Brent's blog

While the aggregation of content has been around as long as the World Wide Web and the ability to filter aggregated content has advanced considerably over two decades – as seen through search engines, news websites, personal feed aggregation, etc. The ability to disseminate content across multiple networks has seemingly been slow to develop.

Through the years I’ve noticed a trend that more experienced, senior designers are much more productive than junior level designers. I first noticed this when LevelTen would hire junior-level designers based on a great portfolio, but ultimately get less productivity from them because it took twice, sometimes three times as long for them to create a site design comparable to a senior designer’s.

From a business perspective, this inefficiency not only causes bottlenecks in production and budget increases, but also can harm morale of the team.

For those of you who woke up to a flurry of frustrated customers or shocked that your website images were not displaying...Some shared hosting companies including Hostmonster and Bluehost have disabled symlinks (symbolic links) used by Drupal and other content management systems to display images. Hosting companies choosing to disallow symbolic links have changed the .htaccess file, which ultimately breaks your linking structures.

As an Art Director and long-time web designer I must admit I never really had a consistent way of creating concepts that were easily transferable from wireframes to concepts, then to final markup…until now.

If I had a dollar for every time a potential client told me how easy web development is, or asked me to estimate the re-development of a Facebook-like website after a ten minute phone call I could travel around the world for a couple months. It it was easy to estimate and develop web applications (or any IT project for that matter) over 60% of projects wouldn't fail.

Competitive edge over rivals is a must for survival or any kind of business, but how do you gain an edge on competitors with deep pockets for radio ads, TV commercials, and huge Pay-Per-Click budgets? It’s been my experience that by using your marketing dollars wisely you can not only swim with the big fish, but become one. Here are a few recommendations:

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I've been playing around with Photoshop, Illustrator and most other tools used to design websites for about 12 years now. While good design comes from years of practice, attention to detail, etc, there are many tools I've learned to utilize that make designing beautiful websites much easier and much, much faster. And while there are many great articles out there, I thought I would share a few of my tools.

As Drupal becomes more popular and grows its open-source development community, more websites are turning to it as a solution for creating extremely powerful online communities, allowing users to submit their own content to a community hub. The power of these hubs is obviously their users and creating an organized, easy to use interface can be the difference between failure and success.

I've recently been researching the differences between content management systems and blogging engines and thought I would discuss some key differences I've found in Drupal and WordPress. LevelTen has experience installing, configuring and theming both and each has its strengths and weaknesses. I feel the deciding factors come down to your long-term goals for the application.

I've been researching Dallas pr agencies for potential partners and I'm surprised at how many HUGE agencies boast about their processes and services, but don't practice what they preach! Ugh. I won't drop names, but I've spent most of the day researching the top agencies in Dallas and their so called "Interactive" departments. Here's what I found: