Ohio Web Technologies

The Smartest Sharing Tools!

Matt Vincik — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 18:41:55 +0000

There are many ways that website designers can help their clients get involved with Social Networking. For many small to midsized businesses creating a Facebook and Twitter Page might not always be the best way to deliver their content because it does take a lot of time. If you are going to create these pages you have to keep up on them or people will lose interest.

So what is the best alternative? There is a tool from AddThis that is very easy to install on your website. The tool gives you the ability to share any page or post on your website with almost every type of social website without the need for your business to have an account setup with the social networks that your users belong to.

What is AddThis?

AddThis is the world’s largest content sharing and social insights platform:

• Easy-to-use tools help users to share your content and drive viral traffic
• In-depth analytics provide insight into your audience and user activity
• Powerful APIs let you create your own UI, access analytics, and more

Get AddThis

We recently added the AddThis social tool to the Ohio Web Technologies website and we are very excited to watch the growth. While Ohio Web Technologies does have a company Facebook page, we feel that making it easy for our visitors to share the content on any page of our website with their social network of choice is the best way to go.

If you have any questions about how your company can benefit from social networking please contact us!

Hard Drive Data Recovery

Matt Vincik — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 20:54:22 +0000

So your day was going great. The birds were singing, all your clients were calling with compliments and all of a sudden as you were entering your last entry in QuickBooks you get the BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH (bsod)! You reboot your computer hoping that everything is fine because you don’t have a backup of your files on your hard drive. When your computer finally restarts you get a message saying “no bootable device found”.

As you jump on your laptop to do a quick search for data recovery you come across many sites that offer services for data recovery but they range from $500-$5000. Right here is where I hope that you found Ohio Web Technologies and realized that we offer Data Recovery Services for damaged hard drives. For a limited time only we are running a Data Recovery special for $300. The best part of it all is that if we can’t retrieve your data there is no charge!

We are running the special because we want to help make data recovery affordable and so that you can enjoy your summer and get back to business. We have had a lot of success retrieving data from damaged hard drives.

When you weigh the options, paying $300 to recover your data is a lot cheaper than paying your accountant to setup your QuickBooks all over again, entering all your client information, taking all those photos again (some which cannot be replaced), setting up all your Excel Sheets again and everything else that will take you weeks to rebuild.

So take a deep breath and relax. Contact us today and we’ll make arrangements to get your hard drive scheduled for a data recovery session. Typically the entire process has a 3 day turn around time.

Websites that work on the iPhone and iPad

Matt Vincik — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 18:05:00 +0000

Many of our clients are very tech savvy companies and they want their websites to be fully iPad and iPhone compatible. From a development standpoint this means that we need to use JavaScript instead of Adobe Flash for animations and video. Currently the iPhone and iPad (or any Apple device) does not support Adobe Flash. While this does create a few challenges, our developers have fully embraced the idea of using JavaScript to achieve a 100% iPhone and iPad compatible site.

There is one drawback however. Currently Adobe Flash is the most widely used format for supporting video playback for websites. While many could of course use Apple Quick Time it’s just a lot less intrusive to use Adobe Flash for your video. Not to mention the compression is great and you can simply do more. Even our own website uses Adobe Flash for our introduction video on the Ohio Web Technologies homepage. We have however decided to display a JavaScript slider as the default so that when an iPhone or iPad user visits our website they don’t see a large blank box where our introduction video is. Let’s face it, even the video giant YouTube uses Adobe Flash for all of their videos and I don’t suspect they are going to reprogram their entire website just to cater to Apple’s refusal to use Adobe Flash.

In best practices, it’s important to use any technology tastefully. While we can’t design websites that cater to everyone, every browser and every device we can however do our best to come up with a creative balance that covers the majority of people.

After all, companies spend good money to create beautiful websites and they want their visitors to be able to see their website the way it was intended to be displayed.