Summer Fun with JB Systems
The JB Systems staff, friends, and family gathered at Carson Park in June to cheer the Predators for JB Systems night! If you were in the crowd, you probably also saw the JB Systems ‘geek’ t-shirts that were being given out to several lucky fans. Thanks to everyone who joined us – we hope you had a great time!
The Predators ended the season on top once again – check out their site for news, photos, scores, rosters and more – and watch for their new website coming soon!
http://www.cvpredators.com/
More summer fun
Summer is coming to a close and we’re still not done having a little fun! We have a $5 gift card to Starbucks for the first person to answer this question correctly.
Q: How many hours of our time (per month) for website updates do you get when you’re part of our basic Maintenance Plus program?
Comment on this post to submit your answer!
We’ve Been Busy…..
It’s been a while since our last post. ‘Why?‘ you may ask? We’ve been a little busy!
In the last month or so, JB Systems has launched five new and/or redesigned websites. These sites are using some of our newest technologies for the web including an advanced property search for real estate, dynamic customer testimonial systems, and user-friendly photo galleries. Take a look at these new sites and see what a database-powered website can do!
Special thanks to our clients listed below for all of their hard work on these sites, too!
Brunkow Builders
Brunkow Builders is a full service general contractor specializing in residential custom new home construction, additions and remodel work in the Eau Claire area.
Lake Hallie Cabinets
Lake Hallie Cabinets is a family-owned business located just north of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Our services range from full custom cabinetry design and installation to millwork to complete interior design services.
Maug Cleaning Service
Maug Cleaning Service is a residential and commercial cleaning company located in Osseo, WI. They are a family-owned company with over 25 years of experience. In addition to general household and commercial cleaning, Maug also offers professional carpet, tile, and upholstery cleaning.
Premium Lawn Service
Premium Lawn Service of Eau Claire, Wisconsin offers a very broad range of lawn care services to make lawn care and landscaping easy.
Coldwell Banker-Brenizer Realtors
Real Estate in Wisconsin, whether buying or selling, can be a daunting task. Coldwell Banker Brenizer, Realtors® offers the collective experience of over 80 agents in five convenient locations to help buy or sell your next home.
To see more of our work, check out the JB Systems portfolio.
Visuals Sell … Especially That Next Trip To Egypt
Written by Meghan Bauer, Art Director
The world wide web has developed into an ever-expanding electronic canvas for creativity and design. At JB Systems, we take design seriously – and offer the most custom approach. We’re proud to announce one of our newest website, CETA TOURS, and we’re incredibly pleased with how it turned out – both functionally and visually.
The goal was simple (or so we thought) – to create a website for three separate audiences – Student Tours, Teachers, and Adults looking to join a tour. We needed to organize all of that information and then visually convince website visitors that they want to travel – that they need to travel. The result … a breathtaking website featuring a custom design that incorporates “travel elements” such as luggage tags and baggage, as well as breath-taking views from all over the world, from France to Egypt, and from Germany to Spain.
Combine this level of design – with JB Systems’ advanced website technology – and you have a great looking website that never looks outdated. Don’t believe me? Try hitting the “Refresh” button. Banners throughout the entire site change, automatically, keeping the pages fresh and constantly delivering important and relevant information to visitors. Add a little jQuery and you have a nicely animated drop down menu for navigation – that is still SEO-Friendly and looks fantastic.
We hope you enjoy our new CETA Tours website – and welcome your comments below (yup, down there, below here)!!
Server Outage Alert
Around 5:10PM today (May 26th) a couple of our dedicated servers experienced issues today resulting in approximately 2 hours of down time. We apologize for any inconveniences this outage has caused.
Engineers at our data facility today were notified of a down router this afternoon and around 7:10PM had the issue resolved. JB Systems responded to the issue within moments of it happening we’re happy to report a limited outage of only 2 hours.
We appreciate the patience and understanding of our clients, and we’ll continue to respond to issues like this in the most expedient of ways.
What? No animation?!
Is Flash Going To Survive?
Written By Gerald Bauer, owner and founder
There’s a tremendous amount of debate happening in the tech world over Adobe Flash, its role in website design, and its future as a leading technology.
Adobe Flash was a great way to bring sexiness and interactivity to the web. Animations, cross-fades, “motion tweens” and a bit of music brought a new level of entertainment to the web – and even brought on its own industry of “Flash Banner Ads” that accompanied thousands of websites across the globe.
So where is Flash today? From our perspective at JB Systems, Flash has a very limited role for the web. Current industry analysts and trade journals we subscribe to are telling us that the in the next decade, more mobile devices (such as iPhones, Droids, Blackberries, iPads, NetBooks, etc) will be on the web than actual personal computers. Apple has taken a progressive stance against Flash, and does not support it in their mobile devices (iPads, iPhones, iPod Touch).
Now, we don’t necessarily take every decision “Apple” makes as true testament to our calling, however it’s a pretty gutsy move to make. But taking the time to look over WHY Apple has made that decision brings some interesting points to mind that most companies should consider. I’ve summarized some important notes below:
Performance Issues and Battery Life
Using the new HTML5 Standards, H.264 encoded videos play faster and consume 50% LESS BATTERY than viewing a video using the standard Flash Video Player. This has to do with technicalities in the encoding / decoding process of the video, but the simple fact is that Flash requires more processing power to decode videos and therefore more juice (battery power) to do so.
Reliability and Security
According to Apple, Symantec recently announced that Flash had one of the worst security records in 2009. Instead of progressing, Flash’s security models and cross-domain models make it more cumbersome and difficult to handle security.
Mobility
To quote a recent documented written by Steve Jobs, “…Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it.” As more and more users begin to their daily website surfing on mobile devices, any Flash-based content you have (all of which no doubt contain important messages about your business) will not be seen, seen well, or even supported.
Touch
It comes as no surprise that Apple is leading with the way with touch, and Multi-Touch® technology. Device makers such as Palm, Motorola, and Google have followed suit. Millions of Flash applications rely on Mouse-based actions, such as “Roll Overs” and those actions aren’t supported on these new devices. What does this mean? The Flash app, or banner, needs to be re-written to accommodate. Well, if it needs to be re-written, why not use new technologies such as Javascript and HTML5?
So, where does JB Systems stand?
JB Systems is taking the stance of using Flash, in limited fashion, for our websites. We have recently seen NEWLY developed website using complete Flash-based headers – including the website’s navigation, thus rendering the site useless for a good chunk of mobile phones. More advanced technologies, such as jQuery and other Javascript libraries offer animation and functionality that mimic (or even perform better) than Flash. As a new standard, beginning in June of 2010, all videos supported by JB Systems will be offered in two formats, HTML5 using the H.264 encoding or by embedding a Flash player. We will, however, wait until the majority of web browsers (eh hem, eh hem Microsoft … ) adopt HTML5 and streamline it as only Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox have adopted it.
Steve Jobs’ article can be read HERE.
“Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.” – Steve Jobs.
Until next time … thanks for reading! Post any comments below – we want to hear from you!!