The 6th Annual Nation’s Triathlon To Benefit The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society will take place Sunday, September 11, 2011 in the nation’s capital, Washington, DC.  It features a course that winds through Washington, DC’s monument corridor in the shadow of the nation’s best known memorials and national treasures.  This International Distance triathlon, sanctioned by the USAT, includes a 1.5k swim in the Potomac River, 40k bike course through DC, and a 10k run through Washington, DC’s historical landmarks with a spectacular finish!

The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) funds research to  help find better treatments and cures for blood cancer.  Over its 60 year  history, LLS has contributed to the discovery of innovative treatments for  blood cancers, many of which are used to treat a wide variety of other cancers  and diseases.  To learn more about LLS, or to donate, visit www.LLS.org/donate.

The Nation’s Triathlon is more than just a race, it is a weekend full of events for athletes, spectators and volunteers. As race day approaches, additional information (like swim waves and the athlete guide) will be posted here.

Please note, athletes must be 18 or over to participate as required by Washington, DC.

Date: Sunday, September 11, 2011

Time: 6:30 AM

Venue: Washington, DC

Address: West Potomac Park

Register Today!

Recognized as one of the top destination triathlons in the country, the Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Triathlon Presented by Herbalife celebrates it’s 12th Anniversary.  The point-point course from Venice Beach to downtown Los Angeles at L.A. Live gives you the opportunity to explore the scenic and historic Los Angeles.

Register Today!

Spark new ideas.

The AIGA San Diego Y16 Conference brings together industry thinkers, innovators and change-makers for two days of creativity and collaboration. Keynote speakers like Chris Dooley, Co-founder and Creative Director, National Television, and Aaron Draplin of Draplin Design Co. will share their insights to inspire and empower. And now for the first time, we’re offering hands-on Thinkshops during both days of the conference, so you have double the opportunity to engage and mix it up with your fellow attendees.

Join us for two days, Friday and Saturday, March 25 and 26, 2011 at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice on the beautiful campus of the University of San Diego. Incredible speakers. New friends. Engaging insights. Sound like fun? Then join us and ignite the Spark within.

Register Now!

Join us! One of the biggest annual AIGA San Diego Student Group event, UNITE. The event is to bring together students, staff, and professionals. Come and get inspired by local professional panel speakers and a well known guest speaker, Jacobs who is a former associate at Pentagram and former President of AIGA San Francisco Chapter. This is the mini Y conference organized by the AIGA San Diego Student Group.

Schedule
5:00 PM - 6:00 PM > Reception with live DJ
6:00 PM - 6:10 PM > Welcoming
6:10 PM - 6:50 PM > Guest Speaker Presentation
7:00 PM - 7:40 PM > Panel Speakers, Q & A
7:40 PM - 7:50 PM > Raffle Prizes
7:50 PM - 8:00 PM > Closing

Guest Speaker
Brian Jacobs, Founder and Creative Director, Brick Design
Brian graduated from the University of Cincinnati College of Design,
Art, Architecture and Planning in 1991. He began his career in New
York City freelancing and worked for a number of design firms
including Carla Hall Design Group. He then moved to San Francisco,
joined Pentagram Design and after two years was made Associate
Partner. In 1999, Brian directed a small group that concentrated
solely on interactive design. Brian started Brick Design in 2007.
Under his leadership, Brick has evolved and diversified into the areas
of identity, environmental graphics, packaging and user-interface
design. This multidisciplinary approach is reflected in a client list
that ranges from the technology industry of Apple, Microsoft, Sun
Microsystems and Nikon, to the educational field of The University of
Southern California, Stanford University and to the hospitality
division of One & Only Resorts. Among others are Cannon Design, Muzak,
United Airlines, Potlatch Paper, Café Mia Gelateria, and Home
Depot. Brian’s work has garnered numerous awards including AIGA
365, IDSA IDEA awards, ID Magazine, Graphis, and the CA Design Annual
among others. He recently served 3 years as president of AIGA San
Francisco and he spearheaded the 2003 Grown in California design
competition.

Raffle
Show your support for AIGA student members and participate in the raffle to raise funds for future student events like the annual Portfolio Exhibition and UNITE.

Register Online

The industry has evolved in many ways, but one particular area has affected how we build websites to a greater extent than any other. The surge in Web-enabled mobile devices has forged a subculture of visitors who require the adaptation of our websites to meet their needs. While mobile design is still in its infancy (and little primary research on mobile trends exist), we need to observe how this now-critical element of our industry is evolving, and the patterns which exist from current development efforts.

The aim of this article is to showcase the variety of methods in which some of today’s most popular websites provide an interactive and (hopefully) useful mobile experience for their end users. There are plenty of big names which were analyzed, such as Facebook and Amazon, and you’ll see plenty of useful graphs to draw some inspiration from. With statistics and some really interesting revelations on the diversity of modern design, you can be excited about the future of mobile Web design!

Article Source, read more: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/12/02/a-study-of-trends-in-mobile-design/

But regardless of how much has changed in the production process, a website’s success still hinges on just one thing: how users perceive it. “Does this website give me value? Is it easy to use? Is it pleasant to use?” These are the questions that run through the minds of visitors as they interact with our products, and they form the basis of their decisions on whether to become regular users.

User experience design is all about striving to make them answer “Yes” to all of those questions. This guide aims to familiarize you with the professional discipline of UX design in the context of Web-based systems such as websites and applications.

Article Source, read more:  http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/10/05/what-is-user-experience-design-overview-tools-and-resources/

A digital picture chain is possibly one of the most spectacular innovations in the field of photography storage in today’s world. This new invention would save you the trouble of carrying around your personal photos in your wallet.

Now whenever you want to show someone the picture of your pet, your home or even someone close to your heart, you wouldn’t have to resort to your mobile. This is where the digital picture chain comes in; you can keep your snapshots ready for showing. The digital can store up to 60 photos which you can constantly display at various intervals. Take your treasured moments with you as you go to work or on a vacation.

A good digital picture chain has a 1.4 inch LCD screen display. It has an internal flash memory with a storage capacity of 8GB. You can transfer pictures using the USB port. Just plug the USB cable to your digital picture and the other end to your computer to drag and drop. The included batteries can last up to two and a half hours which allow non-stop photo viewing.

They will need to be charged at the most once a month. Some models chain can store up to 180 photos. It is obvious that the main attractive feature of the keychain is its size. After all can you get something more compact than something you can attach to it? You can even consider it as a USB stick which has a small screen on it for the purpose of viewing photos.

People who do not like to carry or cannot operate mobile phones, for them the digital picture chain is a wonderful object to solve their picture portability problem. It is easy to use and show photos to friends and relatives. The keychain comes in various colors and shapes. There are models with a shape of a heart, oval or even clock-shaped.

They are lightweight and can be attached to your car mirrors, school bags or handbags as ornamental designs. Some models have an automatic shut down feature. The latest models are 2000, NE and MAC.

However the number of pixels, efficiency of the battery and storage capacity varies in different models. Each digital picture keychain has a high-resolution LCD screen where you can display photos in a slide show also. Different photo file formats are supported such as jpeg, asn, bmp. They also have an ultra bright screen with six second dim feature to conserve your battery power.

The price of of the models has reduced in recent years with a fall from about $100 to $30. The suppose poroduct are an excellent category for presentation and may even be unique.You can be sure that your loved ones would consider it a memorable gift.

These gifts of reminiscences are sure to gain looks of joy on the faces of your loved ones. So, present your near and dear ones with a digital picture chain and make your gift one-of-a-kind.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=J._M._John

Video marketing has been providing an excellent economic option of promotional and advertising choice in the form of several internet marketing tools but simultaneously has given people an alternative to make money online by utilizing home business marketing tools. The paybacks of internet marketing are crossing physical boundaries and revealing the supplies that they have to advertise and sell to larger and better viewers. There by growing the sales potential. Strategic marketing is the essential part of all the business, improve the marketing strategy to promote and sell a product or service, higher would be the revenue graph of the company.

Further, improvement and follow of marketing tips and modern marketing ideas, a company could actually do wonders to its sales figure without investing as much as it other wise would in case of the conventional ways of broadcasting and promotion.

A company must strive very hard at utilizing a permutation and combination of internet marketing tools to make thee maximum use of it. At present, the modern and the trendiest internet marketing tools that is being used by all the companies is video marketing. Video marketing is nothing but making a video of your product and services and then displaying them on the internet. Right now, it’s the best way of promoting your product and services online. There are a number of things that has to be followed carefully before making a video of your product and services. This is one of the finest and the best internet marketing tool when you need to sell a product aggressively to have immediate results.

Internet marketing through video marketing makes it easier way to correspond to the utilities and features of the product. This easily attracts people in a huge way. Nowadays people are so busy that they have no time to read the articles on the products rather they prefer to watch a video of the products and then think of buying of the product or not. Video marketing is an easiest way to promote your services and products online plus it’s the finest and the best ideas of marketing. Video marketing gives an excellent platform to endorse the products and services in an easy way. At present, video marketing is one of the best marketing strategies.

Alternatively there are a number of people who are looking forward to make money online through hone business marketing. For those people, network marketing and multi level marketing strategy is a great source to make money faster. They can easily earn a good amount of money by just sitting in their houses and promoting their services and products through internet and allows the potential purchasers to go ahead and buy your products. When these buyers would actually purchase products and services (they are promoting), a commission would be added, and this would sum up as a remuneration that they could earn.

On the basis of the effort and time they invest in these home business marketing projects, the remuneration figure would go up. With the help of video marketing, you can easily post you products and services videos on internet and can easily make money online.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dan_Martiin ]]> http://chrischasedesign.com/blog/2009/07/23/the-latest-internet-marketing-tools-video-marketing/feed/ http://chrischasedesign.com/blog/2009/07/23/strategic-planning-for-website-promotion-and-internet-marketing/ http://chrischasedesign.com/blog/2009/07/23/strategic-planning-for-website-promotion-and-internet-marketing/#comments Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:08:37 +0000 admin http://chrischasedesign.com/blog/?p=50

Search Engine Optimization is the need for every website or online business. To increase number of visitors or to multiply revenue earnings, people need to promote their website. Website promotion doesn’t mean spending lot of money on buying links or banner space on other websites. You need to develop a strategic website optimization and promotion plan to get maximum benefits. The best thing is that, it will not cost you a fortune.

A perfect website promotion campaign works on four basic levels:

Internal Optimization of Website
For instant boost in search engine rankings of website, it has to be well optimized on structural level. If a website is not designed and developed in search engine friendly manner, it will not get indexed by search engines easily. There are several constraints from Search Engine Optimization point of view which should be taken care at the time of designing and development of website. Some don’ts for Search Engines Friendly websites are as follows:

1. Heavy web pages with graphics and videos (it takes time in loading)
2. Use of Frames (Search Engine Spiders cannot crawl through Frame pages)
3. Images without ALT tag (it reduces the chance of getting indexed for required keywords)
4. Flash Content (Flash is unreadable for Search Engine Crawlers, so contents inside a flash movie will not be readable by search Engine)
5. Pages without META Tags (Meta Tags are essential for Search Engine spiders)

Creation of Relevant Keyword Rich Contents for Website
Content based indexing is an essential phenomenon of every search engines. Keyword rich contents on website always help in easy and regular indexing of web pages. Therefore, in order to get listed on top ranks in major search engines a website need relevant keyword rich content.

Contents with perfect saturation of keywords can drastically push up your ranking in all major search engines. However, in order to sustain in top ranking of search engine a website need to update its contents regularly.

Website’s Placement in Search Engines
Once a search engine friendly website equipped with keyword rich contents is ready, we can start its promotion. Initial promotion includes submission of website to all popular search engines and web directories.

Usually all search engine maintains a directory of website in specific niche, they crawl through all the web directories for this task. So, if your website is listed in prestigious high PR web directories like DMOZ, your chances of getting indexed are more.

Creating Awareness about Website’s Existence
You need to create awareness in order to attract visitors and customers to your website. The perfect way to create awareness about your newly launched website or recently introduced products is blogging and participating in forums. Yes, it really helps. A blog can be the best supporting element for website. You can post latest news and information about products and services offered by your website. It will also act as a platform to interact with your existing or potential customers.

One most important technique of creating awareness is submitting keyword rich articles supporting your niche. It will create supporting links as well as contents for your website, adding more prospects for top ranking of your websites.

Nowadays, the demand for SEO and Internet Marketing services has increased. There are several companies offering best SEO and SEM services. It can be the best way, if you are new in Internet Marketing or just ventured here to reap the enormous benefits of Ecommerce and not aware with the techniques and tools of SEO and Internet Marketing.

To start, let’s take a look at what CSS is and why it’s so important to modern web design. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and was introduced by the World Wide Web Consortium in late 1996 with the aim to separate web page content (written copy, images, multimedia, etc.) from presentation (fonts, colors, layout, page structure, etc.). Another chief goal of CSS is to improve and enhance web accessibility. Previous to the introduction of CSS, a web page’s HTML markup defined both content and presentation.

CSS is usually contained in a separate file from an HTML web page. This is why CSS files are frequently referred to as “external style sheets”. When an HTML page or other type of web page loads like .aspx, .php, or .cgi, the page calls the external CSS file and reads all of the presentation properties defined in the file. The CSS file tells the HTML page how to style the website’s content and in the case of tableless web design, where to place it. With CSS, a web designer can set rules for the presentation of individual web pages or an entire site.

Traditionally, web pages were built using HTML with tables to layout the page structure and content. These cell based tables are very similar in form to a table found in Microsoft Excel and Word. An advantage of using tables is when used properly, it closely mimics the standard page layout in print media such as newspapers or magazine articles. However, as web technology has advanced and become more dynamic, a new era of design with greater possibilities has emerged. A new approach to designing and laying out web pages was created to break the constraints of structured table layouts. This approach is called CSS tableless design.

It’s important to understand that traditional table based design and CSS are not mutually exclusive; CSS is frequently used by web developers using table based design to control the properties of tables and other items on their web pages. On the other hand, tableless design wouldn’t be possible without CSS. However, instead of using tables, a tableless designer uses what are known as “DIV”s, which is short for “division”. The name DIV is also derived from the HTML <div> tag that forms the DIV in the HTML code. A DIV is a box, or more accurately described as a container, where web content is housed. Similar to table based design where content is contained within the cells of the table, with DIVs the content is housed inside DIV containers.

A DIV’s properties are defined within the CSS file. CSS tells the DIV where to appear on a web page, its width and height dimensions, and its appearance i.e. if it should have a background color or image, a border, or whether it should even be visible. There are a wide variety of other CSS properties that can be applied to DIVs. Instead of being constrained by the rigid grid structure of tables, DIVs can be made any size and placed anywhere on a webpage including layered on top of each other. This is what makes CSS tableless DIV design so powerful. The layout and design possibilities are essentially endless.

Even though the use of tables for website page structure is deprecated, tables still play an important role in CSS tableless design. Tables should be used for structuring and presenting tabular data. An example of best practices for using a table in your design that many novice CSS tableless designers overlook is when building a web form, for example a company information request form. Sure, it may be obvious that using tables is best used to present data from a database or the results of a form submission, but when laying out the form itself, tables will save you a lot of time. Therefore, it is important for CSS tableless designers to understand how to use tables and when they are a better and more efficient solution than using strictly CSS tableless design.

It’s been a hot button issue for some web designers as to which method is better, table based layouts or CSS tableless layouts.

Let’s take a look at 9 reasons why CSS tableless design performs better than traditional table based web design and why it has become the preferred method of modern web design:

1. CSS tableless design allows web designers the possibility to make more complex layouts and designs when producing a website. With table based layouts, web designers are confined to creating layouts that can be rigid, inflexible, and based on grids. CSS tableless based layouts, on the other hand, allow the designer to be as creative as their imagination allows them to be.

2. If your intention is to improve search engine rankings for your website, then a CSS tableless design will help your cause. CSS tableless designs result in smaller web page file sizes, a reduction in the ratio of code to content, and the elimination of the extraneous “junk” HTML markup that many table based web editors use. This makes it easier for search engine spiders to crawl through your website and results in a more favorable ranking in search engines.

3. By using CSS style sheets it is extremely easy to maintain visual consistency throughout your website. When using table based layouts, it is easy to lose this consistency because each web page’s style, layout, and design are frequently hard-coded individually into every page. If you need to make a change to your website across all pages, you’ll have to change the code on each individual page. With CSS, all pages can use the same CSS document for their layout and styles. If you change a property in the CSS file, the changes will be instantaneously reflected across all pages of your website.

4. Updating a CSS tableless website is easier and less time consuming than compared to table based designs. For example, if you want to change font sizes and colors within your website, your external CSS file can be simply opened and the necessary changes made without making the change on each and every page of your website. To change the look of your website for special or seasonal promotions, the entire website “look and feel” can be completely altered simply by changing properties in the CSS file without touching the HTML code of the web page.

5. Redesigning a website using CSS tableless design is faster and less expensive than redesigning a website using table based design. This is because CSS tableless designs have separate files for content and visual data including web page structure whereas table based designs mix layout information with content in the same file. By separating the visual data and layout from the content, a web designer is able to quickly and easily make changes across the entire website.

6. Table web page designs rely heavily on the use of spacer .gifs, a transparent image used to control blank space within a table based web page. Having to create a series of custom sized transparent images to organize your web page layout creates messy code and a rigid page structure that can’t be easily changed. CSS tableless design eliminates this problem by using DIVs instead of tables which can be easily resized, positioned anywhere on a page, or even dynamically manipulated through the use of scripting languages.

7. A common advantage of using CSS tableless web design is a reduction in web page file size which equates to your web pages loading faster. When compared to a CSS tableless layout, a table based web page frequently takes twice as long to load. Also, the amount of bandwidth you will save using a CSS tableless based approach, especially as your website grows in size, can be vast resulting in a faster overall loading website while saving you money.

8. Using CSS tableless web design makes your website more accessible by making content consumption and site navigation easier for users. You’ll also do a much better job of accommodating those with visual impairments and other disabilities. Screen readers, Braille devices, and special browsers for the impaired have fewer problems with tableless designs because they can control the CSS file making font sizes larger, or even modify the web page structure to make it easier to read.

9. CSS enables the web designer to attach multiple style sheets for different media types. If a potential customer visits your site with her Blackberry or mobile phone, a different CSS style sheet is called which dictates a completely different layout and styling for your entire website formatting it for optimal viewing on the small screen of the device.

CSS tableless design is a great method for developing modern websites and offers many valuable advantages over traditional table based design. Using CSS tableless design will provide your website visitors better usability and accessibility, faster page load times with greater, more elegant design possibilities. For the web developer and website owner, CSS tableless websites are easier and less expensive to redesign, update and maintain. When given a choice, CSS tableless design will be the best option for most present day website designs.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Steve_Kozyk ]]> http://chrischasedesign.com/blog/2009/06/30/css-vs-tables-9-reasons-why-css-tableless-designs-are-better/feed/