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how-to

Customer-Centric Website Design for Drunks, Mothers, and Everyone Else

An effective customer-centric website design requires the designer to put himself in the customer's place to build a site that is user-friendly, while providing all the information that the visitor needs.  If you find it hard to put yourself in your customer’s shoes, there are services out there that will critique the usability of your website for you.  Some, like theuserismymom.com and theuserisdrunk.com take it a step further...

Signs You Need a New Website: It Doesn’t Work on Mobile Devices / Small Screens

One sign that you might need a new website is that it doesn't look good on mobile devices.  According to a recent study, mobile device usage is significantly higher than desktop usage, with people viewing 51% of the content on mobile versus only 42% on desktop/laptop.   (Five years ago, it was 12.5% mobile vs. 75% desktop/laptop). 

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween for the team at Force 5. If still need to carve pumpkins for the holiday, please feel free to use any of these Force 5 stencils for your design.

How Unsettling is Your Mobile?

I recently wrote a post about the importance of having a mobile-friendly website.  I have created a dashboard in Google Analytics to see how your mobile traffic stacks up against your desktop traffic.  If your mobile traffic doesn't fare well against your desktop traffic, you might need to look at making the website more responsive.

Google Analytics for Nonprofits

Google Analytics for Nonprofits is one of the best ways to understand ways to reach your audience and drive traffic to your organization's website.

Fried Food on a Stick-It's Fair Time!

For the last 10 years or so, we’ve been pleased to work with the Elkhart County (Indiana) Fair’s Marketing department and their Grandstand entertainment selections for the year.
If you don’t know about this fair, you should. It’s one of the best in the country!

How-To: Create a Simple Slideshow Header in Drupal 7

UPDATE: Since the posting of this article there has been dramatic improvements by the community and now this is no longer the best way to implement this feature. We now use the "Views Slideshow," found at: http://drupal.org/project/views_slideshow. We have used this method to create the various slideshows for the City of South Bend at www.SouthBendOn.com.

One of the more common design elements of modern webpage design is a large content area on the landing page of a website. Though there are some Drupal 7 themes that have this feature already (Marinelli comes to mind), what if you want to use a different base theme (like Zen)? In this How-To I will discuss how Force 5 created a simple slideshow that can be used in any theme.

How-To: Use Wget to Automate the Karamasoft UltimateSearch Indexing Process for Your Website

Almost every modern website has a "search my site" module of some sort added to it. In this How-To I'm going to explain how to set up Karamasoft UltimateSearch to automatically rebuild its index on a repeating scheduled basis in a Microsoft Windows hosted environment.