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Good Bureaucracy

Cut through the red tape

Management Tips for Boutique Agencies
We recently concluded our annual team Visceral Summit in San Diego and came away with a renewed fervor for our line of work, and or the development of our small growing agency.

It’s no easy task to build a company and culture, to learn how to balance office expenses and HR tasks with client service, strategic and creative thinking, and to continue to stay apace with skillsets. We’re gluttons for punishment, but it still can at times feel like an endless slog. It doesn’t have to.

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Custom Theming for jQuery Mobile

jqm-blog

jQuery Mobile is an awesome framework for developing mobile websites with common touchable interfaces. All it takes is some proper markup and importing a few JS and CSS files to display your website in a mobile-friendly way. Let's explore how to get a basic page set up and create our own custom theme for the framework. Read Full Post

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Responsive Web Design Book Review

Responsive Web Design Book

Every once in a while a book comes along that changes how we think about designing and building websites. Nearly a decade ago that book was "Designing with Web Standards" by Jeffrey Zeldman. It taught us to shun table-based layouts and push ahead with semantic markup, to embrace standards and shun hacks.

Today I think that book is "Responsive Web Design" by Ethan Marcotte. Read Full Post

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Brand Evolution – Visceral’s new Logo

visceral logos

Brand Fog

Visceral, like many companies, started out small – with great velocity and grandiose visions of success.

We didn’t quite know who we were, but we shared a sense of youthful exuberance that was tied to the excitement of leaving our former jobs and going out on our own. Our visual logo and brand identity were therefore aligned well with the mood of the time – we were a company borne of a vision to provide objective and fearless counsel on our own terms. Read Full Post

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Drupal 7 Module Development: Book Review

drupal7bookreview

Drupal has gained a lot of steam over the past few years, and with the recent release of version 7, it continues to climb the ranks of most-used Content Management Systems on the web. Drupal is powerful, secure, and customizable, but it’s also got a relatively steep learning curve. Fortunately, Drupal has a very impressive community of developers, and if you’re anything like me, you visit the Drupal.org forums constantly during development. I have been through several lackluster technical books on Drupal development over the years, but always found the online community to be the best source of information. It’s safe to say that the best documentation for Drupal has always existed online, but now there is finally an offline resource for serious developers.

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Content Management Face Off

CMS-Face-Off

What’s the best Content Management System for our website?

It’s a question we hear a lot these days.  Pretty much every web project that crosses our desks has one thing in common; a Content Management System (CMS).  The days of hard-coded websites are over.  As websites have grown more dynamic, interactive, and social, the requirement for their continual update has become a necessity. Content strategy is growing as a defined discipline and helping organizations to formalize an approach to publishing their content. As such, the number of CMS options has exploded. Read Full Post

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Designing for CMS: Crystal Ball Optional

Does this look like your CMS Design Approach?

Laying a design foundation for a Content Management System (CMS) framework presents a number of challenges, not the least of which is in engaging in a bit of educated guesswork about how the client will evolve the site in the future.

The creative merits of CMS-powered websites must often yield to an unpredictable content maintenance scenario. For example, while you might provide guidance for the type of imagery to be used, the only true control is in the dimensions you design. And while you may provide a structure approach to the style/class in which to publish copy, you have no control over the amount used in page titles, sidebars, etc. Read Full Post

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Why your CMS doesn’t care about you – and what to do about it

This is your CMS on drugs

I have some bad news for you. Your content management system (CMS) does not care about you.

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Hi…We’re Visceral.

Welcome

Welcome to the Visceral blog.

Over the course of the coming months we’ll be using this space to share our collective thoughts on Strategy, Design, Content and Development. We’ll talk about common problems we’ve found (and have hopefully overcome) in the web biz, as well as those looming challenges and opportunities on the horizon that deserve your attention. Read Full Post

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