TINY FACTORY is recognized for its impressive body of work, which has been consistently creative, imaginative and innovative. The world of website and mobile design has taken notice of TINY FACTORY’s contribution of well thought out and fully optimized sites and mobile applications.

We faced tough competition from our category competitors and are looking forward to next years competition. If you’d like to enter your business you can already here.

Founded by Michael Sacca & Alex Rolek more than two years ago, TINY FACTORY firmly believes in offering clients high quality work delivered with an air of friendly professionalism. Experts in developing and coding mobile applications and website designs, TINY FACTORY is rapidly becoming an industry trailblazer. They are a progressive and forward looking team, living on the cutting edge of technological advances.

Kudos to TINYFACTORY.CO for raising the bar and presenting the industry with a solid example of excellence. Note to TINY FACTORY’s followers, in August 2011, the company will be relocating their main operations to San Diego, CA, and will be available at 1043 6th Avenue, San Diego 92101. Feel free to stop by and meet the team who won the First Bulby Award for the BEST CREATIVE AGENCY in the “.co” community.

1.  Make Fewer HTTP Requests

What this means is each element that appears on your site needs to be downloaded and delivered to your visitors browser.   This could be an image, stylesheet, javascript file, flash element etc.  The idea here is to minimize the number of times the browser has to jump back and forth grabbing content.  Now if you’re like us and still want to have some images on your site, here are a couple ways to reduce your HTTP requests while still maintaining your company branding:
CSS Sprites: If we’re dealing with images, CSS Sprites are an excellent way to reduce the number of calls your asking the browser to make.  A sprite is one large image compiled of all the main images on your site.  Using CSS we can then call the location of that image to appear, much like targeting longitude and latitude coordinates.  So instead of calling in 47 separate images, we just ask the browser to load in one image greatly reducing our http requests.  If you want more information on this, CSS Tricks has posted an excellent article on CSS Sprites

Combine Files: Another method to reduce your HTTP requests is to combine your CSS stylesheets and JavaScript files into one “minified” file each.  Typically we keep the master files (fully commented) stored in a client file, and serve the minified version to the server.  This way we’ll always have the documented version on hand which makes it easier if we ever have to make changes.

2.  Use a Content Delivery Network:

OK – now this may sound like a huge task but don’t let it discourage you.  What a Content Delivery Network (CDN) does, is to deploy your content across multiple, geographically dispersed servers making your pages load faster from the user’s perspective.  The idea is that a user’s download rates are faster the closer they are to the server,  so by delivering the content across multiple servers it speeds up their download rates and they see your page faster.   Services such as Amazon CloudFront or Rackspace’s Cloud Files make it much easier to deploy a CDN at a fraction of the cost.

How it works: When you upload files to your CDN, a copy of the files will be cached in various servers that are spread across important cities in US, Europe and Asia. So a visitor from India will be served content by the server located in Asia and so on.

Setting it up: Setting up a CDN with Amazon or Rackspace is very similar to serving your images from a sub-domain (as we do on our site).   If you’re using Amazon’s CloudFront there’s a firefox plugin that allows you to manage your distributions.  You would then associate a CNAME (some easy to remember sub-domain name) with your S3 bucket so it becomes easy to link to the files from your web page.  Amazon and Rackspace both start at .15 cents a GB/mo.

3. Avoid empty src or href

This is really self explanatory.  When tell the browser to retrieve an empty file it wastes it’s resources trying to find something that doesn’t exist. Reducing these requests will speed up the amount of time it takes for the browser to load your page.

4. Add Expires headers

This can be a difficult issues to resolve if you’re using multiple scripts that you’re calling from outside of your domain. But what you can do, is for any scripts that you’re calling from your domain, make sure you’re letting the browser know to cache them. The piece of code will go into your .htaccess file and will look something like this:

<FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$">
Header set Expires "Thu, 15 Apr 2011 20:00:00 GMT"
</FilesMatch>

What this piece of code will do is for the listed file extensions it will let the browser know to cache them until the date you provide.  A first-time visitor to your page will make several HTTP requests to download all your sites files, but using the Expires header you make those files cacheable. This avoids unnecessary HTTP requests on subsequent page views. Expires headers should be used on all components including scripts, stylesheets, and Flash components.

in Part II will take a look at gZip compression and the location of your CSS & Javascript files.  Let us know if you have any questions in the comments!

Groupons: Whales

Honestly this one was a bit disappointing – the twist didn’t seem to hold much of a punch.  I was really hoping Groupon would win this as they’ve been somewhat of a start-up darling this year.  Unfortunately, I have to admit I enjoyed Living Socials offering better.

Living Social: It’ll Change Your Life

Chevrolet: Cruze Eco Misunderstanding

They had me at “42 wild Italians” – it was a nice break from the intensity of many of the car commercials this year to throw in some humor.  Plus, how many times did they get Eco into this one minute ad? Well done.

Motorola: Empower the People

I’m an iPad guy myself – but I’m also a sucker for the loan geek with a tablet. Well done Motorola.

Careerbuilder: Parking Lot

Monkeys are always funny. Probably not the best of the bunch, but you have to admit at least it made you smile.

Bridgestone

You know we’ve all done it. This commercial brought me right back to Monday morning.

NFL: Super Bowl Celebration

For nostalgia sake, this commercial is the first ten years of my life – when I really did watch the Super Bowl for the football (I swear).

Volkswagen: The Force

This is the obvious winner this year. I’m sure we’ll be seeing this thousands of times, but it did earn a mention. Brilliant stuff!

…and some of the worst

Not every commercial this year was a hit – here are a couple of our worst picks.

Skechers: Kim Kardashian: Hello Skechers

Wow. The voice-over couldn’t be any more flat. I’ve never watched her show, but I couldn’t stand that voice for 30 seconds let alone 30 minutes.

Salesforce: Chatter.com Launch: Do Impossible Things

As a fan of Salesforce, I really wanted to like this.  But something about it just falls incredibly flat.

Chrysler: Imported From Detroit

It’s not an awful commercial. But it’s way to intense for my liking.

So where were some of your favorites?  Let me know if the comments below.

Lexus

They’ve made some major modifications to the standard WordPress framework here – and the result is a beautiful custom theme.

Kobe Bryant

One of our favorites around here for obvious reasons – but a beautiful theme none-the-less.

Ebay Ink

A straight forward approach for Ebay’s offical blog “ink.”  Still a really solid layout staying true to Ebay’s brand.

NASA

One of the more dated looking sites on the list – but hey – it’s NASA, and it certainly houses a ton of content.

Spotify

A lovely example of WordPress as a full CMS.  Spotify has created a really nice user interface that’s easy to navigate through.

Yahoo!

Yahoo uses WordPress to power multiple blogs that they own.

Ford

Another blog on our list that would use a little love, but here’s Ford using WordPress to power their blog.

Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal powers their blogs with WordPress.

Ben & Jerry’s

A really playful blog from Ben & Jerry’s for their French site.

SONY Playstation

Sony’s Playstation blog created for users to find out the latest updates and releases.

People Magazine

Do you love Pete Wentz’s curly hair?  You can weigh in on this pressing issue and others on People Magazines WordPress blog.

CNN

CNN has built a massive WordPress blog for their political ticker blog.

SONY make.believe

SONY built this beautiful WordPress theme for their make.believe blog where they discuss all things electronics.

New York Times

The New York Times relies on WordPress for their blog section.

Samsung

A very straight forward theme from Samsung for their blog

TED

The non-profit group TED uses WordPress to power their blog

Top Gear

One of our favorite Sunday night activities is watch Top Gear on the BBC channel, it might have something to do with their sharp WordPress blog.

Mozilla

Our favorite browser’s blog is powered by WordPress

Katy Perry

One of the biggest female pop stars in the world just got a little sexier with the addition of WordPress powering her website.

MySpace Developers

Is myspace making a comeback?  We’re not sure – but their developers blog is built in WordPress.

Adobe

Alexa rank of 54?  Yep!  Adobe Chooses WordPress for their blogging platform.

Nokia

Nokia has a futuristic looking WordPress theme for their blog

NFL

The NFL uses WordPress for their blog.

Nikon

Nikons simple WordPress blog to highlight their latest news

Wired

Wired Magazine’s Web Monkey blog is built on the WordPress framework.

Flickr

Not sure what’s happening with the gears and rainbow – but flickr relies on WordPress for it’s blog.

Network Solutions

An excellent example of WordPress as a full CMS.

Cpanel

Cpanels straight forward WordPress blog.

MTVU

MTVU uses WordPress to power it’s interactive website

Pepsi

The Pepsi Refresh Project was a huge social hit and they use WordPress to power their blog.

United States Mission Geneva

Even the United States Government is getting in on the WordPress action.  Check out the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva website for an example.

Harvard

The scholars over at Harvard University choose WordPress to power their schools blog.

National Geographic

National Geographic utilizes a WordPress theme for their nature blog

Forbes

Many magazines are using Worpdress to power their blog.  If it’s good enough for Forbes…

USG Magazine

They may not be a household name – but USG Magazine’s WordPress theme is an example of a beautiful WordPress theme.

We know it’s possible to take a template and create a website.  It is also possible to use a stencil to draw a picture, but would you then call yourself an artist?  If you’re wondering, the answer is NO.  The point I’m making here is that a true website designer is a gifted artist whose work is recognizable for its uniquely distinctive look and appeal.   The finished product accomplishes what it sets out to do, but in an uncommon and captivating way.

To begin the process of retraining your eye for website design excellence, let’s begin with a few key factors which can make or break a website at first glance.   We know that if your sight does not have visual appeal, it’s not likely to efficiently attract new business.

Beginning checklist for appropriately assessing website designs:

1. Is there inconsistent spacing and an obvious lack of understanding of white-space issues?

2. Is there a healthy balance between text and imagery?

3. Is the text presented in an interesting and appealing way which draws the viewer’s attention and keeps them reading your message?

4. Is there an overabundance of stock imagery?  Don’t risk eliciting the “Yeah, yeah we’ve seen this before” response from your site visitors.  This can become irritating to shoppers and ultimately lumps your site in with all the rest leaving you no way to distance yourself from the herd.

5. Are there wingdings in the text due to invalid html characters (typically caused by improper use of copy and paste commands)?  Believe it or not there are websites online that are just that sloppy.  We’ve seen them, and it makes us sad.  At least clean up the obvious flaws.

These are just a few common errors we’ve noticed while browsing various websites.  A true web artist doesn’t settle for anything less than excellence in the performance of his/her craft.  Stick with us and we’ll teach you more.  Hire us and you’ll experience the difference between hacks and artists.