A web agency weblog

After a few weeks of designing and programming I have a new site ready: Telework People.

You will find information about my book, discussion forums for teleworkers and articles about many subjects for all of you living, and making businesses, online.

There’s an Spanish version available at Teletrabajo Hoy.

Cheers.

Well, today is Friday 13th and, as promised, we have selected the winners of a free Linux hosting account from the members in our forums.

Yes, plural: Winners, one from our spanish based forums and one from the english based ones.

They are:

Willy Wong: Willy proposed some cool ideas, such as working an e-zine idea and creating a chat section for webmasters. He has helped us with his constant feedback. He is from Peru.

Pacres: From Canada comes our friend Pacres, we have had very interesting threads about music, poetry and TV with him. He is also getting interested in Scandinavian music (i.e. Sigur Ros rocks). And yes, we can setup AWStats for him.

Well, congratulations to both of you guys, just contact us in order to set up you new hosting account.

To everybody else participating in the forums: Thanks a lot, keep posting, I promise we will have more contests in days to come (did I hear Gmail accounts?!) , your suggestions will be always appreciated.

If you are not a member, you can still register.

We are running a contest, the price is a one year hosting account in our servers.

Every new member, starting now, in our discussion forums can participate.

In order to win a one year Linux hosting account just register and partipate in one of our discussions, or start a new one. Discussions can cover many subjects: Web designing, books, music, movies, blogging, Internet businesses, even religion!

We will be choosing the winner from the most interesting and original posts. The winners will be announced in this blog on August 13th. Yes, I know, it’s a Friday 13th, scary isn’t it?

Hosting account includes: Plesk control panel, 99.9% uptime, 50Mb space, 2000Mb monthly bandwidth, 15 email boxes and full tech support. Domain registration is not included.

I know what you are thinking: “Oh no!, just another boring forum for bored web developers with time to waste!".

I don’t think, or intend, this to be the case with our relaunched forums, please read on, this could be for you.

More than a web agency, Ventanazul is a group of friends, we don’t just live to develop web sites for our customers, we want to create a
community Continua leyendo …

Just wanted to let you know that I have just updated our discussion forums to the latest vBulletin version. There is a lot of customizing to do yet.

We have just finished implementing a new chat system to assist our visitors online. You can use this system from any page in our solutions section.

Now you will be able to ask your questions in real time.

We started working on our new site eleven months ago, the project had been in our to do list a very long time.

On August 2003 we had selected our new logo, which was designed by our friend Michael Grinstead at 2Square Design, on September 2003 we began designing the information architecture for the site. We wanted to have a highly usable design with intuitive navigation for an audience with many profiles, clear and concise copy, english and spanish content, and separating content from appearance to create a web standards.based web site.

During that time I read and reread many books, a great source of inspiration for the project. I will be commenting many of those books in days to come.

Actually, every little detail about our site: Navigation, copy, photography, markup, XHTML and CSS, validation and download optimization, could be used for future articles in our weblog.

Our logo was an excellent start, it was so important that now we start every new project studying logos. Font type, isotype, the wave line and color palette, all reflected Ventanazul culture.

Creating the information architecture was overwhelming at first. There were so many things we wanted to say, sections and content to create. Finally we decided on using four groups: Solutions, portfolio, support and about us. Our weblog was a last minute idea inspired by great designers such as Jeffrey Zeldman and Douglas Bowman. Our weblog is powered by Movable Type, a web application deserving many articles for its power and flexibility.

We had a lot of ideas and mockups for our design, as time went by we started to define the current one, we got great feedback from our friends at The Cafe, a forum where worldwide designer exchange opinions and suggestions.

We performed many usability tests to get an easier to use design and decided on using global menu based on Javascript and DOM, at some time during design we thought about using Flash, as Macromedia, but we wanted to avoid plugins. Brainjar’s DOM introduction helped us a lot to implement our own menu.

The site uses valid XHTML 1.0 and CSS2.

We have many unfinished details, our discussion forum needs some work to adapt to our new design, we are thinking on migrating from vBulletin to phpBB, which has improved a lot in last version, is entirely open source and we have worked with the phpBB developers in the past. We are working in the design of our newsletters and we hope our visitors feedback will allow us to find many other things to fix or improve.

I have always thought that a web site has a life of its own when is launched, I am sure our new site will get us great results.