In the past few years we have seen a substantial increase in the use of touchscreen technologies. From city guides, museum maps, and sales kiosks to the massive supply of hand held touchscreen technologies (iPhone, Droid, iPad, ect.) designers have taken a major interest to understand and design for these platforms.

What is a unified marketing platform?

A unified marketing platform basically refers to an instance where all current marketing materials share the same face in branding, style, and/or message.  A good example would be a re-branding followed by an ad campaign covering all aspects of media with the same theme or tag-line individually formatted per resource. You see many prime examples of this through large businesses and their worldwide ad campaigns.

On Wednesday, June 9th, 2010, it was publicly announced that Unleashed Technologies, LLC would be the strategic partner for Automated Graphics Systems (AGS) located out of White Plains, MD for co-location, web hosting, and web management. The strategic partnership came about after a synergistic relationship was found between the two organizations.

Using textures in websites can be a great way to add accents to your design. Sometimes we find in the design process that there is just something missing from the overall look and feel of the design. When there is already enough content and you simply do not want to busy up the environment, a great thing to experiment with is texture! Whether it be the background, or the main navigation, there is always a way to implement something with style!

"Flash animation" is a buzz word that a majority of our clients will use to describe animation, special effects, and generally any moving part on their web presence. Even though the same solution could be built in many different ways, the customer knows it only to be "Flash", and as such, only asks for Flash. As most clients work in different industries, they may not know that other solutions exist or if Flash is even the best tool for their project.

Internet Explorer 9 is the latest version of Microsoft's web browser. Although it's not expected to be released to the public until 2011, developers may download a preview version for beta testing. They are looking to make a huge number of improvements to the browser (compared to previous versions), which we're really excited about.

Web 2.0 is everywhere now!  I have seen more and more Web 2.0 design styles over the past few months, many exceptional designs and many not so great! I've seen a vast amount of misconceptions regarding Web 2.0 as well. For me in the simplest definition it means, creating a user prioritized environment or user driven design. From the layout at its root, to the images and textures used throughout. Big! Bold! Simple! Direct!

The folks over at Web Directions are at it again.  They have just opened their State of the Web 2010 survey of professional web designers and developers.  The idea is to see what technologies and practices are being employed by web firms.  Although many "best practice" articles do exist around the net, they want to find out what developers actually use/do when creating new online presences.

1. Minimum Width for a Page (Using Expressions)

A very handy CSS command that exists is the min-width command, whereby you can specify a minimum width for any element. This can be particularly useful for specifying a minimum width for a page.

Unfortunately, IE doesn't understand this command, so we'll need to come up with a new way of making this functionality work in this browser. First, we'll insert a DIV under the BODY tag, as we can't assign a minimum width to the BODY: