Blog
Matcha Design Ranks Second on BestWebFirms.com’s Top Ten List
Matcha Design was ranked second on BestWebFirms.com's January 2015 top ten list of best custom web design companies. BestWebFirms.com provides monthly rankings as a guide to find the best of the best internet marketing firms in the industry. "We are extremely excited...
Is It Time To Redesign Your Website?
When was the last time you refreshed your company website's design? If the answer is more than a couple years, then it's time to consider a refresh for your headquarters on the web. In today's tech-centric world, your identity on the web is an absolutely essential...
Wearable Technology 101
Wearable technology will be a hot commodity for 2015. The rapid rise of Android Wear devices, Google Glass, and the upcoming iWatch, along with Fitbit fitness bands and their copycats, demonstrates that there's surprising power in small packages. For the past several...
New Year’s Resolutions: Trim the Fat
A new year is a fresh start, a time that many people use to start thinking about those aspects of their lives that can be improved. Most of us just consider the most immediate things: eating right, working out, and generally trimming the fat. But how long has it been...
10 Common Mistakes for Young Developers
As a companion piece to our previous blog post “10 Common Mistakes for Young Designers,” we decided to take a look at the more technical aspect of web development. Through our observations on different websites and our conversation with different developers over the...
Matcha Design Picks Up Innovator Award at the 2014 Summit Emerging Media Awards
Matcha Design brings home an Innovator Award at the Summit Emerging Media Award (Summit EMA) competition held at the Summit International Awards. Matcha Design won this prestigious award for their work on Level 3 Communications' "Own It" interactive microsite. The...
10 Common Mistakes for Young Designers
A good design is a practical design but with the complexity of platform compatibility, industry requirements, demanding clients to the stress of meeting deadlines; achieving greatness in design isn't as simple as you think. In the interest of young designers...
Top 4 Marketing Trends of 2015
It's true: 2014 is nearly over! Now, it's time to look at the top four marketing trends that we expect to see in 2015. It should be noted that digital marketing dramatically outpaced all other marketing approaches, including phone, television, radio, print, billboards...
How to Write Effective Content: Titles and Introductions
When writing content, whether it's for your website, marketing materials, a press release, a lead capture page or another project, there are a few rules that you'll want to follow as you write the title/headline and introduction. The title and intro are (arguably) the...
Matcha Design garners a record 27 trophies at the 2014 SIA Awards
Matcha Design was honored with 27 national awards, including one Best of Show, from The 11th Annual Service Industry Advertising Awards (SIAA) for work in the print design, video production and website design fields. More than 1,700 entries were received from more...
5 Ways a Website Can Break (and what to do about it)
Web developers, at least good ones, try not to release the programs they write without having full confidence they'll work under normal (and many abnormal) circumstances. Testing is an absolutely necessary part of every development cycle. Despite a dizzying variety of...
The Mobile Web: A Developer’s Overview
When a customer requests a website which scales well between mobile browsers and full screens (better known as "responsive design"), often they don't understand why it requires so much extra work. But designing a responsive site requires a unique sort of design...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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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