January 15th, 2010
Brixwork is a premier product of ours that makes managing websites easy and professional for small business owners. We are in preparation steps to start offering a subscription based service soon, for Real Estate Agents!
We will bring a fresh new vibe to the industry. Out with the old designs with too much clutter, lines, and boxes. In with our new designs that are clean, simple, elegant, user-friendly, and never gets old! Blend this with amazing functionality and cross-browser friendliness, and we can provide you with an excellent solution for your realtor websites. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: brixwork, cms, realtors, Web Design, Web Development, website
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November 30th, 2009
It was a very small move actually – we moved from suite #1301 to #1701 in the exact same building, so our new address is as follows:
#1701 – 388 Drake Street
Vancouver, BC V6B 6A8
Our office is slightly larger as the new suite’s renovation has removed some of the dividing walls. We will resume regular service by Tuesday December 1st after the move work and cleaning is all done. Thank you for your patience and support.
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September 25th, 2009
In the last few years the popularity of smartphones (mainly the iPhone and the Blackberry) exploded to a new high, and is now regarded as a media outlet almost as important as our computers. Especially the iPhone re-shaped the concept of mobile browsing – by putting in their Safari browser, the browsing environment on the iPhone is 90% of what you would see on your computer. It supports full Gecko HTML/CSS interpretation, PNG images, javascripts, scrolling, clicking and the whole nine yards. The only limitation is Flash, and perhaps drag-and drop is still not an option. That being said, this also brought some changes to the way web designers think about websites. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: css, HTML, iphone, media, Web Design
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August 27th, 2009
I’ll be going through a slight operation (tonsilectomy) on September 21st (Monday), and have been informed that I will be heavily medicated with pain killers, while unable to eat any solid or warm food for a few days. I was advised to take at least a week off work.
While I will be checking my emails for urgent material, and putting some time in throughout the week, there will be some slow-down to the services. Read the rest of this entry »
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August 20th, 2009
As announced before, Sonika Studios Inc. is presenting “Beyond Template Tags” at the WordCamp Fraser Valley. As one of the speakers, we are entitled to give out one free pass to a lucky winner through a draw. This is an excellent chance for you to win a free pass ($75 value!).
Here’s how you can win:
A. If you create a blog post on your own blog (doesn’t have to be WordPress), with a link back to this post with the handle “Vancouver Web Design Agency Sonika Studios Inc. at the WordCamp Fraser Valley” within the <a> tag, we will award you 3 entries.
B. If you tweet “@sonikastudios is presenting at the @wcfv this Saturday on WordPress for total web CMS. Win a free pass to the event at http://bit.ly/UdiDM”, we will award you 1 entry.
The contest will close at 6pm Friday (August 21st 2009).
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August 12th, 2009
Wordcamp is a series of events held all over the place, promoting the use of WordPress and also educating designers, developers, and other business professionals how to utilize WordPress to its maximum capacity. Jeff Kee, CEO of Sonika Studios Inc., will be making a presentation regarding development using WordPress.
Of course, Sonika Studios Inc. is an industry leader when it comes to applying WordPress as a CMS in order to deliver self-managed websites to clients who want them, and you can read more about how we use WordPress as a CMS here. WordPress and its plugins allow an excellent user experience for the business owner, without the headache of learning the vast complexities of other off-the-shelf CMS solutions such as Joomla or Drupal.
As a lighter alternative to our own semi-custom developed CMS platform, Brixwork, a professionally modified edition of WordPress can deliver you the results you need for a simple yet powerful CMS. Of course, if you want full-strength and a lot of custom development options, our Brixwork platform is your answer, but more than half of our website clients can sufficiently manage their sites with a WordPress system, so you could be one of them!
Wordcamp Fraser Valley is being held on August 22nd, between 9AM to 5PM, at the Surrey SFU campus. It’s near the Surrey Central Skytrain station, so either drive down, or hop on the Skytrain to get there! Tickets and other details can be found at the Wordcamp Fraser Valley Site.
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June 27th, 2009
To some designers who are well versed in graphic design and HTML, but has little or no experience in coding and programming, the idea of PHP may be intimidating. Some people may even say they do not need it within their field. Yes, it’s true that using PHP, you can work database-driven websites with MySQL, and you can work with XML data integration. You can also exchange information between different servers in order to achieve Paypal gateways and what not. BUT some basic PHP can be used simply to save you a LOT of time in coding and updating sites.
For this exercise, you only need to know a few PHP commands. To open a PHP code snippet, you use <?, and to close, ?>. In some cases, opening with <?php is recommended, but I generally skip it – it’s not critical.
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Tags: Browser, Coding, Development, HTML, Internet, PHP, Server Side Scripting, Web Design
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June 24th, 2009
Among many javascript frameworks out there that speed up development of UI (user interface) and other aspects of a website, my two favorites are mootools and jQuery. Which is better? Hard to say – I like to experiment with both. The Sonika Studios Inc. website is built on the jQuery system, and this is actually my first major website that I’m building with jQuery.
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June 24th, 2009
We have finally completed the programming of the front-page slide module. Now we are preparing to enter the data, and set up the rest of the pages and the design. Using wordpress and its template tags structure effectively, we have created a website that is fully running on WordPress and nothing else. Using WordPress as a CMS is one of our specialties in this industry, and it is an effective way to set up a text-content driven website. Applying graphic content and other options into WordPress is available as well.
We are also preparing the launch of our iCep (Custom Easy Platform). This is a revolutionary semi-custom development platform that we use to customize content options just for your website, based on your industry requirements. This platform has been implemented successfully with many different industry types, and we are proudly launching an updated version of it. Please look forward to our next blog post!
Tags: cms, icep, website, wordpress
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June 20th, 2009
Sonika Studios Inc. is an expansion and a re-brand of its former company, Synchronous Design & Marketing. Over the years we’ve grown, and learned, and now we finally felt ready to incorporate our company and take a bigger step. To our patrons of Synchronous Design & Marketing, thank you for your loyalty, and we hope to continue to serve you even better.
We are still finalizing our company logo. Based on feedback from clients and friends, the logo has morphed significantly, and we are very close to determining a final winner. Our website is also being completely overhauled. With all the expertise and knowledge we’ve gained, we are confident that this is our best company website ever! Built on a WordPress platform, we also incorporated jQuery and jQueryUI into our new site. These are powerful tools that we apply also to our clients’ websites.
Please keep coming back to our website as we keep adding valuable content!
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