettin’s good; and
2. Strongly consider what is safe up there, in the cloud.

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Well, it’s election time again in Canada and Canadians are busy listening to the parties and their platforms. Now, it may be more efficient if the parties would wait a bit longer before calling an election, we seem to get elections more often than we get spring, but we all have to play the hand that’s dealt to us, and get out there and vote.

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Most of our clients receive email one of two ways: on a Microsoft Exchange Server, or through POP/SMTP. For those that use an Exchange server, there is likely an IT staff involved, or at least an external IT supplier like Bulletproof Networks handling the email. For those without IT support, POP is the likely method of email transfer.

Now, Redpoint is not an IT firm – we are a creative agency. We host websites for clients, and help with email config within our scope of expertise. Usually, that includes a couple devices. read more

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I opened my twitter account on the advice of a client who I respect quite a lot. The advice was “I expect you to know about this , so whether you like it or not,  you need to have a twitter account.”

I reluctantly opened the account and started to tweet. At this point, my general opinion of the twitter service lied somewhere between distain and annoyance.With a dash of “what the heck would I do that for?”

Well, a month on and I think I am twitterpated. I have to say – sadly – that it’s not because the throngs of people in the net-sphere lining up to read about my last experience in the coffee shop line-up. I suppose a few fine folks will follow the redpoint tweets and that is great. No… it’s that I now an connected to a myriad of people, places and things I am interested in.

Highlights:

• The David Suzuki Foundation is following us
• I’m following the lead developers of jquery, php google and some bizarre firefox plugins. I don’t understand half of it.
• At the time of writing a whoping 15 people are following the new Redpoint twitter. {whoo-hoo!}

Well, a month on and I think I am twitterpated. I have to say – sadly – that it’s not because the throngs of people in the net-sphere lining up to read about my last experience in the coffee shop line-up.

So I suppose the next question is: what do I think Twitter is for? Do I recommend it? Hmmm… Well, most larger organizations tweet, so you can always learn about things you are interested in, but it moves very fast so you need to review it a few time a day, and use a reader like tweetdeck to aggregate the feeds (it does facebook too).

But does it make sense for a smaller local focused business to tweet to gain followers? Well, its always good to connect with people, but if you can’t devote enough effort to it to create a following, you may find it useless (kind of like talking into an empty room). I think twiiter is built for speed, so if you don’t like going fast, stay off the autobahn.

In all, I really like my twitter account and try to tweet a couple time a day, depending on how exciting the coffee shop line-ups are.

• Follow us on Twitter

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Working on web based projects is always consuming and requires a lot of commitment. We launched the new web presence for the Red Deer Museum + Art Gallery this week, and journey that has taken us down a road that has lasted almost two years. The site is bay far one of the most powerful we’ve created and is loaded with features. Aside from the sortable events calendar, learning programming tools, blog tools, permanent collection index, downloads and other widgets – this site has a few things that really make it special. read more

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After quite a few months, we’ve finally launched the new website for the Career Assistance Network in Red Deer. It has been a fun process and the amazing thing about a site is watching the content come together. I have to admit, I’m a sceptic when talk turns to the active management of content. I like simple web tools that get used. I’m pretty shameless in my promotion of that.

Well, Aaron at the CAN office really impressed me. I have not worked with many people (particularly small business owners) who write as diligently as Aaron. Kudos certainly go to the content here. Not flashiest, but it is accurate. read more

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We were contacted a few months ago by a team building the brand new Konductor Website Content Management System, built on the chassis of the new Adobe Air Application. We were lucky enough to get in on the development beta team and have been toying with the new software for a while now. It’s been awesome to see bleeding edge technology developed in front of your eyes, and we haven’t fully touched the capabilities of the beta software we’ve got access to.

Straight away, the software eliminates clumsy CMS interfaces like Joomla that seem to serve mostly to confuse the average user and replaces it with a visual drag-and-drop-style environment. The core text editor serves the same role as most editors out there – add rich text, images, links and the like with relative ease, but one nice feature is the extremely simple form builder that allows the average user to add web-based forms with ease. read more

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We have been having a race lately to see which projects get completed first and We recently went live with a web project for X-cel communications. It’s a nice site with a few really nice features. As usual, the client has complete access to all content and can create and edit content at will. But aside from that, we created a widget for the homepage to profile the primary product offerings and allow for a little play-ability (don’t get dizzy).

Another nice feature is the product information page. With a broad product offering, X-cel has to have fairly specific information when responding to client inquiries. After a bit of thought, we presented a form tool with a selector for each product type. Once a potential client selects a product, the form automatically loads the appropriate set of questions. Simple.

This site was a pleasure to design – in part thanks to Bell Canada, for allowing their dealers access to high res images for most of the products.

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We had a marvelous opportunity this summer to collaborate with a major Edmonton web development firm to develop a new online presence for the Alberta College of Paramedics. The College has an incredible amount of content and required a major re-working of the site design, layout and navigation structure.

Enter redengine. Meet Redpoint…

Redengine provided the research, architecture and the content management programming (RCM), while we created the xhtml, css and the visual design. The site went live today, culminating about 3-4 months of work. We were proud to see the content easily found (our #1 goal) and that the software running the site integrated so easily with our design. Hats off certainly goes to the development team – this site has one of the most advanced content management systems we’ve seen.

Congratulations has to go to the crew at the College of Paramedics for being open to working partnerships like this. It certainly paid dividends in this case!

Alberta College of Paramedics new Website

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We launched another large website development project this past week: www.kingsenergy.com. Another site we began last fall, it’s great to see this project open to the public. We employed some new innovations for the content management and site functionality here, so it’s a project we are quite proud of. We created an unique set of search tools as well as an expandable product section, among many other features. For more, visit the King’s page on our portfolio.

We learned a lot about the valve and instrumentation trades in this project, especially on the 2+ days of photography when we were on site. They work hard, but they have a lot of fun at King’s. you can see they enjoy their time, and support one another… but mostly they play pranks on each other.

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