As we’ve mentioned before in previous articles, links are a positive signal to search engines affirming the value and validity of your website.  By this logic, the more websites linking to you the better your page rank, right? Unfortunately, it isn’t quite that simple. In the early days of search engines, yes, it was that simple. Early search engines only assigned value based on quantity. They possessed no ability to ascertain quality or origin of external links. Webmasters constructed entire networks of interlinked pages designed to boost the ranking of specific websites and this still happens today! Their overall impact is, however, diminishing. This and other tactics intended to fool search engines and boost page rank are considers “black hat” strategies. After all, how does a web crawler definitively ascertain the value of the originating site? Only the people behind the search engines know. Suffice to say that as search engines and their crawlers evolve, so does their criteria for evaluating the origin of the website hosting your link. As you attempt to gain stature in the eyes of the search engines, be wary of engaging in the following practices; the short term gain isn’t worth the monetary loss and long-term [....] Read More >>

We're pleased to announce the release the re-designed Brooks Barron Real Estate website, the first Realtor to take advantage of our new Edgeworks CMS for Realtors. With the newly redesigned website,  Brooks Barron Real Estate now offers MLS listings data from the Northern New England Real Estate Network within the geographic area they cover. Whereas the previous website had the listing data for only their properties, the new site offers properties from other listing agents in the same geographic area. The detail view of a property has been given extensive and special care, making it quite possibly the best display of MLS data of any real estate website in Vermont. The new Brooks Barron website is simple to manage thanks to the Edgeworks CMS for Realtors backbone and we have plans for the platform that will continue to improve upon the experience for both website visitors and Brooks Barron. Congratulations to Susan and Brooks Barron on the leap forward! An example property detail page on the new Brooks Barron Real Estate website.   Read More >>

It's another Friday making it time for another round of Friday Props. I'm back in the drivers seat for this week so we'll be steering clear of the crazy things Phil presented the last couple weeks. Let's dig right in! Let it Rain! Musical Rain Gutters In the student district of Desden, Germany there is a building fitted with rain gutters that are so whimsical and creative as to deserve Props. The Kunsthofpassage Funnel Wall actually plays music when it rains. They are not only designed to look like instruments, they are instruments. How cool is that!?   Parallax to the Max There is a new trend in web design called parallax design. The idea is to provide the illusion of depth to a web page by taking advantage of the parallax effect. According to Wikipedia: Parallax is a displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight, and is measured by the angle or semi-angle of inclination between those two lines.  The term is derived from the Greek ?????????? (parallaxis), meaning "alteration". Nearby objects have a larger parallax than more distant objects when observed from different positions, so parallax can be used to determine distances. We've been spending a fair amount of time recently [....] Read More >>

Design—it is all around us. Stop reading for just a moment and look around you—every man-made item in your field of vision was designed by someone. Permeating our lives, good design is often not noticed while bad design drives us to frustration; the cell phone that hangs up when held against your ear in a particular manner is more often noticed than the one that functions flawlessly and lets you go on with the task at hand without bringing attention to itself. Yet even without noticing it, all design influences you. Design impacts our daily lives. It can be found in a myriad of areas–from architecture to transportation to product design to graphic design (to name just a few). Sometimes design crosses into the realm of art and becomes something to look at and contemplate, to move people, to create controversy or to enrich lives. And while it is true that design shares a spark of creativity and innovation with art, most often design is much more specific—it is creativity deployed for a specific goal and that goal is usually one of solving a problem or communicating a message. Graphic design, in particular, conveys messages in our modern media-centric society. There is [....] Read More >>

Ed is still hunkered down behind the four computer screens in his office while I gaze longingly through the windows at the beautiful blue skies....FREE ME FROM MY CHAINS! Since all my work is done, I get the honor of giving you this week's edition of Friday Props, brought to you by the friendly interwebs, Where All Good Things Happen. For our first prop, I will add this disclaimer: I don't understand Spanish very well. OK, yeah, I used to work with a whole lot of guys from El Salvador, but most of our conversation revolved around food so my vocabulary is almost useless outside a grocery store or kitchen. Don't worry if you don't know Spanish. It won't take you too long to figure out how this invention works and how it will improve society:   Speaking of commercialization that helps improve the world, Rhett and Link have made an art of making low budget commercials for local businesses. This came out three years ago but its so campy, it makes me chuckle everytime I see it because it is so ridiculous. If every TV commercial was this interesting, I would watch TV for the commercials. What gets the Props here is not [....] Read More >>

Friday, Friday, Friday the 13th and, yes, evil things have struck here at EWC: Phil is doing the Friday Props this week since Ed is deep in the world of code. Buckle your seatbelts, kiddos. I'm going to take this opportunity to push my own agenda of awesomeness since there's only a few more hours in the office for me. First off, a quick giggle to the funny peoples who make their mark on the internet with the simple humor that always surrounds aging action heros.They are the ones that truly make this country great. Rounding the bases and headed to second like a chihuahua after a dropped piece of beef jerky, I want to steer your Friday Props to a friend of ours down Barnard way. After our time exploring the Mariana Trench south of Japan, Chris Wilson dedicated himself to the art of baking and sweets in various establishments. The bad news was that only a few people ever got to experience his creations until recently when he started his own little confection business. Here's a nod to you, Mr. Wilson Without breaking stride, third base is coming up quick! Don't slow down now! The weekend is so close! To [....] Read More >>

Another Friday means another round of Props going out for the cool, funky, groovy, neat, things we've run across that we like. Hello, Nerf First up ... new guns from Nerf. As you are probably aware Nerf gun battles are a part of the culture here at Edgeworks Creative.  Foam dart hail storms are now simply of a part of life at the office. One never knows when a storm might break out.  We're giving out Props this week to a whole new group of arms being offered up. The new N-Strike Elite blasters have an incredible 75 foot range! Looks like we might need a bigger office.   Sun Boxes in Vermont Props are going out to  Craig Calorusso for his audio artistry that's happening right here in our back yard! Calorusso is bringing his Sun Boxes to Vermont State Parks in July and August. His soundscape project is made up of twenty speakers spread over a large area. Each Sun Box is powered by solar energy and connected to a PC board that has a musical piece recorded onto it. These pieces of music are then played in loops. Because each piece is of a different length, the overall musical experience changes over time [....] Read More >>

At Edgeworks Creative we design and develop websites. You know this. What you probably don't know is that we create these websites atop a custom made platform - the Edgeworks CMS. The Edgeworks CMS is a powerful website building tool that gives us incredible freedom to treat each and every project as its' own while allowing us to re-use and re-purpose components we've already built. It gives us the ability to create custom websites at affordable prices and it dovetails with our website development process to give our clients pixel-perfect, functional websites in quick order. In this post I aim to show off some of the features of the Edgeworks CMS. A Look Under the Hood To really gain an understanding of what makes the Edgeworks CMS such a powerful platform for the rapid development of our client websites we need to take a look under the hood. When a client logs into their website administration they don't see the same things we do. The point of having a website for your business is not to learn how to create and code websites. Unlike Wordpress, Joomla or other platforms where site owners must learn about plugins, modules and the like, the Edgeworks [....] Read More >>