RM Launches New Davis Drive Animal Clinic Site

Davis Drive Animal Clinic is one of Rood's Media's original clients. We originally branded their new veterinary clinic and built them a web-site to go with it back in 1999. When they called us up to finally build them a new web-site after 12+ years, we were more then happy to help. 

Today we finally launched their new web-site and we are happy to share it with you. The new web-site features current web trends, social networking ties, larger images, online registration, appointments requests and better overall usability.

Please feel free to review this site. www.davisdrivevet.com

www.davisdrivevet.com

Grand Opening for new RM Orangeville Studio.

We officially opened the doors to our new studio in downtown Orangeville on April 8th. A lot of work went into finding the right spot to plant our feet so we can grow our company. We are extremely happy with the direction our company is headed. This new office and downtown location will allow us to team up with other local creative professionals and provide web-site design services to the Greater Dufferin Area and Southern Ontario.

Rood's Media provides web-site strategy, design and management services. In addition, we provide value added services such as, graphic design, video production, digital indoor signage, web-site hosting and Filemaker Pro development.

We invite all who could use any of our services to contact us or visit our new studio in person. We would be happy to show you around and discuss solutions for your future project. 

New Rood's Media Studio

We are growing to serve you better!

Rood's Media is pleased to announce the opening of our new head office in the historic downtown district of Orangeville, Ontario. Located at 109 Broadway, Suite 11, our new studio will offer expanded space for meetings, project management and complete web design services. We have undertaken several strategic investments to improve both our scope and capacity for YOU, our loyal customers.

Save the date! We invite all our valued clients to join us on Monday April 8th between 10:00am and 2:00pm to celebrate our Grand Opening/Open House event.  Please help us spread the word about this special occasion.

>> Click here for map and directions

PLEASE NOTE: This Saturday March 23rd, we will be migrating the servers to the new studio.  We will make every effort to minimize any interruptions to your web-site, email and FileMaker database services. Your patience will be greatly appreciated. 

 It is an exciting time for Rood's Media, thank you for all your support.

Rood's Media
109 Broadway, Suite 11
Orangeville, Ontario
L9W 1K2

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.