Buck Sharp's Plexus Blog

Design Galleries...

Buck Sharp — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:47:44 GMT

Great sites when you're needing a design boost.

iPhone: Time's Invention of the Year

Buck Sharp — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 19:50:54 GMT

4. It's not a phone, it's a platform
And this is just the beginning. Platforms are for building on. Last month, after a lot of throat-clearing, Apple decided to open up the iPhone, so that you—meaning people other than Apple employees—will be able to develop software for it too. Ever notice all that black blank space on the iPhone's desktop? It's about to fill up with lots of tiny, pretty, useful icons.

Hey, Gmail... Over here

Buck Sharp — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 13:36:04 GMT

No IMAP for me yet. What's up!?

The Road to Leopard

Buck Sharp — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 20:08:50 GMT

If you are interested in the evolution of the modern GUI (graphical user interface) you should check out the excellent "Road to Leopard" series on AppleInsider.

More than just a look at the new Macintosh OS, the preview breaks down each component of Mac OS X and talks about the history of each, going all the way back to origins of the application.

The chronology is complete with screenshots to compare the old to the new. It is surprising to see how much difference there is between things now and just five years ago.

Gmail now supports IMAP

Buck Sharp — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 17:51:13 GMT

Just found out today that Google is rolling out IMAP support for all Gmail accounts over the next couple of days. This is great if you access your Gmail using a traditional mail application from multiple computers or devices (ahem...iPhone). Also, it should be the end of all the quirky settings and behavior produced by trying to get Gmail's pop service to have IMAP-esque features.

Brilliant Video Illustrating "Web 2.0" Concepts

Buck Sharp — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 15:45:43 GMT

Birthday...

Buck Sharp — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 14:06:45 GMT

Today (1,2) is my Birthday.

The Living Room of the Future

Buck Sharp — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 14:58:46 GMT

Found this image of a futuristic living room according to an unknown publication from the 70's.

The photo is from a new flickr pool called "In The Year 2000". It focuses on this type of visual speculation on the 21st century lifestyle from artists and visionaries from the 50's, 60's & 70's.

Be sure to check out the full-size version to read about all the devices.

Funny, even with all of the crazy devices in this image they still didn't dream of a device as cool as the iPhone, or cellphones in general for that matter.

Easily Embed Google Maps Onto Your Site

Buck Sharp — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 14:37:44 GMT

Noticed today when I was on Google Maps that clicking the "Link to this page" link there was another field to copy from... embed code for easily integrating Google Maps content into your own Web site.

Now, you could always send a link around to a specific map location, but some technical knowledge was required to actually embed a map into a page on your site. Now, it just requires a couple of clicks and a little copying and pasting.

Not only has Google made it easy, they give you total flexibility when it comes to how big you need your map to be. Need it to go in a margin instead of the main body of your page? Just select "Custom size" and make your map 150px wide. Nice.

Below is an example of an embedded map. Location is the Plexus office on Timothy Road.

View Larger Map

Viral? More Like... Organic

Buck Sharp — Tue, 08 May 2007 18:27:46 GMT

It seems like everyone is talking about viral these days. It's quite the buzzword. With the emergence of social sites like YouTube, Digg, mySpace & Flickr it seems like everyone is either chasing, or trying to start the next viral phenom. Lazy Sunday, Star Wars kid and multitudes of other media snippets have been elevated to icon status by the viral power of the new social Internet.

Can it be manipulated?

Agencies now boast of being able to create "viral marketing" campaigns to tap into the power of this strange new phenomenon. While there is no denying that some savvy use of the aforementioned sites can generate some traffic to your site, spending valuable resources hoping to generate viral buzz is for the most part folly. The name itself defines unpredictable nature with which it gains momentum and spreads. The best thing to do would be to just sit back and enjoy the ebb and flow of the viral tide.

Think Organic. Grow Locally.

A better course of action for a small to medium sized business would be to grow their own site into something that is updated frequently, reflecting industry trends and the dynamic growth of the business in an ever-changing 21st century marketplace. The more updated your site is, the more pages it has. The more pages it has, the more content you present to Google. The more content you present to Google, the higher your search engine ranking, the higher your search engine ranking, the more Web site visitors you get, and by the time you're getting all of that shade grown traffic you'll have a content rich site that will encourage reading and exploration, adding precious time to a visitor's stay.

A Real World Example

At Plexus we develop Web sites and applications built on an exciting new framework called Ruby On Rails. Thus, one of our target search phrases is "Ruby On Rails Georgia" so that we can get in front of anyone in our geographic area that is interested in Rails Web development. If you do the search you'll see that we generally show up between the fifth and tenth position. This is excellent first page presence. Look closer and you'll notice that it's not the Plexus home page that garners this result. It's the page that lists all of our blog posts about Ruby On Rails. Our site's organic growth strengthened our search engine position. Yours could too.

Organic is Easy

On our site we use the same tools that are available to our customers. These tools allow anyone, even the non web savvy, to add dynamic, content-rich pages to your site as often as you like. In essence, we provide you the seed, you grow the tree. Now, we are expert gardeners and we care dearly about every seed we sell, so we'll be with you every step of the way to make sure your site is experiencing healthy growth.

The Tools

Every content management tool we offer will easily enable you to add content to your site, contact us today for a face to face meeting to help you decide what is best for your site and your business.