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The Method Behind the Madness
 
In my 7th grade English class, my teacher implemented a process that made me change the way I wrote essays. When we submitted an essay for grading, we had to turn it in with all the drafts that had come before. Needless to say, I wasn’t a fan of the extra work (I mean obviously, it was perfect the first time). Despite my best efforts to avoid this system, my essays got better, my language stronger, and my argument more defined with each revision. Eventually, continuous drafting became a process for me. The rough draft was just a skeleton where I could play with ideas, develop my argument, and sketch out my final product.
 
A Web Developer’s Rough Draft
 
A prototype is a web developer’s version of a rough draft. It serves two very important roles in the process of developing a website. First, in the finest tradition of a rough draft, a prototype sets up the structure of development. In making this, a developer is able to think the problems of a site through, and build a firm site structure.
 
The second function of a prototype is that the finished prototype represents a living standard of the site. It’s made to capture the tactile experience of a site, allowing users to flip through, press buttons, etc. In effect, the prototype should represent the website’s structure, content and functionality before any of the development is set in stone. It is also coded so that it is extremely fast moving forward to modify, tweak, or completely rebuild.
 

I am on my way back from Magento’s Imagine Commerce 2012 conference. One of the first announcements was the release of new versions of Community and Enterprise (for a full feature list, check out the Magento blog.)
 
The two features I am most excited about are the support for HTML5 and the new REST API.

HTML5

With native support for HTML5, we will be able to apply the work we have been doing with mobile-optimized templates and responsive design. This is a good step forward for Magento themers.

REST API

This is the feature we have been waiting for the most. Magento has had a good SOAP-based web service, but SOAP has two disadvantages over a REST API–document size and additional processing needed to serialized and federalize the requests.
 
In order to extend the front end and provide richer user experiences, we need a lighter weight web service protocol. The new REST API supports requests and responses in JSON. This allows us to be much more nimble in our JavaScript code.
 
This initial version of the REST API supports the following functions:
 

• Create/Retrieve/Update/Delete a simple product
• Retrieve a list of orders and specific order information
• Update/Retrieve catalog inventory
• Create/Retrieve/Update/Delete complete customer information

 
However, the API can also be extended. We’re really excited about these new developments, and are already thinking of ways to use these for our clients.

 
Pinterest for Marketers
 
Here at DB, we’ve been engaging users using Pinterest for our clients. We put together this short video of four quick tips for marketers using Pinterest as a tool for business. Our top priorities when using Pinterest are producing solid content, optimizing content for search, engaging users and running promotions and contests.
 
Check out our client Pinterest pages here and here. Find us on Pinterest too.
 
Are you using Pinterest for your brand or company? Tell us how!

Celebrating with a couple hundred if our closest friends in the Magento community at Imagine 2012 at the M Resort in Vegas.

DB AT DRUPALCON
 
Digital Bungalow has just returned from DrupalCon, the world’s largest conference for enthusiasts of Drupal, the leading Content Management System. We participated in some fascinating discussions around a number of cutting-edge marketing and technology topics, which we’ll be sharing with you in the coming days and weeks right here on our blog.
 
DRUPALCON IN A NUTSHELL
 
The hot topic at DrupalCon this year was Mobile Web. Drupal creator Dries Buyhaart and design visionary Luke Wrobelski held keynotes on the subject. There were numerous educational seminars and many of our informal discussions also centered on mobile.
 
LESSONS LEARNED
 
With nearly 1.5 million mobile devices entering the world every day, it’s important to have high quality mobile websites. The very constraints of mobile present an opportunity for designers: limited space, reduced graphics, and fewer buttons result in a streamlined experience that better serves most users. A mobile-first approach to design allows for sites to be organized so that the most important information will be prominent, resulting in cleaner, more easily navigable websites.
 
Mobile devices are able to connect to a network literally anywhere, and have rich processing capabilities. But despite their high performance, 40% of web users will leave a site after three seconds, especially if they don’t get what they want or need right away. Thus, clean, tight mobile site design is imperative. In addition, mobile apps, although helpful, are not always put to use, as many mobile users still peruse the web though their phone’s browser. Facebook, for example, has 425 million users; half of them use the mobile app and half of them use regular mobile web.
 
In conclusion, without well-crafted mobile websites, business will suffer.
 
DB AND MOBILE
 
At DB, we are incorporating responsive design into our web design for our clients, in order to ensure optimum mobile web performance. We have built sites for clients such as Humana and Showcase Cinemas in this way, and will continue to build sites with a mobile-first approach.
 
Did you go to DrupalCon? Learn anything exciting that we didn’t mention here? Tell us about it, we’d love to hear from you.

What’s a DrupalCon?
 
This week, we’re in Denver, CO for DrupalCon, an international event geared toward Drupal users, developers, designers, evaluators and business execs. With over 2 million websites, and 10,000 community-contributed modules, Drupal is one of the fastest growing open-source content management platforms in the world.
 
In preparation for the event, Dries Buytaert, creator of Drupal, and CTO and co-founder of Acquia, asked us to participate in a video highlighting Digital Bungalow as an agency to look out for in 2012 for Drupal development. Look out for a link to the video to come!
 
So Why Digital Bungalow?
 
Quite simply, we build custom websites for our clients on the Drupal content management platform, so that our clients can easily edit, update and manage their site content. This event could not have come at a better time as we’re about to launch two huge Drupal sites in the next month; one for Humana and one for Showcase Cinemas. In short, Drupal is a pretty big deal to us, so we’re not about to sit this one out!
 
To kick off the first night at DrupalCon, our very own president Nate Wolfson, is going to be one of the keynote speakers during Acquia’s Partner Spotlight. Acquia is Drupal’s leading hosting resource with tools for optimizing the Drupal platform, and we’re one of their 16 enterprise select partner companies worldwide. Nate’s speech will center around how Digital Bungalow is innovating in responsive design and social publishing on the Drupal platform.
 
We’ll Keep You Posted
 
We’ll be sure to keep you up to speed on how the event is going on our Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram (dbungalow) pages! Stay tuned throughout the week for event highlights and updates from our guys out in Denver.
 
Do you know of anyone headed to DrupalCon this week? Let us know and maybe we’ll see you there!

First Thing’s First, What is Pinterest? 
 
With roughly 12 million registered users, Pinterest is the fastest-growing, online photo sharing platform today. Unlike Instagram or PhotoBucket, most of the photos on Pinterest are not user-generated (taken and submitted by individual users), but rather, a collection of a user’s favorite images from various websites. It serves as a sort of “online pinboard,” or compilation of a user’s favorite things. Pinterest is a female-dominated platform, with women accounting for 87% of its users.
 
How is Pinterest Changing Social Media?
 
Women aren’t the only ones who’ve noticed this emerging platform. Companies are adopting Pinterest into their social media campaigns. Even more so than other social networking platforms, including Facebook. Why? Because Pinterest has a higher site traffic referral rate than Google +, YouTube and LinkedIn combined. The visitor-to-lead conversion rate for Pinterest is 16%, almost double that of Google + at 8.4%.
 

As people are becoming more and more mobile, websites we build for our clients need to be designed to fit onto small screens as effectively as on larger ones. Thus, at Digital Bungalow, we have shifted from designing for the web in multiple layouts to designing for mobile first, and we can do this most effectively through responsive design. Responsive design can be achieved through rearranging, shrinking, substituting and hiding.

Rearranging – Many sites are designed with their content separated into columns and blocks, emphasizing and relating content as necessary.  A page on a website may have a section for an article that occupies a wide column to the left, while supporting content (or advertisements) are stacked as blocks in a narrow column to the right.  For this all to fit onto different-sized screens, we can alter how these page elements come together, through re-arranging them on the page. Re-arranging is often done through stacking columns or folding blocks of content together.
 
Shrinking – Another technique that we use to make content fit within small screens is simply shrinking elements so they take up less space.  This could mean making text size smaller, the width of columns narrower, or even scaling down images.
 

Substitution – Sometimes elements on a page simply won’t serve their original purpose when they shrink down.  Text may become illegible or the content of images may become meaningless.  In these cases, we can substitute them for other elements that will better serve the intended purpose.  For instance, if we have a horizontal menu with too many links to display at narrower widths, we can replace the entire menu with a drop down menu that will reveal the links after the user touches it.
 
Hiding – Finally, we can simply hide design elements that are not relevant to users on mobile devices.  As screen real estate shrinks, we may decide that users don’t need to see banner advertisements or complex interactive modules, making more simplified layouts for mobile users.
 

The DB team has been working tirelessly this quarter to push our work in 2012 to a whole new level.  So for Valentine’s Day this year, we decided to have a bit of fun and remind each DB employee that our work is more than just appreciated by others, it’s what we love to do.
 
When we came into the office this frosty February morning, there were little Valentine’s Day cards on each of our desks. Inside each card was a riddle, along with an answer. Attached was a note that said, “Someone at DB holds the answer to your riddle. Find that person and see Jane to receive your V-Day treat!” Chocolate as an incentive? Count us in…
 
All chocolate aside, it was a pleasant surprise and we had a lot of fun trying to figure out who held the answer to our riddles. It also opens up an even bigger question:  how are other companies embracing holidays to boost both employee and client morale? Companies like Google and MailChimp are celebrating today with themed landing pages. Do you know of any others who are doing this well?  Just some holiday food for thought!
 
Happy Valentine’s Day from everyone on the Digital Bungalow team!