St. Joseph, Missouri – December 7, 2011 – Triggerfish announces a joint venture to spin-off a dedicated IT support team for small-medium sized businesses.  

Triggerfish has entered into a joint venture with Tech Team, LC  a IT service firm dedicated to the needs of of small-medium size businesses. The venture is intended to provided a higher level of service and customer satisfaction due to a dedicated staff focused on the needs of a particular market segment. 

Tech Team, LC was founded by Travis Hawkins and Jason Chase; two Triggerfish team members with over 10 of combined experience serving Triggerfish customers. Tech Team, LC will continue to be part of the Triggerfish family of companies, but with a mission to improve service and satisfaction of customers with common challenges and requirements. Check them out at http://techteamlc.com

Triggerfish Corporation will continue to maintain it’s focus on providing health information technology (HIT) support and consulting, staffing the IT Service Desk, managing tNET (our private wide area network), managing tVoIP (our multi-tenant VoIP environment), providing co-location and virtualized services in our datacenter facilities and supporting our new venture supporting a telecommunications and bandwidth buying group. 

We are excited about the opportunities that this joint venture will provide to existing SMB clients as well as to Triggerfish in regards to growth and expansion of our core businesses.

Triggerfish Corporation is a professional services firm focused on technology integration and support for healthcare providers and other clients with moderate to complex information technology requirements.

Triggerfish has entered into a strategic partnership with careGEN Group, a member led buying group for telecommunication and bandwidth services. The buying group will maintain a significant focus in the healthcare sector, though will likely also provide related services to clients in other industry’s as well.

careGEN will operate as a member driven buying group or consortium. Its core business will be directing the procurement process for broadband and telecommunications services on behalf of our members. The business will be supported by membership fees, % of cost savings and consulting engagements with members and other clients. 

This partnership is expected to leverage the strengths that Triggerfish has already developed in negotiating telecommunications contracts and services on behalf of our clients. Additionally, Triggerfish will provide management and staffing services for careGEN.

To support this initiative, Steve Ward will be joining the Triggerfish team effective January 1, 2012. Steve Ward brings over 20 years of experience in designing and building service provider networks and services. In addition Steve is the founder of the careGEN concept.

We are excited about the opportunities that this partnership will provide to Triggerfish in regards to growth and expansion of our core business as well as potentially new and unique business opportunities.

Triggerfish Corporation is a professional services firm focused on technology integration and support for Community Health Centers and other clients with moderate to complex information technology requirements.

Everyone Makes Mistakes

We all screw up. It’s mankind’s nature. Nonetheless, in the website design industry, many elements can be implemented wrong, and with some tweaks made to become great. These go from typography to padding, where a single digit can radically damage your site design. Luckily, once you’re able to identify what the most common mistakes are, one or two clicks and a few taps on your keyboard can rescue a drowning design. Today, we are going to have a quick look at some design mistakes that all designers should look out for.

Typography

Typography is among the most crucial features of a design. In most designs, text rules the vast majority of the page so clean, well-tailored typography could be the key to freeing your theme’s potential. There’s many mistakes that new, or seasoned, designers can make that may just degrade the otherwise delightful appeal of a page’s typography.

Sans Serif vs. Serif

In the interests of this piece, I assume the reader knows what a serif font is. There is a certain refinement in serif fonts being used on a web page, and a more modern feel when a designer uses the wide range of sans-serif fonts. However, these two effects do not mix to become the pinnacle of good typography when used concomitantly. Actually mixing the two under normal circumstances can create compound results that, to be blunt, simply don’t look great.

That is not to say that mixing serif and sans-serif fonts together never works. In fact, in a few cases, it works well, particularly when the sorts of fonts are used on different tiers of a hierarchy. For instance, A List Apart uses a serif font for a title, whilst employing a sans-serif font for the primary body content.

Number of Fonts

Another big mistake some designers walk into is using many various font families, rather than a select couple. Using multiple fonts could lead to a disconnected design that interrupts the readability of your content. Rather than multi-font content, making an attempt to use one font family per tier of the design’s visible power structure typically creates a better font scheme that looks much more united than a handful of random styles here and there.

Shortage of Contrast

A significant problem that may present itself is an absence of contrast between the typography and the background. This will bring real readability issues up, as some users will find it hard to differentiate between the two sets of colour. Take the example before, for instance. Which one is simpler to read, the left or the right?

There is not a complicated theory behind contrast. You would not put black writing on a black background, as you can’t establish what is writing and what’s the background. The only proposal is to get the text colour as near to the opposite extreme to the background, without damaging other artistic qualities, to avoid disappointment on the user’s end. The Ellipsis theme shows a good measure of contrast in the top header area. Would a light pink or purple work there instead?

Padding, Margins and Spacing

No longer are we battling on small monitors (we’re thinking generally desktop reading here, not smartphone). As an alternative we’re living on 21+ screens and surfing on resolutions higher than HD giving designers much more space to work in. Therefore, you shouldn’t feel at all squashed and devote more space to padding and margins to improve the aesthetics of your design. Take Apple’s design for instance; it exploits a lot of white space concentrating all the colour and action on the content it cares about. That’s not to say you ought to have plenty of white space, but your designs could profit from being moved apart allowing more visibility in turn making it simpler to distinguish one from another.

It’s important to keep spacing consistent and equal through your design as best as possible in both internal padding and external margins. For an example, take a look at the diagram below. The latter half looks far better because all the margins are the same 18px space. Everything is aligned to the same grid layout. It’s clear and each area is distinct from another, but it’s not really wasting any space.

Grid Systems

Similarly, the grid is a very important feature of most successful website designers. Using a grid keeps everything in order and cleans up designs with consistent gutters to use. Grid-based design makes everything so much more organized. This section isn’t in this post because it’s a mistake not to use one, by regarding it as a solution if you should happen to feel like your designs are failing in an area it makes a contribution to.

You’ve also possibly heard about divine proportion, or “The Golden Ratio”. Whilst not every design wishes to adhere to this principle, most standard designs admittedly should try to at any cost. The proportion of 1 to 1.62 (in a rounded form) is generally called the Golden Ratio, and isn’t just utilized in web design though we merit some credit for employing it.

The Golden Ratio presents balance in a site design since we humans are used to it; the proportion of the forearm to the hand is 1 to 1.62 as is the human smile. Finding someone appealing can also be based from the Golden Ratio, which is why we feel the Golden Ratio to be “natural”. Keeping everything just that balanced can make a website design feel and luck better as it’s more natural to the user.

You can read more on the Golden Ratio and how mathematics influence web design here.

Forgetting Why You’re Doing This

Forgetting the key purpose of your design is always bad. If your planning for ecommerce and you’ve got this revolutionary concept for a kick-ass slider that just doesn’t fit into the present project, don’t integrate it just for the heck of it. Similarly, if you’ve got a practice of using this awe-inspiring drop-down menu you spent numerous hours working on yet it just degrades the practicality of that particular site, don’t use it. Don’t get distracted by anything more, aside from what your design will ultimately be used for. Step back regularly and consider if the target matches the present design and, if not, manipulate it to do it.

Design your own professional website with WordPress.

You don’t have a website? Your competition does.

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Yes, I am. TechGeeks have been doing it for years now, showing off and getting all the attention from your friends and family members, now it’s your turn. You can access your home computer, laptop, or even your work computer (with permission from the boss, of course) from any other computer with Internet access. LogMeIn Free (www.logmein.com) is software allowing you the power of remote access to as many computers as you need to add to your account. It just takes a few minutes to create an account and a quick download to add your computer to your account. Once you have added your computer, you can then go to any other computer with Internet access and gain access remotely.

Need to access your parents’ computer because they are old and don’t know how to send an email? No worries, just log into your LogMeIn account, choose the computer (that you already added to your account), and as long as it is online, you are in business. Once on the remote computer, you can view and control as if you were physically there! Latency is pretty good, but a little is to be expected on a remote session. Overall, this software is a pretty sweet tool for the traveler, regular Joe, or the guy who just wants to impress a girl.

“I can’t update my website!”

“All I want to do is add a couple of pictures . How does it cost that much?”

“Nooooo, I just broke my website!”

Some of these folks may even have the technical know-how of registering a domain name and updating some generic aspects of their website based on the tools their web host provides them. But, what if for example the local flower shop owner wants to add a new bouquet to her website showing a beautiful picture of her new creation that they just snapped with her digital camera. If you’re like me you don’t want to wait and see the new bouquet in a couple of days. You want to update your website now and tell all your customers about it while your still excited. In other words you want to finish the job without shelling out all that money to have it done when it gets done.

WordPress to the rescue

WordPress is the largest publishing platform on the Internet powering over 25 million websites (http://en.wordpress.com/stats/). WordPress is also an Open Source project meaning there are more contributions made to the platform as a whole than its commercial counterparts. There are also no licensing fees for the software, meaning more resources can be devoted to creating compelling content for users.

Although many people don’t know that it is a powerful Content Management System (CMS) that can be used for more than just blogging. With WordPress you can build a blog, a website, or both. In this article we will explore why WordPress is a great choice for small business websites and why it’s the best choice when choosing a platform to deliver your message.

Web Content Management Systems

In short, a content management system (CMS) is a tool that helps you manage the creation and updates to web pages on your website without the worry of learning some fancy new coding language or the fear of possibly breaking your shiny new website.

Integrating WordPress with your Website

WordPress is an incredibly amazing and powerful content management system that is FREE. You heard right – FREE. And its core developers are working hard every day for you to make sure you have the best security and the most flexibility available. It’s perfect for a small or medium business looking for an easy way to manage their website and their content on the fly.

WordPress was originally designed as a platform for blogging, although you don’t have to use it as a blogging tool exclusively. In fact, out of the over 25 million websites being served by WordPress more and more of them are using WordPress to manage their entire website including members areas. With the right theme development it can be used to run your website, with or without a “blog.” At the same time, the fact that WordPress was designed as a blogging platform gives it some very compelling advantages over other CMS platforms like Drupal and Joomla.

As it should be, it’s optimized for easily publishing and updating content. And let’s not forget getting good search engine rankings requires fresh, unique and dynamic content. You need a system and a workflow that doesn’t hinder you when you want to update your website with a new article, newsletter or picture.

Let’s take a quick look at why WordPress is the best choice for you and your expanding business.

My Top Five Reasons to Use WordPress for Your Small Business Website

1. SEO

   WordPress provides great search engine optimization (SEO) right out of the box. On top of that with the installation and configuration of standard WordPress plugins this only increases your strength with Googles search results. In fact Google’s own Matt Cutts says WordPress is “made to do SEO well” in this video: Matt Cutts gives tips to small business owners.

2. Content

   It’s dead simple to update content on your website without knowing any code like HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript etc. Do you have to “ask” your webmaster every time you want to make a small change to your website that usually costs more than it’s worth to you? Well no longer – once WordPress is set up for you, you can easily create new pages or edit existing pages using a simple rich text editor. If you use Microsoft Word, then you basically already know how to update the content on your website.

3. Plugins

   There is a living, breathing and ever growing community of developers creating themes and plug-ins – imagine the ability to extend your website with polls, contact forms, ratings, social integration or hundreds of other cool features without having to hire a web developer to build it from scratch.

4. Support

   If you do have problems, or want to add very custom features, it is easy to find support and developers who can help you. There are literally thousands of WordPress developers out there. And there are so many people writing about WordPress that help is only a Google search away!

5. Backwards compatibility

   With every new release of WordPress the developers strive for backwards compatibility. This gives you the peace of mind you need when upgrading your core system files but better security and flexibility.

As you can see, these are just a few of the reasons I recommend and prefer to build websites for small to medium sized businesses using WordPress. In the end, it’s all about the user and how easy it is for you to get your content to them. I would love to hear your comments below especially if you have started using WordPress recently. What are your favorite things about WordPress and do you see it saving you time and money?