With a fierce following of passionate fans for whom “Like” is an understatement, Bojangles’ wanted to expand its social media strategy with a branded Facebook app that encourages their fans to spread the word about Bojangles’. The newly launched, Friend Biscuit is a Facebook app that challenges users to amass the most friends who “Like” Bojangles’ on Facebook. The app fills a virtual biscuit with pictures of the users’ friends, and then rewards the user with the biggest Friend Biscuit with gift cards and other prizes including a grand prize of free Bojangles’ for a year. The only question we had was: where do we sign up?

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Studiobanks has expanded its team with two new developers. Matt Davis and Zack Hovatter will focus on front-end engineering and server-side programming to develop digital marketing solutions that are both usable and functional.

"With digital marketing continuing to gain prominence in the marketplace, the demand for our services has increased dramatically,” said Banks Wilson, Studiobanks’ president and creative director. "As a result, it’s been critical for us to add specialized talent who can create compelling brand experiences for our clients. Matt and Zack are a welcome addition to our team, bringing an impressive skill set and depth of knowledge in web technology, development and digital trends."

Visit our team page to learn more about the Studiocrew.

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Last week I stumbled across Support Details – which is a simple, single serving site by Imulus that tells the user the operating system, screen resolution, web browser, browser size, ip address, color depth, if JavaScript is enabled, the version of Flash installed, and if cookies are enabled on a user’s computer. The site even allows the user to take their results and export a PDF, export a CSV or email their results to a desired recipient.

It shouldn’t be hard to see how a service like this can be particularly useful when attempting to debug issues with less computer-savvy clients who are unsure how to acquire any of this information. If you find yourself attempting to address a similar issue with a client, I’d recommend using Support Details.

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Internet Explorer is a major headache when it comes to development, but not much can be done because people are stuck using it for reasons such as their work not letting them upgrade. So, Google has created a solution that allows IE users to install a browser plugin into their version of IE called Chrome Frame that gives them the Google Chrome web browsing experience.

Google claims its goals are noble. Talking to Group Product Manager Mike Smith and Software Engineer Alex Russell, they tell us that they simply want to make a more seamless web experience for both web users and developers. That said, they are only targeting one browser, IE, right now.

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Of the many pangs of being a web developer, one that rises to the tip-top in terms of pain-in-the-assness is backwards compatibility. Whether it means discarding cool features, scaling back designs or even creating a separate site altogether, the steps we take to ensure backwards compatibility for browsers and email clients not only hinder our creative potential, but also costs considerable amounts of time and, therefore, money.

In their latest victory over progression, Microsoft have declared war on advancements in email design. FixOutlook.org has taken a stand and is encouraging people like me and you to let Microsoft know that we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore. From their site:

Microsoft have just confirmed they plan on using the crippled Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010.

This means for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position and no background images. Not to mention the long list of bugs and quirks that break the simplest of layouts.

Outlook 2010 is still in beta and Microsoft have confirmed they want to hear your feedback on this decision. It's time for the email marketing and design community to rally together and encourage Microsoft to embrace web standards before it's too late.

They have launched an aggressive Twitter Campaign and an impressive site to go along with it. Join the cause, fight the power, Viva La Resistance!

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Back in March, Microsoft finally caved under the pressure of web designers and developers and announced Internet Explorer 8 will render content in the most current standards-based mode by default (currently, it must be forced out of "quirks" mode by specifying DOCTYPE). In addition, there will be two other rendering modes that are enabled through meta tag declarations—one comparable to IE 7 and another dating back further. Being the behemoth, corporate entity that they are this is understandable, as they can't ignore businesses locked into previous versions of Internet Explorer. Despite my distaste for most of Microsoft's actions, this is a great decision.

With the release of IE 8 Beta 1, the development team at Microsoft is beginning to release details regarding improvements. The most exciting news I've heard on the IEBlog is the HTML and DOM Standards Compliance in the new beta. It appears as if the team is working with the new HTML 5 specification. As we mentioned around this time last year, there a lot of improvements on the way in the new version of HTML. With IE 8 already in its first beta, the WebKit project churning along and the speed at which Mozilla can kick out new versions of Firefox, it's realistic to think we may be able to utilize many of the proposed HTML features in in the next few years. While that still sounds like a long time, the HTML 4.01 specification was recommended as of December 1999 (XHTML in the following year). The HTML 5 specification was just adopted at the end of 2007 and the first working draft published in January. So, the pace is quickening, even though HTML 5 reportedly won't be "recommended" by the W3C until around 2012.

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When discussing usability, I tend to bounce from element to element - menu this, font-size that and so on. The last year or two introduced some non-design elements to the conversation, like AJAX, accessibility and semantics. Not until the last few months, however, have I considered URL construction an important part of usability. SEO, sure, but usability? Never.

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The ADDYs are the advertising industry's largest and most representative competition, recognizing and rewarding creative excellence. This year more than 50 Charlotte-area companies submitted over 375 entries of work to the Charlotte ADDY competition. Only 135, or roughly 35%, of those entries were honored with an ADDY Award. We are happy to announce Studiobanks received 7 of those ADDYs. We snagged 5 of the 12 ADDYs bestowed on website development. Studiobanks was the only shop to win a Gold ADDY for web development.

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