Once you purchase a box you need to activate it, this simply requires inputting a code with your remote that you can get from the Telus service reps. This call I had a not so helpful rep who insisted I needed to have a technician come and setup my TV, as “any new TV requires a technician to set up”. I called bull shit and she relented and gave me the code.

The system worked great for a few days – no quality loss from the split cable – really that’s all they do anyways to get multiple lines in a house. Then one day our PVR box started to have all sorts of lag issues cutting in and out.

I tried to trouble shoot rebooting systems here and there, unplugging the sound system and going direct into the TV but nothing helped.

Finally the other night we moved from one room to another and I noted how only the one TV has a problem and the TV on the split line is fine. I was watching hockey and it seemed to be okay then suddenly it started acting up again.

I did a little more detective work and it occured to me that a lamp had been turned on by the TV, then I remembered that the lamp was not there when I set up the system and all was wonderful. The lamp was plugged into the same power bar (a Monster power bar) as the TV and was interfering with the signal. I removed the lamp and everything works fine again.

The moral of the story – decorative lamps suck. ~ jk.

I’ve been given some fairly liberal control of brand promotion for Freak’n Muscle and we’re going to test a web sales strategy until we hit the Canadian market. This incarnation of the website has some tighter graphics, more of an SEO bent.

Categories relevant to bodybuilding form the majority of the top menu with numerous keywords implanted to create a Google Silo style site.

I added a forum to the site to allow for greater customer interaction and improved content generation.

The site will also accommodate both the USA and Canadian products in the future.

I picked up a little background alpha trick from the facebook plugin that I used to create a lot of the semi-transparent blocks for content.

I also updated the store template to match the new look. Check out some all new low prices.

www.freaknmuscle.com

LeanFit is a popular brand of Whey Protein Shakes including isolates, blends and unflavoured varieties. Sold at Costco and part of the Loblaw chain of stores it is a high quality whey protein with few frills.

The new website was to replace a site filled with discontinued products, the old design was all tables and images so I redid it from scratch. I wanted something easy to get around that hits the basic points of why you use whey. As a general retail product I used content that is more informational for the general public than say a bodybuilding market.

www.leanfit.com

Admittedly I’ve only worked on a couple of contests in my lifetime and never built an online contest so this was a first for me. It was decided that we should do a picture contest so I looked at a number of options including facebook promotions, voting scripts etc but the simplest solution seemed to be to use tumblr.

Tumblr allows for a lot of customization of templates plus it has built in features for allowing public upload of images, links etc. In this case I limited uploads to images, set up some contest rules and away we go.

A couple of tidbits of information I found while searching on the web…

1. Facebook contests require approval, and approval is often linked to spending money in facebook advertising. I’m not sure if using a third party contest engine gets you around this or not.
2. Quebec and Rhode Island are not great places to live if you want to enter contests.

The next challenge is actually getting people to enter the contest with no real promotion budget. If you are into bodybuilding check it out, there’s lots of prizes and so far little competition… talk about great odds.

http://contest.freaknmuscle.com

For the person who has all things fitness comes this unification of art and function. Kettle bells  in sculpted demon head shapes. To my eye they look very well crafted and are full functional.  I love the way the heads change to suit the weight of the given kettle bell. I caught these on notcot.com and thought they would be perfect for a Freak’n Muscle promotion. We’ll see if it ever happens.

GFR Ingredients

GFR Ingredients is a plant based ingredients manufacturer based in Barrhead Alberta. The facility was purchased from Sepallo when that company went bankrupt and the new ownership wanted to bring the new company inline with the GFR group of companies. GFR Ingredients is both Organic and Kosher certified and specializes in creating premium nutritional ingredients and custom processing.

The website needed to convey that the ingredients were nutritionally superior product, have an organic leaning and also show the vibrancy of colour found in the finished product. I basically created the site knowing a rough idea of what the logo was going to look like.

I chose to use a lot of gradients to provide little texture instead of solid colour pieces and rounded edges to create a more natural organic design.

www.gfringredients.com

Telus Optik TV Review

The Good

Telus TV has some really nice features, the Movie Channels on Demand has way more programs available at any given time and there also seems to be a lot more series for both HBO and Movie Channel. The time shifting also seems to provide more options available that I didn’t have on shaw for the same amount of money. Once I got used to the guide format I enjoyed it although the color coding on shaws menu was handy. The channel packages have a pretty good mix, different from the way shaw splits them up. Telus also has the shared PVR feature which is convenient for multi TV systems.

The  Bad

On the flip side there seems to be connectivity issues daily. Either you need to reset the main router, the local box or the PVR depending on what is having problems. Often you get a choppy video or failure to connect to the PVR (when using a remote box). After all those years on Shaw where this problem never happened this is very annoying.

Telus Optik Internet

I’ve had some form of high speed internet for over ten years, I’ve never had the super high speeds but usually ran around the 7 mbps speeds. Optik Internet comes in speeds of 15 mbps and 25 mbps and I’m on the 15 mbps speed. Downloads have doubled in speed for programs etc running just over 1 mbps which is pretty handy. I don’t use usenets or anything else that would give me access to the top speed which is one reason I saved a couple of bucks on the slower option.

The wireless router is now N instead of the G router you get on the Telus ADSL. I wouldn’t say it really boosted the wireless range all that much and doesn’t pass through walls any better then the old router. I have seem some slow downs in the first few weeks but with the number of computers we have sharing the network I couldn’t say whether or not its a telus problem or not.

Overall it’s a decent system though for the same amount of money you could get 50mbps internet from Shaw.

Phone

Telus started here and the rumors on Voip phone is a major reason I went for a Telus bundle over a Shaw bundle. I haven’t tried Shaw phone service first hand so I can’t really comment on whether the rumors have any foundation or not but I’ve had good luck with Telus phone service.

NOTE: when the Shaw tech came to unhook our TV system he unplugged the Telus system at the same time. Pretty unprofessional but I know Shaw subcontracts a lot so I give the company a break.

Mastermind Developments

A Calgary based re-developer of inner city homes, Mastermind Developments specializes in mid to high end construction and finishing. This site was a redesign on a previous site I built for them several years ago. The old site had an investment bent to it while the new site is more focused on selling the current property inventory.

The mandate was to warm the site up and use lots of images. Of course the quality of a given image greatly effects the end result but there were some professional photos to work with.

The majority of the site are large galleries made with Concrete5 plugins. From my point of view, I’m a comparison type person so I like pricing when I shop real estate but you can’t always get what you want.

www.masterminddevelopments.com

GFR Pharma

GFR Pharma is a cGMP (Good Manufacturing Practices) contract manufacturer of supplements and health products. Located in Maple Ridge BC the company produces a number of national brand products. The original website was built with IBM WebSphere Studio Homepage Builder around 2008 and was basically just static html. Luckily for me the content for the new site had already been gathered so my task was really organizing the content and creating the layout. As a manufacturing company I thought a clean look with lots of white space was appropriate, plus I put a little assembly line scroller on the home page.

I used a graphic navigation bar with css suckerfish style dropdowns. I like adding spans to wrap the text in the wordpress menu generator to hide the main menu text and then use the generated id’s and classes to define the various menu tabs.

I wanted to have a strong call to action so the “Request a Quote” button was done in bright red with some pills for decoration to call attention to it. Some of the newer services are a little light on content but we launched the site anyways since it was 1000 times better than the old one.

GFR Pharma cGMP Contract Manufacturing

I’ve moved this content from the Insights post to it’s own post.

The pain of telus hosting

Honestly you really don’t get what you pay for as a telus hosting customer, you will get way better value from most of the major hosting companies out there. As an aside you getter more storage, more bandwidth, more databases, more email addresses, a real control panel and faster support for under $10 a month from Bluehost, Dreamhost or you name it host…. End of Rant.

After building a client site on a dev Bluehost account I moved the site to telus. The telus servers couldn’t handle concrete5, the pages took minutes to load, and even cached pages took up to 30 second. I thought for a minute I would have to build a static html site (ewww) then I had the notion that it may only be a slow/overloaded database and if I tried something a little lighter it may work.

I rebuit the site in wordpress. Converting the template was very simple, only taking an hour or so since all the styles existed already. Entering the data was the slow part.

Luckily telus was able to serve a wordpress page at reasonable speed. This site marked my move from Concrete5 to wordpress. I find many businesses don’t have the greatest server resources and wordpress provides all the functionality I need, plus has a lot more free add-ons as opposed to all the basic stuff you would need to buy for C5.

Addendum: A little further proof of Concrete5′s heavier load on the database is Bluehost threatening me for using up too much database resources because of the database used on the Insights Concrete5 development site.

WordPress Pros:

1. Lots of free plugins to do just about anything
2. Large community of developers, lots of information available
3. Blog interface is familiar to many people
4. Template system is pretty easy to understand
5. Light on the database

WordPress Cons:

1. Editor is a separate page so content input is not seen in context
2. Design is relatively rigid once the templates are set

Concrete5 Pros:

1. Inline editing of content helps people undersand the content in context
2. Can add numerous block of content without changing templates
3. Can style each block inline via editor
4. Can create default content blocks for templates
5. Logical Dashboard
6. Simple to create templates

Concrete5 Cons:

1. Heavier database requirements
2. Many basic features available only as paid plugins
3. Less plugin options available

After making this list it seems to me that eventhough Concrete5 should appeal more to a less technical user with it’s easier interface, it’s real power is in the hand of a person who needs to change designs in their content. Which hopefully means the person knows some CSS and design skills – which is rarely the case if you are turning it over to a client.

Personally I would most likely use WordPress, but Concrete5 is still a great product.