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Matcha Design Earns Silver Winner at 2014 W3 Awards
Matcha Design Earns Silver Winner at 2014 W3 Awards

The Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts announced the winners of The 2014 W3 Awards today. Receiving over 4,000 entries, The W3 Awards honors outstanding Websites, Web Marketing, Web Video, Mobile Sites/Apps & Social content created by some of the best...

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The Art of Creating the Right Content
The Art of Creating the Right Content

There's a saying that 'content is king' when it comes to creating a successful website or web-based marketing materials. But that 'content is king' phrase refers to high quality content only. Poorly-written content can do much more harm than good! So when you're...

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How to Build an Infographic
How to Build an Infographic

Infographics have gained tremendous popularity in recent years, as they're an extremely effective and aesthetically-pleasing method for conveying information such as statistics, facts and figures. Infographics feature a graphical depiction of the information to be...

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The 5 Keys to Understanding a Client’s Needs
The 5 Keys to Understanding a Client’s Needs

Whether you're designing a website or crafting a printed marketing piece, it's absolutely essential that the client and the designer share a common understanding, as miscommunications can result in disaster. For instance, a client may indicate that they would like a...

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Speed Up Your Mac – Tips from a former Mac Genius
Speed Up Your Mac – Tips from a former Mac Genius

A few days ago, Matcha Design invited Dina Hunt, a former Apple Genius, to be our guest blogger and offer some practical tips to our fans and followers who use Mac. Enjoy. For the last year I've been enjoying my time away from retail. I've adopted a new role as a...

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A Guide to Grassroots Marketing
A Guide to Grassroots Marketing

What is grassroots marketing? It's a common question amongst those who are new to marketing and seeking to launch their first campaign. Grassroots marketing is a unique variety of marketing that utilizes an engaging, interactive, community-based approach. These...

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PCI Compliance Tips

PCI Compliance Tips

Everyone who accepts credit/debit card payments online needs to be familiar with and implement the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. This is easiest for merchants who don't directly handle any cardholder data. For example, if your store hands the shopping...

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Image Scaling Tips

Image Scaling Tips

Recently Matcha president/creative director Chris Lo and I were hashing out a solution to a problem. We needed to create print-quality images for a client, and use those same images on their website, which we were also building. The problem is that print requires high...

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Image Manipulation in PHP – GD vs IMagick

Image Manipulation in PHP – GD vs IMagick

Recently I've been working with image manipulation in PHP, using GD and ImageMagick. Both libraries are very useful but they're quite different in a number of ways. I thought I'd take this opportunity to go over some of the differences and provide some suggestions on...

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Web Design and SEO

Web Design and SEO

A great website design is an important part of a good marketing strategy. However, it's also important to realize where the website fits within that strategy, and that it isn't the whole strategy. Even within the website itself, a great design is useless if nobody can...

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QR Code Demystified – Part 6

QR Code Demystified – Part 6

We've covered almost everything we need to create QR Codes. The next thing we need is version information blocks. The version information blocks simply tell the reader what version the symbol is, and therefore how many modules wide and tall it is. Table 11 shows the...

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QR Code Demystified – Part 5

QR Code Demystified – Part 5

Now that we've got the data and error correction sorted out, we're almost ready to place it in the symbol. As seen in Part 2, the data and error correction modules basically go everywhere that isn't taken up by something else. The reason we're not quite ready to place...

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QR Code Demystified – Part 4

QR Code Demystified – Part 4

I had planned on holding off the error correction until later, but it really fits better right here. Before error correction is done, the data that we've generated must be broken down into "code words", which are just 8-bit bytes. All we have to do is take our "bit...

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QR Code Demystified – Part 3

QR Code Demystified – Part 3

Now we'll cover how the data is encoded. There are several steps involved. First, the encoding method is chosen, then the raw data is converted to binary based on the encoding method, then the error correction algorithm is applied, and then the data is placed in the...

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QR Code Demystified – Part 2

QR Code Demystified – Part 2

The next important thing we'll look at is the structure of a QR code. The below diagram shows names of the different sections of a QR symbol. Then I'll go over each one in more detail. Keep in mind that below if I mention one copy of something being the original and...

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QR Code Demystified – Part 1

QR Code Demystified – Part 1

Recently I undertook a task to develop a QR Code generator. I was surprised to find how difficult it was to find complete information on the QR Code specification. Most of what I found only explained part of the puzzle. So my new endeavor is to completely explain the...

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Simple jQuery Snippets to Spruce Up Your Website

Simple jQuery Snippets to Spruce Up Your Website

Matcha Design - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 The purpose of these tricks is to take existing, perfectly valid code, and add little touches to it. They all use jQuery, though could potentially be adapted. They're meant to be called after the DOM has loaded, such as...

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A New Way to Share – Facebook Send Button

A New Way to Share – Facebook Send Button

Matcha Design - Tuesday, April 26, 2011 Yesterday, Facebook announced that they've added a new social gadget to their growing arsenal - the Send button. Clicking the Send button on a web page will open a dialog allowing the user to choose from their Facebook friends,...

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