We here at OSWC are students of the newest design trends in the biz. We love shiny new things. If there is a new toy out, we have GOT to get our hands on it. We don’t know why, but that’s how it works with us. The same goes with web design trends. jQuery is very hot right now, and we’re getting our hands on it and playing with it like it’s the newest smart phone. We already employed some of the hippest CSS2 trends when we built this site, like image sprites, background image hover effects, and purely CSS drop down menus. Since then, we’ve leveraged a lot of the newest jQuery techniques too, beginning with the Twitter plugin, continuing with a validated AJAX contact form, adding in some nifty portfolio sliders, and rounding it out with some cool quote rotators (e.g. the Outer Spice Buzz panel on the Services and Portfolio pages, as well as the bottom-right panel on every page). So, we’re continuing that trend today with a few more features.

Our shiniest, most notable new feature is the star animation in the header. Undoubtedly you’ve already noticed, but just in case you missed it, scroll to the top of the page and check it out – Outer Spice is now flying through space! There is a subtle animated image made up of stars that slides across the original image in the header, making it seem as though we’re meandering through space on a galactic quest of domination and adventure. Those are indeed strong words, but once day you’ll see – we will take over the universe. The animation is done using jQuery (no flash here!), specifically by leveraging a plugin called Spritely. Check it out for yourself, it’s pretty awesome. And we’re only using about 20% of what it can actually do (we’re not actually using the “sprite” feature – just the “pan” feature for now, but we’re planning to implement some sprite animation in the future).

The other feature we just implemented is the brand new Google Font Directory via the Google Font API to produce awesome fonts that render in any browser without the use of jQuery or images. That means the page loads faster and is much more SEO friendly. We were previously heavily using a font called Yanone Kaffeesatz in images as headers and text all over the site. However, Google just added that font to their directory of free fonts, so we were able to do away with all those images and lighten up the site a bit.

Check out this awesome font – it’s really a font – no image or jQuery is used!

Cool, huh? We were going to employ the cufon font replacement technique, which uses jQuery to transform embedded fonts into images on the fly, but thanks to the Google Font API we were able to go one step further and put our special font directly on our page. Natural. Pure. Indexable. Gracefully downgrading. That’s what we like to hear at OSWC. Stay tuned for changes to our portfolio and services pages!

The Caulk Wordpress theme developed by Outer Spice and uploaded to Theme Forest on December 12, 2009 has been purchased over 100 times (108 at the time of this writing), and is currently near the top of the sixth page on Theme Forest in the all-time sales category (out of 18 pages). His little brother, the Caulk HTML template, is seeing success as well, and currently sits at a healthy 45 purchases. This’s over 150 total purchases for the Caulk family of themes in just under 2 months! We’re very excited about the success of our first template, and expect to see even higher sales for our forthcoming theme, which is to be named Socket. Thank you to all of our valued customers!

Hayabusa

Japan didn’t care that no one had ever soft landed and taken off from an asteroid.  They picked an asteroid 500 million kilometers away named Itokawa and took off with their sweet ion engines.  Normally, (well actually only 2 other missions have even attempted to get near an asteroid) you’d just get near a asteroid and scan it or take pictures of it.  Not Japan.  They’re soft landing on it, grabbing some samples and RETURNING TO EARTH WITH THEM!  The first ever asteroid samples are on the way back to the land of the rising sun.

Things didn’t really happen exactly as planned.  There was an actual lander called Minerva that was going to elegantly land and hop around on the surface of the asteroid.  It didn’t get accurate altitude readings so when they let it go, it said “PEACE” and flew away.  It was all good though, Japan had a plan.  They just shot the stupid asteroid with a few ’sample collectors’ (come on, lets call it what it is – SUPER ASTEROID BUSTING GUNZ) and litterally flew threw the resulting dust- sealing up the cargo area and setting course for Earth.  AWESOME.  Lets just hope this doesn’t end with a Zombie apocalypse when we open the hatch.

Cassini-Huygens

With it’s Plutonium power plants, the Cassini-Huygens probe sent off to Saturn and its moons.  The Huygens probe was built to land on one of the moons of Saturn called Titan.  It took 2 and a half hours to get through the thick atmosphere, but miraculously it landed and sent pictures back to Earth.  Titan is the only other planetary body that Humans have found lakes of liquid.  Methane lakes the size of lake Michigan.
Slow down for a second.  This is a moon.  Of Saturn.  We landed on it, took pictures and sent them back.  We’re talking OVER A BILLION KILOMETERS AWAY.  Just check these pictures out- it blows my mind that I’m looking at the surface of a moon off of Saturn…

Venera 13

The Russians sent a probe to Venus called Venera 13.  Venus is kind of a pain to get to, as well as pretty tough to land on.  For instance it’s about 460 degrees on the surface.  CELCIUS.  The atmospheric pressure is around 93 bar, which doesn’t seem too impressive until you realize thats about the same pressure you’d find 1 kilometer under the freaking ocean.

So the crazy Russians didn’t care about the tough environment and sent a probe to the surface.  They took pictures, took readings of all kinds of things and beamed them back to earth.  Pretty ho hum, right?  Oh, did I forget to tell you?  They did this 27 YEARS AGO.  Never mind their country was falling apart, they still scrounged up just enough awesome to pull this incredible mission off.  Kudos to our Ruskie cousins.

We didn’t even go over the vasimir engine, phobos probes, New Horizons, LCROSS, or many other completely awesome space missions.  If you think nothing cool is going on up there, think again friend.

That’s not how it used to be.  Brian and I have conversed many times about the state of customer service.  Usually with cursing and gnashing of teeth over some experience we’ve had.  When it’s all boiled down, it usually comes down to communication, assumptions, and willingness to please the customer.  Businesses 30 years ago cared about customer service.  They wanted customers to be happy with them and cared about word of mouth.  They took care of people that showed loyalty to their business.  Now we have multi-national corporations that are more concerned with numbers, survey ratings, and profits.  Their ’support’ personnel don’t have the ability or the willingness to help customers in any worthwhile capacity.  They don’t know their customers, and really don’t care about them.

The information technology industry is also plagued with companies that have no concept of service, no concept on how to estimate or forecast cost and time.  During typical projects deadlines slide by, estimates skyrocket – and customers goodwill towards IT slides into the crapper.  Communications are almost always at the root of this problem.  Assumptions are made on both sides, requirements aren’t completely hammered out.

All this service talk was a big part of the reason to start Outer Spice Web Co.- we wanted to ‘bring service back’.  We understand what good service means, and want to make sure our clients feel great about their project all the way through.  Words are great, but here’s how we’ll back that up:

How do you want to communicate?

We’ll ask you when you want to communicate and how.  We’ll be available to go over details, talk about requirements or discuss the Colts secondary any time you want.

Reports/Research

You didn’t ask for it, but we’re giving it to you anyway.  With your proposal, we’ll include a short report about your local industries presence on the web.  We aren’t a market research shop, but we’ll give you some basic information from a different pair of eyes.  Hopefully it will do you some good, but it’s also going to help us understand your industry and how your new website or application will fit in and compete.

Proposal/Requirements definition

We know it’s kind of a crazy time to be spending lots of money on web stuff.  We’re going to spell out a few different tiers of work we can do for you with different prices and levels of support.  You’ll know what we’re going to do, and when.  You choose what you want.

Contract

Well, this is the big day.  It’s time to formally bind ourselves in contract.  It’s going to be a happy day though – you’ll know what you’re getting, and we’ll know what we’ve got to do.

beta

Before we kick you off, we’ll give you a chance to check out your product and kick the tires.  We want you to use the product in a normal way to make sure everything is ironed out the way you want.

Completion review

When the dust is settled, we’ve wiped down your website and put a bow around it – we want to meet with you and make sure it’s how we both dreamed it would be.  We’re going to make sure you’re happy.

Post project support/follow ups

We aren’t just going to bail after you’ve got your shiny new website or application.  We want to hear about your thoughts on your project after its had a chance to sink into the internets.  We’ll go over what you like, what you’d change, and how awesome the movie Zombieland will be.
So you get the idea.  We’re committed to service.  :)