Web Development with Invisible Window

Twitter as an online marketing tool.

webhank — Thu, 07 May 2009 15:28:49 +0000

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past six months, chances are you’ve at least heard of Twitter, a social networking site that allows its members to post status updates in a micro-blogging format. “Tweeting” as it’s been termed has become all the rage from the geek relm (of which we’re proud members) to celebrity circles and all groups in between.

Twitter positions itself as a way to stay connected with friends and collegues, but what about your customers. I think the real power of Twitter lies in the ability of a company to get its marketing message out in “real time”. Take for example a small bakery in Boulder, CO (@BoulderBaked) who tweets special offers to customers and encourages them to stop by for late night munchies. Or, how about Naked Pizza, a healthy pizza joint in New Orleans (@NAKEDpizza) who has put up a billboard encouraging people to follow them on twitter.

As we see the web grow, we feel that this type of marketing will be the future of how companies communicate with their customers. We’ve already helped several of our customers integrate Twitter (and other social networks) into their sites - let us know if we can help you.

Oh, and follow us on twitter (http://twitter.com/webhank)!

Fresh Produce Blog

webhank — Thu, 07 May 2009 15:04:07 +0000

We’re excited to announce the re-launch of www.freshproduceblog.com! This blog re-design adds many new features to Fresh Produce Sportswear’s highly trafficed blog including integration of their social media networks. The beachy feel of the site and dynamic resizing of images makes both reading and authoring this blog a much more enjoyable experience. We, of course, built the site on WordPress. Add Fresh Produce blog to your RSS reader - you never know who might stop by.

Peter Holcombe Photography Blog

webhank — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 20:45:37 +0000

We use WordPress on a near daily basis. We build sites on its architecture, we expand it with plugins, and we’re even in the process of customizing it for a peer voting site. Ironically, it’s not that often that we get to help someone develop a pure blog on WordPress.

When the talented crew at Peter Holcombe Photography approached us about re-doing their blog, we jumped at the chance. This project was truly a collaborative effort. Peter and Kathy brought many ideas to the table, then gave us free reign to bring their ideas to life. To suit their needs, we customized WordPress and expanded many of the comment features to make good use of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Check out the site, leave a comment, and check out the amazing emotion that Peter Holcombe Photography captures on “film”.

Aspen Coffee Company

webhank — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 20:45:34 +0000

We’ve known the guys over at Aspen Coffee Company for quite a few years. Through all of this time it seems that some circumstance has always prevented us from creating a web presence for their three shops. That all changed in late November when we got that call that “it was time.” We developed the site on a WordPress 2.7 platform, used a good bit of JQuery to provide “oohs, and aahs”, then threw in some Google Map features to round the site out. We’re very proud of the site, and the guys at Aspen are happy to show it off to their customers. We feel it was worth the wait. Check out the site, and if you happen to ever be in Stillwater, OK forget the smiling eskimo and stop by and tell one of the Aspen crew hello instead.

How To Do Basic ‘Things’ in WordPress

webhank — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 16:35:21 +0000

WordPress recently launched WordPress TV a collection of “How To” videos dealing with many aspects of WordPress. The following are some of the videos that our clients will find useful when maintaining their site/blog:

Wordcamp Denver

webhank — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 23:18:47 +0000

Today I had the privilege of attending Wordcamp Denver today at the Denver Art Museum, a conference put on by Automatic “…created for enthusiasts, users, developers, designers, and fans of WordPress in the Denver/Boulder area.” It would be a mild understatement to say that the amount of knowledge dissipated today was colossal. I can not wait to put some of the things that I learned into practice on new projects.

Invisible Window has been committed to developing on Wordpress for a few years now, but today opened up a whole new world of possibilities. The most noteworthy sessions were:

Matt Mullenweg (Automattic) - founding developer of WordPress.
Matt spoke on the future of Wordpress, presented some amazing themes and plugins, and spoke of some new projects on the horizon that the Wordpress community can look forward to (bbpress, wordpress.tv, Buddy Press, etc)
Ben Huh (Pet Holdings) - Ben Huh is the CEO of the company that runs FAIL Blog, I Can Has Cheezburger?, GraphJam and other Interweb time sinks.
Ben spoke on how to scale a company using Wordpress and other ‘pluggable’ vendors/providers to grow a business (he was quite entertaining to listen to, and coined a great acronym - MPH - Mr. Potato Head - essentially you can put something in, it may look ugly but it works - you can pull something out - it may be ugly but it works)
Alex King (Crowd Favorite) - WordPress as a CMS using the Carrington Theme FrameworkAlex presented an amazing CMS framework theme for developers called Carrington. Carrington offers a very high degree of customization via a sophisticated file structure (Invisible Window will definitely be using this heavily in the future)
Jake Spurlock (Petomundo!) - Developing with BuddyPress
Jake spoke on Buddy Press (a social network which runs on a WordpressMU installation). I think we will be using this to re-deploy The Chain Ring.

This was a totally amazing experience (especially if you’re a geek like me ;)) and I am really looking forward to putting this knowledge out there on projects. Contact us and we’ll get going on your next great idea.

Great SEO Meeting

webhank — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 06:14:05 +0000

Had a great meeting with a fellow SEO enthusiast this morning and learned a few new tricks and tools. The ever-changing world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is always fun and exciting. These new tools will help us enhance rankings for all kinds of clients. We’d love to help you out, so drop us a line and let’s talk.

Denver Wordcamp 2009

webhank — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 04:45:43 +0000

We’ve were fortunate to catch the Wordpress wave right as it took off and have been using this amazing blog and CMS software to develop client sites (and this site too) for a few years now. We’re really excited to be attending Wordcamp 2009 at the Denver Art Museum at the end of the month. We’re really looking forward to learning even more about Wordpress and being able to use this new found knowledge to “take it to the next level” for our clents.

Fresh Produce Sportswear

webhank — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:05:45 +0000

Sometimes the best things really need time to be cultivated. We’ve been involved with Fresh Produce Sportswear for several years now and in that time, the idea of putting the Fresh Produce Sportswear line up for sale online has come up several times. In the past some reason always kept us from doing it. We dabbled in ecommerce by putting the Extra Fresh line online (which turned out to be a huge success), but weren’t able to put all the products online. That is, until today!

Invisible Window worked closely with the talented marketing team at Fresh Produce and deployed the site using Magento. We can’t wait to see the response to this fantastic site!

Wordpress 2.7

webhank — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:33:58 +0000

Wordpress 2.7 is set to release soon. We’ve installed the beta version on some test blogs and we’re blown away by the new interface and features. Here are some screengrabs to check out.