What's Your Mobile Web-Site Strategy?

It took more than 1 year to sell 1 Million iPods but only 28 days to sell 1 Million+ iPads!

In the last couple years there has been a big movement to have social networking and media added to web-sites (new and old). And with the huge increase of iPads and tablets in general, there is a monumental user demand for more mobile web-sites and responsive design.

With Apple leading the charge with the iPod, iPad and iPhone, every company with a web-site will need to prepare and initiate a strategy for optimizing and delivering their online content through mobile devices. The days of having one fixed width web-site to deliver all web content through a desktop computer is over.

How do you, as a web-site owner, keep up with the constant changes and trends that are associated with properly maintaining your all important business web presence?

Rood's Media is always reviewing new technologies and updating our collective skill sets in order to provide solutions that reflect current web trends. Rood's Media is here to help you create that much needed mobile web-site strategy and deliver a solution that will optimize your web content on any platform. We offer the right approach to keep your site relevant and available to your customers, whether their access is through a smartphone, the latest iPad or their desktop computer.

Inquire by email or by calling 416-898-7663.

The Rood's Media Team

Online Marketing

Rood's Media can build you a custom web-site solution (View Portfolio), but having a great site is only half the battle. Now that you have this fantastic web-site you need to let people know it exists. Relying solely on your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Google rankings may not cut it alone. Search engines may not generate the traffic you were hoping for. So now What? The answer is a successful and cleverly constructed online marketing campaign.

Here at Rood's Media, we like to get creative by designing and building custom web-sites. We focus on creating web-sites that visually appealing, easy to navigate and loaded with great content. As a value added service to all of our clients we are now offering custom online marketing packages through one of our strategic partners Dufferin Media.

Dufferin Media provides social media and internet marketing services. They optimize your social media presence (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogs & Mailing Lists) and manage the daily postings and interactions on your behalf. Basically, they build a custom online marketing campaign that will drive visitors to your Rood's Media designed web-site.

Adding CMS to Existing Web-Sites

Many of you are well aware of "Content Management Systems" or CMS for short. There are many off the shelf CMS solutions for FREE like WordPress and Joomla, however as powerful as they can be they don't always offer the turn key solution you may be looking for.

For companies with pre-existing custom web-site designs and layouts already online, it would be hard to simply populate one of these FREE CMS solutions with the same content and maintain the functionality of the web-site. However, it would be nice to be able to give access to several employees in an effort to maintain the web-site and keep content current.

Luckily for us web-site designers there is a solution from WebAssist. Their PowerCMS extension for Dreamweaver allows designers to dedicate areas within any PHP page that already exists as manageable content from within an online CMS admin application. This extension is part of their "Design Extender" suite for Dreamweaver. All that is required is a PHP page and a MySQL database. PowerCMS gives us the best of both worlds. Web-Site designers can provide clients with affordable content management for pre-existing web-sites while at the same time maintaining control of areas of the web-site that should not be handled by anyone without a web-design background.

If you are like me, you enjoy the freedom of creating your own web-site designs from scratch within dreamweaver. FREE CMS applications are great for content, but lack in creativity and design. PowerCMS allows you to keep your creativity without sacrificing the functionality that most clients are currently looking for.

You can learn more about PowerCMS online at WebAssist.com or contact us at Rood's Media and we can discuss how this unique CMS solution can be added to your existing web-site.

Tablet Computers Frustrate Designers

With the growing number of people choosing to browse the web with a tablet device instead of a conventional computer, the issue of web-site navigation creeps in. For years now, web-site designers have had a handle on the best way to integrate functional web-site navigation into any design. Now with the dawn of tablet computing all that knowledge has gone to waste.

For me, as a web-site designer myself, I have been raised on "hovering". The idea is simple... you move your mouse around screen until the courser or graphic visually shows you a "call to action". The call to action can be anything from a "mouse-over" effect to a drop down menu or a change in the courser graphic. Once you see the change you know you can then click. Unfortunately this simple yet effective way to help visitors navigate a web-site has gone out the window with tablets.

Tablet computers have no hover action. Everything is very static and you must design new web-sites with clicks for everything. For a designer, this means you must make your web-site deigns very button heavy with a logical "step-by-step" flow. To make matters worse, all manufacturers have their own set of "multi-gesture" touch patterns that result in the device reacting differently to the way you interact with your web-site. If you don't want to "Dumb-Down" your web-site navigation then you will be required to produce a "Mobile" version of your web-site design and a "Computer-Based" design for traditional / full interaction with the user. The end result gives the user the best environment for their chosen device, but clients must now pay web-site designers more for additional layouts and maintenance.

Tablet computing and web-site browsing will evolve over time, but right now it is shaking things up. navigation, native resolution, plug-ins and more are all handled differently with tablets and mobile devices. It is important that all web-site designs keep up to date with trends and how the bulk of users want to receive and interact with their favorite web-sites.

At Rood's Media we discuss all these options with our clients and continue to evolve with web-trends and industry standards. We understand that it is our job to inform our clients and empower them with the tools to help them make the right choices for their future web-site needs.

Web-Site Designers & Developers Wanted

Rood's Media is currently looking for creative young individuals who are eager to be involved in our growth as a company. If you are a recent college graduate or self taught designer, we want to hear from you. We are currently assembling a short-list of web-site designers, developers, web-masters, digital artists and more. As the industry evolves, individuals with unique skill sets become valuable assets. Rood's Media is asking for your resumes and online portfolios at this time.

Please submit all resumes and portfolio links to info@roodsmedia.com

Thank you.

Rood's Media to build new Swissmar.com web-site

Current Swissmar.com web-site

We are happy to announce that Swissmar has chosen Rood's Media to build and maintain their new web-site. Staring this summer, Rood's Media will re-design the current web-site from the ground up. The new swissmar.com web-site will include a new custom FileMaker Pro 12 database solution that will play host to over 1,500+  SKU's with related product information and details. This large project is scheduled to be completed in a six month period and will showcase the project management skills and creative talent of Rood's Media. With Rood's Media providing their unique FMP database driven web-site design solutions to Swissmar's amazing lineup of "Gourmet Goods" and "Active Outdoor" products, the end result will be something to truly appreciate.

New VP, Business Development

I am proud to announce that Cora McBride has accepted the role of VP, Business Development at Rood’s Media.  Cora comes to Rood’s Media after spending the last 15 years working in a variety of management roles at multi-national organizations.  Her experience in Sales, Operations, Customer Service, Project management and Strategic planning will enable Rood’s Media to grow and expand into additional media markets.  Cora’s role will focus on business development and superior client service.

So please join me in welcoming Cora to the team.  Cora can be reached by email: cora@roodsmedia.com or by phone: 519-827-5678

Why FileMaker?

Rood's Media builds custom web-sites for FileMaker Pro databases. In fact we can build and host your entire FMP database as well as design a custom web presentation or admin dashboard to go with it. Filemaker Pro in our preferred database solution. 

I am often asked, why FileMaker? It's simple. FileMaker is a user friendly yet extremely powerful relationship based database application that utilizes a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to help development work flow and user functionality. As a company that produces visual assets in digital form, Rood's Media feels FileMaker Pro is a perfect fit. We get the powerful database software our clients need in a visually pleasing hands on application. With the wide assortment of plug-ins and extensions available, Rood's Media can fine-tune any FileMaker Pro database solution to fit any project. In addition, the FileMaker server can relieve a web browser of many client side burdens by doing much of the heavy lifting on the back end.

For more information on Filemaker Pro and the rest of the FileMaker line-up please visit their official site.

Our Web-Site, Our Portfolio

www.roodsmedia.com

We welcome you to roodsmedia.com and in turn our online portfolio. Since 1999 We have been working with clients to help present their business' online with new media solutions. Rood's Media provides a wide  array of digital media solutions that include Web-Site Design, Multimedia, Video Production, Graphic Design and Filemaker Pro database development. We have all the tools and talent required to provide our clients with digital assets they need to market and showcase their business.

Please feel free to look through our web-site and review our past projects. If you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact us by phone (416-898-7663) or by email.

The New BLOG

Hi Everyone, we started this page a long time ago but never seemed to have the time to get around to updating it and posting it. We decided it was finally time to get our BLOG online... basically joining the club.

We have been working extremely hard over the last year making changes to the company and re-organizing the work flow in the office in an effort to streamline productivity for our clients an their projects. We have much more news coming soon, so please check back often. You never know what type of information we will be posting.