Discount Hotel Reservations

Linking in and out

Over at Blogstorm, there is a new post about receiving links from authority sites like CNN.

The full list continues with;

• Orange
• Contact Music
• Orlando Sentinel
• BBC
• Tiscali
• Exalead
• Web.de
• News.com

Thanks Patrick, we'll see if Google has devalued these links.

Studio Gets New Look | Design Graphics Illustration

Our Studio Website Has Been Redesigned

We are proud to announce a complete makeover for the Stuart Hughes Design Website. This redesign was in part to make the site a lot more visually appealing, but also to improve the overall user friendliness. I think both things have been achieved but only time (and you our visitors) will tell. Please drop us a line and let us know what you think.

Thanks for reading,

SPH

Professional Logo / Print Design

It's Simple. Professional quality graphics & logo design with personal service.

When you hire SHD for your new logo or a redesigned logo, it's a pretty uncomplicated process. We have a flat fee (please contact us) for our logo designs - we ask for 50% upfront, and 50% upon completion. This includes as many revisions as needed (within reason of course - I'm not sure about a million) until we get the design exactly the way you think it should be. After we have finalized the design we will send you the completed files (in several formats) via email and if you prefer burned to CD and sent regular mail. This rate also includes laying out your business cards for FREE and sending those files to your printer.

We can work together via phone and email or just one or the other - whatever works best for you. Normally, I like to ask what your preferences are (if any) - typestyles, colors, graphics or symbols. I'm also interested in what your company does, who you sell to, maybe some history and anything else you think might be helpful. These things all spark ideas, and give me a good starting point. From start to finish usually takes a week or two, but this will vary.

Take a look at our samples, and if you think we can work well together, please contact us anytime.

Thanks for reading!

SPH

Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget

SHD Hotel Reservations Gadget

Well, our Sidebar Gadget for Windows Vista users went live yesterday and it looks great.

It is saved in the Search Tools category and to my knowledge, was the first "Travel" related Gadget to be added to the Live.Gallery. Sweet. I noticed today though that it didn't take long for another travel Gadget was added from one of the "big" name sites. But so far, we're still ahead of them in number of downloads. Thanks everybody - keep supporting the little guys!

We had our Gadget built by the nice folks over at GadgetSpark. I initially spoke with William Cross the owner and he was very helpful. Then I worked with their Lead Coder Lawrence James in making the Gadget. He was fantastic, and gave me the required sizes so I could design the images. They are very easy to work with, and will try to add just about any feature you can dream up. We highly recommend them.

Have fun, be safe, keep traveling!

SPH

Custom Toolbar Buttons

We recently came across a neat thing offered by Google where you can make a custom button for the Google Toolbar. We read up on the full documentation and decided to give it a whirl and make one. After you complete your button you can have it reviewed by Google and if they approve it they will add it to their Button Gallery.

So we are waiting to see if we get the nod on our button for inclusion to the list, but in the meantime we did add it to our site pages so our visitors now can add our custom button to their own toolbars (if they happen to use Google Toolbar).

They offer good instructions on the full documentation page, and here's their brief description of what a Custom Button is;

A custom button is a push button that you can add to the Google Toolbar that can have custom navigation, search, send and update capabilities. Notably, a custom search button can use most any website's search engine, not just Google's.

When clicked on, a search button can perform any of the following tasks:

Navigate the browser to a website, like a bookmark
Navigate the browser to a website and run that website's search engine, searching for the text the user has typed into the toolbar search box. For example, a Wikipedia button would go to wikipedia.org and search for the term you've entered. (It can go to any one of a number of locale-specific websites based on the toolbar's locale.)
Send the currently selected browser text to a service, such as to compose a new email, blog entry or text message
Update its button icon, tooltip, and dropdown list of icons and strings from an RSS feed

We think this is very cool, and the only unfortunate thing (as of now) is that Custom buttons currently work only on Internet Explorer.

SPH

New Look New Samples

We have given our Website a complete overhaul.

Stuart Hughes Design has finished nearly finished completely redoing the Website showcasing logo designs, graphics, web and illustrations. Not only did we changed the look of the site, and added new content, but we also coded it using a new method (for us at least).

Up to now, we have strictly designed websites using HTML. Yes, our programmer codes in ColdFusion, ASP, and many other languages, but our design studio only hand-coded in old fashioned HTML.  However, we've been studying up on coding with improved flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS. This research has included reading Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm.

I really enjoy the way he has written this book not only very knowledgable and user-friendly, but also with some humor. That's cool, cause when your learning about "code" it's pretty unfunny and stiff. In fact, I'm planning to buy another of his books that talks about the importance of Web standards and how to best design while meeting those standards.

Anyway, we really hope the new site is a hit, and improves our traffic from the big search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) along with allowing more people with different set-ups to enjoy looking at our work.

Thanks for reading,

SPH

Hotel Contact Updated

We updated our Contact Us page on the hotel site this morning with a few minor text changes, and also by adding a picture of my wife Tamara and myself from a few years ago.

Now I don't think there is a hard fast rule about including photos of employees on the company website, but in most cases I don't really think it's a great idea. I mean, there are a few places maybe that it makes sense - a realtors site, a doctors/therapists site, and a handful of others. But probably for 95% of company websites it is not necessary, or better yet even helpful for visitors to see the people that work for a particular company. And I don't want to be a jerk here, but honestly some folks are better off "behind the scenes".

With that being said, we did decide to add a picture of ourselves on the Contact Us page. The one real big difference here is that it's not actually a photo but a pencil drawing by Stuart Hughes (me) of her and I.

So, maybe we are changing our opinion of putting picutres of yourself on your website. Maybe it does give websites a more "human" feel to visitors, and entices them to want to do business with a company. We'll see. If it doesn't get a positive response in this particular case, maybe I need to make a new drawing ...

Have fun, be safe, and keep traveling!

SPH