• First of all you need a clear vision of what you want to do and set clear goals.
• Then break your long term goals into smaller pieces and let them determine your daily actions.
• It is important to take an inventory of everything you do in your day. Record all the projects you are working on, your thoughts, conversations and activities for a week so that you will understand where your precious moments are going. You’ll see how much time is actually spent producing results and how much time is wasted on unproductive thoughts, conversations and actions.
• Now find out which of these roles are the ones that will make the biggest impact on your success. Schedule time for high-priority things, from your thoughts to actions that have to be done. And have the discipline to keep these appointments.

And how to become the master of your own time?

• First in the morning make plans of what are you going to do in a day.
• It is important to block out all distractions like Facebook and all other forms of social media. Make sure you use them only to generate your business.
• Don’t forget to put a “Do not disturb” sign when you are busy and practice not to instantly give people your attention unless it is important for business reasons.
• The best option is to shut all distractions down until you don’t finish what you intended to.
• Do not respond e-mails just when they arrive. If not cruical to respond, finish your tasks first and then scheldue some time for e-mails.
• Try not to answering the phone every time it is ringing, if not important. You can return calls later, when you finish your priority tasks.
• Before you start doing some task take some time to make sure what result you want to attain. After task is done check if you achieved desired results. If you haven’t try to figure out where it went wrong and how you could do it better next time.
• Schedule time for breaks and interuptions.
• Focus on the results you want in a day, think why you want these results, develop the actions to achieve the results, estimate time for actions and schedule the actions.
• Because it’s impossible to get everything done, if  you haven’t finished some things today, let the unfinished things be the first on your to-do list for the next day.

Sources:

• http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/219553
• http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/198984

One of the most common questions people ask about Facebook marketing is how often to post on the page. As Dan Zarella found out, the pages that post once a day or more are more likely to have less likes than the ones that posts every second day.
Others say that it is good if you post every day but not more than one post per day.

We think that it is important to have regular activity but in the same time not to spam users. So do not post more than once a day otherwise the quality of interaction may go down. If you really have something you think you have to share with users and it can’t wait until tomorrow you can post it. But be sure this doesn’t happen too often and that information is interesting for the users.

And what are your experiences? How often do you post on your Facebook wall?

In this time and age, Internet is the primary source of information and so many business interactions happen online, some companies tend to forget that their customers might need to actually physically find them. And that is a real shame, for not only it makes you lose customers, but also because there is a good and (the best feature of them all) free tool out there for it – called Google Maps.

Since there are obviously a million guides how to implement a simple map on your website, I will skip that part (beginners go here), and move straight to the fun part – listing all the cool goodies that helps you customize the map to your design needs.

According to Google Maps Terms & Conditions, the most limiting clause for customization is that you may not in any way obscure or hide Google logo and copyright information in the corner of the map area. Apart from that, it’s pretty much a fair game.

All this info and links are for Google Maps Javascript API v3, which is not backwards compatible with v2.
Custom markers

Let’s be honest, Google default marker icons are butt ugly. Adding your own is easy as a pie. You can specify the image, hook (which part of image is attached to the precise coordinates), clickable region shape (in case the icon has transparency), even the shadow. Syntax explanation here.
Custom infoWindow

Want to add extra information for the marker, but the default infoWindow does not go well with your page design? You can completely redesign its looks by including a simple JS library (like the one here) and adding your own markup and css.
Overlays

Adding a bit more prominent country borders? Coloring whole areas of interest? Showing paths that aren’t limited to just roads? Sure. You can even add a ground overlay (let’s say, an image of the same piece of map 100 years ago) that can be zoomed and abused just like the “normal” map squares. The only fly in the ointment here is that you either need very precise coordinate list / database, or you may not let users zoom in too much, or they will see all the pointy edges of your custom lines.
More about custom overlays here.

And that’s just the visible (customizable design) part of the story. The API is quite powerful, and (since its the same good old Javascript) allows binding of bunch of map pane events to outside and vice-versa as well. Throw in the free services of geocode, directions etc. and there really is no reason to look further for easy and nice interactive flash-free map for your website.

Our latest project that makes use of Google Maps was Tuš. We implemented automated geocoding (address to coordinates conversion) in our CMS system for almost 400 stores. Front-end received adjusted design for info window popup, and of course, customized markers for each different store chain. Search box was implemented not only to search the list of stores (which, by the way, is linked to the map itself and only shows the stores that are visible currently), but also geographical locations (within the country) themselves, so you can, for example, easier find the closest store to your house.

We are looking forward to new projects that will let us push our knowledge of Google Maps to the limits.

Average users spend 700 billion minutes per month or 55 minutes per day on Facebook. More than 35 million users are publishing new content on their walls, in one week users exchange almost 5 billions of different content.

On Facebook you can find more than 3 millions of active pages, more than 1.5 million are owned by different companies and used to advertise their services and products. An average user becomes a fan of at least 4 pages per month and has been invited to at least three events. Of course, we should not forget to mention 100 million of users who access Facebook via mobile devices.

Fascinating, isn’t it? But that’s not all. There are many people who use Facebook not just to communicate with friends, but also to play games. 53% of all users are playing games, daily 56 million users. 19% say that they are addicted to playing games. 20% of them are willing to pay to gain special advantages in games. Of all entries to Facebook almost 50% are with purpose to play games. Players spent a total of 927 million hours per month playing games on Facebook. After all, it probably will not be surprising if we tell you that the most popular page on Facebook is also game, Texas Hold’em Poker, which has 29,148,935 fans. Every day, the number of fans increases by 76,825 users on average. An even greater record holder in number of users is the application FarmVille, which has 53,741,381 fans.

Surprised? As you can see, because of its huge user base Facebook is an excellent tool for spreading the word about our products and services in several ways. Not only through the pages, but also through online games and applications.

Because we believe that Facebook is very effective and has a bright future, we here at Refresh have decided to work on it a little bit more. We are researching promotion on Facebook and developing strategies for effective communication and presentation there. We will share the results on how to successfully communicate through Facebook with you in later blog posts.

So, follow us … if you want to know more..

What’s new at Refresh?

The last half year at Refresh was quite busy. In the beginning of the year we were entrusted by company Engrotuš d. d. with revamping their website. Company Engrotuš, better known as Tuš, is the largest privately owned commerce network in Slovenia. For this client we created a corporate website www.tus.si, and seven additional sites for various activities that the company is engaged in. We will add more details about Tuš project in one of the following blog posts.

Work on the Tuš project was pretty intense, but this does not mean that we did not work on other projects. More important ones are the Serbian version of the Perutnina Ptuj website, website and e-mail template for theflowr.com and www.intera.si …
Again we awakened our passion for banners and produced a series of banners like a dynamic timer for www.321gremo.si and also banners for for a media campaign on 24ur.com for 321gremo.si. Last week we’ve made a banner for Tuš catering.

If web pages and web banners are our daily work, then the production of innovative mobile applications is a novelty. Together with theflowr.com we participated in the development of flowr mobile application that works in a web browser and will be supported in most modern mobile devices. More about this in one of our next blog posts.

Our hard work and dedication in the field of web is seen not only by users for whom the pages are produced in the first place, but also by web experts. On November 10, 2010 Slovenian Chamber of Commerce announced the Netko 2010 awards. Netko awards is a competition for the best business and administrative web site in Slovenia, which was awarded by the Slovenian Chamber of Commerce. Prizes are awarded in various categories, but we participated in the online services category with a website theflowr.com. Among fierce competition, the three-member jury, consisting of Andraž Tori, Vasja Zupan and
Tadej Maligoj, selected us as the winners. Some photo impressions from the award ceremony Netko you can see on the Refresh Flickr page or on our Refresh Facebook page.

We are very pleased by the award, but that does not mean we do not need to work anymore :). More interesting projects are scheduled, like the renovation of the Hyundai Slovenia website, preparations for a new Tuš pages, followed by further improvements on sites Pullus and Perutnina Ptuj.

Thus, we have quite a lot of very interesting projects waiting for us, on which we will shortly report again.

First and easiest path – do nothing. More and more mobile browsers are actually starting to support HTML standards and have decent CSS and JavaScript support. If the website is designed also with mobile in mind and implemented without nasty hacks, it will be usable, though possibly not pretty, on newest smartphones. Also, Flash is still an issue on many phones, even the ones that claim to support it.

Another way of getting your content to a mobile user is native application. It’s written in platform-specific language, and has to be installed before it is run. Such approach requires the developer to know the programming language of this specific platform, but also provides best compatibility and also allows access to phone camera, file system etc., which regular web pages cannot (yet) achieve.

An offspin (or at least I like to call it so) of a native application is mobile web widget, which is basically a “static webpage” with HTML+CSS design, run in the phone browser’s engine, using JavaScript / AJAX to become interactive and to communicate with any web service or API.
At first you might wonder why I would categorize mobile web widgets so close to a native app, but think of this – browsers will eventually gain access to phone infrastructures such as camera and storage, and then the difference will be pretty much only the language you are coding in (and who in their right mind wouldn’t choose web technologies over any kind of mutilated C++ or, God forbid, Java?).

And the last, still chosen by many companies – a separate website optimized for mobile. It might be talked down to for being double work and double maintenance, but considering current mobile browser standard support, data transfer costs over mobile networks and, last but not least, design fancies including high quality pictures, flash, custom fonts, and walls of text, it might be the only way for mobile users to actually get to your content.

What you should be aware of when creating or optimizing websites for mobile users:

1. Fluid layout, using widths in percentages as much as possible. You wont be able to avoid pixels altogether though, so I suggest also adding min-width on the content wrapper and work your way down from there.
2. Add width and height attributes to every <img> tag – you don’t want your design to collapse while images haven’t loaded yet.
3. Everything clickable should be wrapped in <a> tag, so user can use navigation keys to browse through them.
4. Be careful with floats and position:absolute and :fixed, support for those can be dodgy.
5. If you are spoiled by JavaScript libraries, find one that works on your target phone platforms. Everyone’s beloved jQuery is not (*gasp!*) the best choice here, but stay tuned, for it might be in some near future.
   You might want to check out Sensa Touch, PhoneGap or XUI.
6. Do not rely on all standard JavaScript events – while “click” should work, “focus” and “blur” are buggy and unreliable.
7. Have compassion for data download costs and minimize your JS and CSS, reduce request count by joining all external files into one, and serve images with data:uri and CSS sprites whenever possible.
8. Place JavaScript on the bottom of the page to give the user a feeling that the page is loading faster.
9. Reduce AJAX calls to minimum, especially the background ones set on regular intervals.
10. Account for different zoom levels and orientation of phone (portrait, landscape mode).

You might have heard most of these suggestions before, as they are not mobile-specific, but simply some good practices of optimizing the speed, which is particularly important on low bandwidth devices.

Testing: The Last Frontier.

If you cannot afford to buy, borrow or in any other way (stealing not recommended) get your hands on different brands and vintages of mobile phones for real device testing, then the next best thing is mobile emulators. Below are the ones I had a chance to try, but don’t hesitate to share your favorites in comments below.

1. MobiOne (iPhone, Palm Pre)
2. iPad Peek (iPad)
3. Google Android emulator (Google Android)
4. Nokia Remote Devices (Nokia) – requires registration
5. BlackBerry (RIM) – requires registration and some tricks to make internet accessible in simulator
6. Opera Mini 5 & 4.2  – make sure you understand how Opera Mini works before wondering about weird behaviour
7. Windows Mobile – currently based on IE6, latest version based on IE7 “with improvements” (you know what that means!) – if you dare, you can get emulator here.

Our work in mobile web field / Case Study

Lately also we here at Refresh have started to include quick mobile testing before publishing a new project, as we realize mobile browsing the fastest growing user base, which is also confirmed by Google Analytics used on our pages.

From recent ventures in mobile development I would like to mention trying our hand in setting up a purely JavaScript-driven mobile version of the popular Flowr web app (real-time business collaboration tool for teams or whole companies – check it out!), which proved to be very exciting work for us, as it made us shift our priorities from the actual content, SEO and design details to effectiveness, speed and compatibility, with everything else secondary. While on desktop a few more kB won’t make or break the site, in a mobile application it as well might, as the speeds are slower and users more inconvenienced by screen size and navigation options. Also data security also needs to be planned carefully, as there will be none or very little server-side scripting in such JS-only application.

So far, this project has once again made us remember the value of simplicity, usability and optimization. And, of course, a standard-supporting browser.

Useful links:

http://www.quirksmode.org/m/table.html
http://www.quirksmode.org/m/css.html
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/the-mobile-web-optimization-guide/
http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/

Your favorite web browser can be tested for HTML 5 support on the following page http://html5test.com.
Such tests give some insight on your browser’s capability to display HTML 5 elements. I hope the results will give majority of users with older browsers some food for thought.

[ The comparison of tested browsers ]

For a quick overview of support of HTML 5 elements and CSS 3 selectors and styles in different browsers, visit http://findmebyip.com/litmus. Sadly, already from a quick glance at these results its immediately obvious that Internet Explorer has the least support for web standards. Major improvements in this area are expected in the next version only.

Currently, chances of using the new techniques are very limited, because outdated browsers are still widely used. There is a possibility of showing an alternative content for users whose browsers do not support these new standards, but it takes extra time to implement.
The best support for the new standards is offered by browsers such as Safari, Firefox, Chrome and Opera. Additional great feature of these browsers is that they are automaticaly updated on regular basis.

Of course, we developers would like nothing more than all browsers showing the same elements exactly in the same way.

We suggest using new techniques where precise presentation is not crucially important. That way we can implement shadows, rounded corners and other similar design enhancements, although users with older browsers will not be able to see them.

Yes, it was about time to update our web page and add a few things that we deemed important and useful. So we refreshed our portfolio, added the option to filter the projects, so that you will be able to list through them more easily. Our site is now SEO friendly and made without tables that were still present before. We also used some CSS3, as it is important to follow new trends. But this is not all. Now you can also meet the team and see who stands behind all our creations. For you to get to know us better we created a Flickr account and added some photos there.  So now you can see who we are and what we do in the office and out of it.

But there is more. As you can see, we also have added a blog, because we think it is important to share our knowledge, thoughts and ideas with you. We will be happy to see your comments and opinions there too.

Full of fresh energy we are back after the great summer time and ready for new challenges. And for the end of the september we are announcing a release of a big project that we have been working on in the last few months – Tuš group websites.