One of our designers just turned us all on to Eat Street.

It’s an elegantly designed iPhone app with an intuitive interface to help you track down food trucks. Here in Los Angeles, where mobile food is still all the rage, this app really fills a need. It’s perfect discovering new trucks in your neighborhood in real time. You can sort by type (e.g. desserts) and filter by your location, as well as view the latest tweets from a selected truck. Go check it out.

We’re excited on another level, since this app ties in perfectly with the Tango Mango Italian Ice Truck website and mobile site that launches later this month.

Happy eating!

Yes, it’s no surprise that your website needs to reflect your brand. And yes, it should look great. And while we’re at it, your site might as well be intuitive and elegant for your visitors to get around. But is that enough?

Not exactly. Your site also needs to be visible to search engines if your customer is going to find you in the first place. (Making your site visible to search engines is called “Search Engine Optimization” or “SEO.”)

At some point, when you’ve got all the fundamentals in place, partnering with a dedicated SEO company may be the right decision. But if you’re a small to mid-sized business, building your site properly and adding quality content will likely be money much better spent.

So how is your site currently scoring? If you have a existing site, now you can get an objective analysis by Website Grader for free!

Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

On May 5, 2009, Studiofluid recieved a WebsiteGrader score 91 with an Alexa rank of 755,131 which is in the top 2.7 % of all websites.

How did your site score?

If you’re looking to revamp your low-scoring website, or build a new site right from the ground up, Studiofluid can help. We build efficient and intuitive websites that are easy for your visitors to use, and that allow you the best possible visibility to search engines like Yahoo! and Google.

And yeah, your site will look great too.

Keep scrolling, there are a lot of solid ideas and unique business models made possible through our increasingly connected world. What sorts of business ideas do you have in mind for a side business? When do you think you’ll take the steps to make your dream happen?

If you find yourself on the fence about your next business move, you might want to give this a read. Business Coach and Venture Capitalist Paul Graham shares his insights on why to start a startup in a bad economy. Some of these really jumped out at me:

• If you’re the right sort of person, you’ll win even in a bad economy. And if you’re not, a good economy won’t save you.
• If you’re worried about threats to the survival of your company, don’t look for them in the news. Look in the mirror.
• Startups often make things cheaper, so in that respect they’re better positioned to prosper in a recession than big companies.
• Another advantage of bad times is that there’s less competition… If everyone else is cowering in a corner, you may have a whole car to yourself.

Also worth checking out is Paul’s latest company, Y Combinator, which specializes in funding early stage startups.

Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel put together a short film posted on the AIGA site (American Institute Graphic Arts) based on her thought provoking text on the presence and pervasiveness of Graphic Design in our world.

“…Graphic design is the boldly directional arrows on street signs and the blurred, frenetic typography on the title sequence to E.R. It is the bright green logo for the New York Jets and the monochromatic front page of the Wall Street Journal. It is hang-tags in clothing stores, postage stamps and food packaging, fascist propaganda posters and brainless junk mail…”

Graphic Design is deeply rooted in the past and the meaning we’ve assigned to images and symbols over many centuries. Understanding and reinterpreting those meanings is one aspect of graphic design that I find so fascinating.

At Startup Weekend Los Angeles, my team developed “Yummyware” in less than 48 hours from concept to working prototype…

Our inspiration came from the real-world frustrations of one of our team members who works for Hotcakes Bakes, a bakery here in Los Angeles. Yummyware is a simple, internal software solution for Bakeries that streamlines custom orders, while keeping things organized from production through delivery.

ABOVE: Yummyware branding and customized login screen.

ABOVE: Daily view shows projects to be completed and employee messages.

ABOVE: All orders available at a glance by week.

ABOVE: Order form tailored by each bakery, and helps capture detailed information with custom orders.


We developed Yummyware for Hotcakes Bakes as the prototype customer, with the ability to scale the product and sell it as a monthly subscription service to Bakeries and other confectioneries in need of simple customized management help. (Just get in touch if you would like to license the product).

I worked with a team of 6 entrepreneurs to push out a working version during our weekend. I led the software architecture, user interface, visual design, product naming and logo design. My teammates built the database, implemented the HTML/CSS, proposed a business and marketing plan, led the pitch presentation and made valuable contributions to the UI and product as a whole. Many thanks again to teammates Talya, Tracey, Madeline, Craig and Joel. You guys rock!

If a simple, customized solution sounds like something that could benefit your small business, get it touch. We’d love to hear from you and help you become profitable.

While optimizing your website for search engines is vitally important, depending on your goals and current design of your website, you might be surprised to find that hiring a “SEO specialist” could be a waste of money…

It is likely that you, yourself can follow some simple steps that will generate visibility and save money in the long run. In other words, that $300/ month you were budgeting for an SEO company may be better spent on developing a site from the ground-up that is SEO friendly, and then following the steps below to increase your listing in the search engines.

Here are a few simple steps you can take to increase your web visibility, while in many cases achieving the same, if not better results.

1. Make the content on your website easy for Yahoo! and Google to find you. This means including using your keywords naturally and frequently in a) relevant page titles, b) page keywords in the metadata tags, c) in the page text content itself.
2. Do not embed important words as image graphics, unless you include those words in other places.
3. Stay away from sites entirely in flash, unless you are working with a developer who knows how to make them visible to search engines, you give each page it’s own unique address.
4. Post relevant, keyword rich content to your site on a regular basis.
5. Create a pay-per-click campaign with Google AdWords, where you pay only when traffic is directed to your site.
6. Create listings for your company with industry-specific sites or city search listings. Often times this can be done for free.
7. Read blogs and articles related to your industry, and post thoughtful comments (thoughtful being the key word!). Provide a link back to your site.
8. Install analytic software on your site, such as Google Analytics, so you can see how people are finding you check out their behavior. You can then increase the frequency you use certain keywords, or be inspired for other topics to write about.

If you’ve taken these steps, and are wanting to take your company to the next level, by all means, an experienced SEO company may be the way to go.

And if not, what are you waiting for? By following the simple steps above, you will see the results of being visible to your market, and will have taken control of your own SEO destiny.

Yesterday, in conjunction with the Detriot Auto Show, NPR aired an interview with Daniel Sperling and regarding his book Two Billion Cars. He discusses the global impacts of our cars, and what is on the horizon for sustainable transportation.

In 2008 Studiofluid created an infographic to help communicate the concepts Dr. Sperling presents in his book, as well as to U.S. congress and audiences throughout the world. It feels good to see our work serving it’s purpose and helping people understand some important global topics.

You can listen to the interview over on NPR’s site.