Eggplant. Who doesn't love a little  Solanum melongena now and again? In this, our twelfth week of Friday Props, we're looking at eggplant. What a strange thing to be handing out props for, yes? Yes. But hold onto your hats because I promise you'll fully like what we have in store for you this week. Cooking up Color Love You might think we're going to look at recipes (and the thought did cross our minds), but instead we're handing out props to one of our favorite spots on the web to get inspiration for color schemes. Colour Lovers is a spot to create, share and use color schemes contributed by a community of users. The aubergine flower to the left was made with a color palette we liked named ... wait for it .... eggplant       Vermont Style Gardening We all know there are no better gardeners than those who manage to bring forth in our short growing season enough bounty to get a family through the winter. Well here's a garden in Rochester, Vermont where the bounty is so rich and the heart behind growing it so generous that we just had to hand out Props. (We don't actually know if there is any eggplant in [....] Read More >>

We are firm believers that every business ought to have a presence on the web - it's as basic as having a phone number. In fact, most people nowadays have their first contact with a business via the web - either on their laptop/desktop computers, tablets or smart phones. It behooves every small business owner to take seriously the need to be reachable, searchable and generally available online. But not all businesses need a full-blown website. In fact, there are many that can do just fine with a business card style website - one which shares the very basic information about a business that most people would be looking for anyway - telephone number, hours of operation, location, directions, links to any social media presence and perhaps the most recent news or specials, but not much more. We're happy to announce that we've used our Edgeworks CMS product to develop very reasonably priced Edgeworks CMS Biz Card websites for just these types of businesses. Our Edgeworks CMS Biz Card platform provides a simple, single page website with all the basic information for your small or micro-business. These sites are reasonably priced but offer features that are usually available only on much more expensive sites. Biz Card [....] Read More >>

For our eleventh installment of Friday Props I was going to start out with a tribute to space exploration and specifically to the Mars Curiosity rover en route and nearly arrived, but it got me thinking about the spirit of exploration in general. That then led me to thinking about the boundless potential of childhood and childhood dreams. So this week we are giving out Props for people and things in some way related to the wonder of childhood. Super Heroes The window washers at the London Children's Hospital dress in super hero costumes for the kids. This is just plain awesome. You can imagine how it might lift the spirits of some kids who could really use it. Major Props going out for these guys - a super hero thing to do. Moonrise Kingdom We won't be handing out Props too often for movies, but this movie is just too good to ignore. It's a sweet, silly, random story of childhood love and wanderings set in the fictional New England island of "New Penzance". The casting, the dialogue, the hillarity  ... it's all so much worth seeing. Props going out to Wes Anderson for his film. Watch the trailer below, check out the [....] Read More >>

We are quite pleased to introduce the Edgeworks CMS for Realtors. As we've mentioned before, we have developed a website building platform and Content Management System called the Edgeworks CMS which we use to build customized websites for businesses of all varieties. We take the basic CMS and then build on top of it in order to adapt the platform to each of our clients'  businesses. There are some types of businesses which have similar needs, however. We've identified a number of those business types and over the coming year we will be releasing versions of the CMS for those business types. The first business category we have targeted is real estate agents. The Edgeworks CMS for Realtors offers real estate brokers and agents a fully connected NNEREN MLS data-aware website. Our offering provides the following benefits: A completely custom front-end design Property detail pages that are well-organized and easy to read Simple to use CMS administrative interface Hands-on training covering how to use the CMS Ability to enhance your own properties with search-optimized pages for your properties Google maps of properties Similar Properties feature Property search feature with agent listings featured Mortgage calculator Hourly updates to MLS data Each and every implementation of the Realtor CMS will still have the individual attention and custom design [....] 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 >>

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 >>

I spend so much time in front of screens doing my work that sometimes I yearn for different tactile experiences. I'm not eager to be a paper pusher by any means, but I thought for this weeks' Friday Props I'd do a theme to honor those folks who do crazy cool things with paper. Join me in giving accolades for these astounding projects and their creators! Phone Books are so 80's But turning phone books into works of three dimension carved portraits? Timeless and way cool. Props going out to Alex Queral for his Phone Book Carvings.  Queral uses an X-ACTO knife, an acrylic medium and a black wash - nothing more. His work uses phone books which are (of course) destined to be thrown away and makes them worth keeping again. He creates portraits of famous people as well as abstracts. Visit a gallery of his work  for more examples.  You'll find many that you recognize and I promise it will blow your mind.   Is This Even Possible!? I can fold a couple varieties of paper airplanes and with the help of a book I can even do some very basic origami. But Simon Schubert gets Props for his paper building made by folding paper. There is no better [....] Read More >>