Budding flowers the harbingers of spring? Nah, spring arrives with baseball!

It’s time once again to consider the metaphors of baseball and how to apply them to business…and to life.

No one is perfect. Buster Posey, the National League’s Most Valuable Player, batted .336 in the 2012 regular season—better than anyone else in baseball. That means, for every 10 times he stepped up to bat, he made it to base just 3.3 times. He trudged back to the dug-out more often than he hit the ball. For this, he is acknowledged as outstanding.

Keep at it. The “Never Say Die and Don’t Whine …

Easy to Read is Easy to Understand
You might have a beautiful site design, and a powerful message. It’s little use to you if people have trouble reading the words. I’ve got five things you can do to be sure your paragraph content is easy for your site visitor to read.

Keep in mind, I’m talking about paragraph content, not your headings.
1. Use a single standard font.
Pick one font for your paragraph content and use it, and it only.  You’re saying unprofessional loud and clear when you mix fonts from paragraph-to-paragraph or page-to-page.

Use a font that is unremarkable. Fancy type faces are …

You either have integrity, or you don’t.
There is no middle ground. In business, there are some tell tale signs; three in particular listed below speak volumes about your level of integrity.
Do not steal
Sounds obvious, but it goes beyond office supplies and products, it extends to intangibles, too - if your work hours are between 9 and 5, don’t show up at 9:10am and then leave early at 4:30pm, unless you have prior permission to do so. Over one month, regularly missing 40 minutes a day amounts to over 13 hours that you have stolen from your employer. Employees who receive …

One of the things I enjoy about the holiday season is that it gives me the chance to design for something other than a phone or computer monitor.  For the past three years I have used this as a chance to make custom soaps.

Each year I pick a different theme. This year it was butterflies.

My first impulse was to add a bit of life to each insert.

Unfortunately, these details were lost in my first test bars.  With my first direction closed off, …

January is a time of new beginnings, and since mb/i is all about quality, business-centered websites, we thought we’d take a look at 10 reasons you might want to build a new site.
10. Haphazard Growth
Some times a website won’t grow according to plan because there never was a plan to begin with. Poor navigation and uneven development are the hallmarks of an unplanned site. Some pages remain under development for years while others grow, and branch, and twist until even a modern Daedalus would get lost in their digital halls.
9. Hard to Update
If you need to call up …

Winter is not just a time of celebration, but also a time for solemn reflection. This year two of the computing world’s greatest have passed away. Without their contributions, the world would look nothing like it does today.

Steve Jobs

1955-2011
Steve Jobs is known for creating the Apple powerhouse not once, but twice. His ceaseless quest to marry function and design brought us the desktop, multi-font computing, the iPhone, the iPad, and many other inventions that will be with us for years to come.

John McCarthy

1927-2011
Though not widely celebrated outside of computing circles, John McCarthy was responsible for many computing advances …

Soap box time. I’m anti-multitasking and I’m here to say why.

I have clients and colleagues who multi-task in an unproductive way: They make phone calls while concentrating on something else. (Often, they’re driving. Sometimes, they’re on their computers while also pretending to be on the phone with me.)

They think they’re being productive. They think they’re getting two things done at once. Let’s look at what they are actually communicating:
I’m not concentrating on the point of this phone call

These people lose track of the conversation. They struggle with simultaneous, competing thoughts, such as “Can I merge safely into traffic now?” and …

Let’s face it: the classic blog post is boring.

Barring the text and images, each one generally has the exact same layout. We see little originality from one post to the next. Of course, consistency and branding are extremely important to consider when designing a website or blog, but what about individuality? Does a blog post about kittens deserve the same layout as one about CSS hacks?

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That was one heck of an opening, and just the sort of thing mb/i has been looking for to explain the importance of building an engaging, well-branded WordPress presence.  Of course there’s a …

What is CMS software in the first place?
CMS stands for Content Management System, and for the purposes of this article we will be discussing website content management systems. Web CMS software allows you to easily and efficiently manage a website and all of the associated text, images, and other files without having the technical knowledge of web programming. That being said, as a person who does possess the technical skills of a web developer, I wouldn’t even consider foregoing the great benefits of a CMS for the nostalgic joys of manually managing a website and its content. …

Drat the Internet! Post resolutions in January 2010 and they live on as proof of non-compliance.

Let’s examine what I planned to do in 2010, and how I’m …uh, adjusting my goals for 2011:

2010: Re-re-read The Elements of Style… [and several other worthy books on writing and grammar.]

2011: Read books. This year I’m heading into the classics. “Deep” reading is the term. Not necessarily deep literature, but a few things I haven’t read in a while (The Wind in the Willows) or ever (Huckleberry Finn), with enjoyable re-reads of Austen and maybe (only maybe) something of Dickens. The fact is, reading …