studio-119-degrees_design-sample-15, originally uploaded by Studio119.

We’ve been on Twitter for some time, but I thought I’d add a screen capture of how we added our own brand identity to our Twitter account. Granted, you can’t manipulated the code on the left-hand side and add links, etc. However, you can create the illusion of having added those. It also stays true to our current web site design.

Just a quick one here… thought I’d post a link to a recently updated page of ours for the logos we have developed for clients. There’s also a few icons there as well. Check it out!

Studio 119 Degrees Logo Designs

Visual Samples:

Chris J. Politzki
Studio 119 Degrees Web Design & Development Studio

SEO company and Web Design & Development studio collaborate

Our design & development studio recently completed a widget development project for a local SEO company here in Denver, Colorado. Together, we developed a strategy for creating the all-important backlinks to a Texas attorney’s web site. The group over at seOverflow here in Denver is quite a talented group of SEO gurus that assisted the Studio 119 Design & Development team with the preliminaries for creating widgets for the Jim Adler & Associates team in Houston, Texas.

What do these ‘Death Statistic Widgets’ do?

Good question! They simply track 5 different types of deaths across the United States. There’s a widget for Car Accidents, one for 18 Wheeler Accidents, one for Drunk Driving Deaths, one for Mesothelioma Deaths, and also one for Motorcycle Deaths. All five come in 3 different sizes; 300 x 250 pixels, 240 x 400 pixels, and 160 x 300 pixels. All perfectly suited to implement into your blog or web site. Each one respectively tracks the total death numbers to date for each specific type of death. Each day a new number is displayed and oftentimes these numbers are updated hourly using a javascript which deducts the current day, compares it to the national daily average of deaths and returns a total number to date for the specified year.

You can download these widgets at either of these two landing pages:

1. The Accident Awareness site.
2. The Jim Adler Death Statistics site.

Why create Widgets for SEO?

Yet another good question… and the answer is easy. ‘To Gain Valuable Backlinks to Your Site‘, simply put. In the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) community, we all know that if you are able to gain links back to your site you can gain some valuable exposure within the Search Engines. Strategically placing targeted keywords within your anchor text (the words that appear within the actual link on the page, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the term) also help the spiders that are crawling your site help determine what your site is about and how they should categorize it. Changing up the anchor text is also a common task. Backlinks also function as a sort of voting system in that they indicate that someone has taken the time to add a link back to your site and find your site’s content valuable.

The Death Statistic widgets have appearing on each one of them 2 and sometimes 3 backlinks. Two anchor text links and one image alt tag set on the image link. So as you can see, we’ve placed these within the actual widgets in hopes that people will implement them into their blogs and web pages to give us our precious backlinks to our site. A very unique strategy in my opinion and one that also worked well with our previously developed Dex Yellow Pages widgets.

It’s all done in the name of  ’Gaining Valuable Backlinks to Your Site‘.

Happy Widgeting everybody!

Chris J. Politzki
Studio 119 Degrees Web Design & Development Studio

Vintage Ace Frehley circa 1977

Ace Frehley, spaceman from the rock and roll supergroup Kiss, finally has an official web site! Ace has inspired many guitarists throughout the years and is now entering the cyber world via his newly launched web site and other various areas of the internet.

Ways to Follow Ace Frehley on the Web

I recently saw that he is now on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and even Twitter! He’s definitely out there making himself visible to the world. All of the various ways to follow Ace on the web are listed on his ‘Into the Void‘ page on his site.

His first video blog from April 2009 I’ll post here:

His band is in the studio now finishing up their upcoming release called ‘Anomaly’. Sign up for exclusive updates from Ace and his webmaster. Here’s an exclusive video of Ace solo tracking for the track ‘Pain in the Neck’ in his studio:

He’s also posted some really nice rare photos from his spectacular career. The official Ace Frehley web site photos section, called ’12 pics’ has a few photos here, but I would suggest also visiting him on Facebook and MySpace to see some other nice images of Ace in action.

Recent Ace Frehley Sightings

Ace opening up the New York Yankee Stadium Hard Rock Cafe - April 2009

Ace at the New York Hard Rock - Halloween 2007

Ace Frehley with his new band - New Years Eve 2008

So there you have it. Ace is back and he told you so!

Update!!!

A recent interview with Ace at Amoeba Record Store in Hollywood, California. Check it out:

Chris J. Politzki
Studio 119 Degrees

Ok, so I thought I’d post something that covers two areas that are close to me… Music & Web Design. Having recently posted something on the David Gilmour site, I didn’t really find this too far off-base really. Plus, I got the notice on my MySpace page, went over to the new Clapton site and was pretty impressed. I even became a fan of his page on Facebook, so I guess you could say I’m a bit pumped about this?

The other item I forgot to mention, is that when I looked at tour dates, I noticed Eric was playing the Royal Albert Hall in London tonight (actually is now on stage as I’m writing this) & I wanted to jump on this opportunity to promote his site and his tour. The Royal Albert Hall is, for those of you that don’t know, quite the venue. It makes an appearance in the Beatles song, “A Day in the Life“. The line is, “Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall“. The hall is circular in shape and is well-known for it’s great acoustics. Many famous concerts have taken place here, so it would suffice to say that it has a bit of history behind it. It was built in 1871 and is still standing tall as one of the most sought after places for a musician to play. If you’ve played here, then you’ve pretty much made it as a musician.

Getting back to the Eric Clapton Web Site though, I’d have to say it’s one well-thought-out and laid-out site. I immediately went to the video section to find this great 1991 version of “White Room”, which is show above. Okay, so it isn’t Cream performing it, but Eric’s playing is still impressive. One of the most expressive guitar players I’ve ever heard… and that’s coming from a devout Jimmy Page fan!

I think the photo section will grow as the tour progresses and it certainly will be something else to see and hear Eric together with Stevie Winwood again on this tour. The video section also could be a little more robust, but the interviews make up for it. I always enjoyed listening to Clapton talk and this was no different. Pay special close attention to his take in the Concert for Bangladesh he did with George Harrison. Having just read his autobiography, these comments from him really hit home. I do kind of wish the music section, or discography rather, would include some small sound clips from the songs and then also have a feature to buy the song/songs from either iTunes or Amazon, but maybe that was a legal decision. The mini-player of Eric’s music at the top of all the pages is nice though… would be even nicer if while the song played and one navigated to a new page, the song would persist to play, but it does not.

A link to Eric’s enduring fight to help people with addictions is also on the site up top in the header. The facility is called, “The Crossroads Centre” and is truly an amazing thing Eric has given back to this world. All in all, a good site. It might need a little growing into and more content created or added to it, which I believe will take place soon. A site any Clapton fan would be please to visit.

So there you have it, my tribute to Eric Clapton’s start of a 10-night stay at the Royal Albert Hall starting tonight!

Visit the site and enjoy it!

Chris J. Politzki
Studio 119 Degrees

The DexKnows.com site recently posted a new page I helped develop.

It contains all of the current Widgets, Gadgets, Text Links, Banner Ads as well as ‘What & Where’ Search boxes. It’s known as the Free Tools page and is available anywhere on the Dex site if you head to the bottom of the page and click on the link, ‘Free Tools’ in the footer. This is right in between the ‘Direct Marketing’ & ‘View Phone Books’ links.

These are nifty little free tools that one can use to search the Dexknows site.

The Search Boxes are great for embedding into your own HTML page. They come complete with Javascript, CSS, & HTML code for a great looking resulting search box! They come in a few varied sizes to perfectly fit into the right spot on your web site. 728 x 90, 468 x 60, 300 x 250, 234 x 60, 160 x 600, & even a 120 x 90 size, which is pretty small, but could very well fit in a tight spot.

If you only want a text link, this is also available. Banner Ads as well.

The Gadgets and Widgets include an iGoogle Gadget for your iGoogle Home page. There’s a Google Desktop Gadget which you’ll have to download the Google Desktop application first, but the link for that downloaded is provided. Then there’s a Yahoo! Widget that also requires an external application to run, but once again the link is conveniently provided. There’s even a Apple / Mac Dashboard Widget, which I’m quite fond of being a Mac user.

The next feature is a Widgetbox Widget and I’ll embed it below to show you how easy it is to obtain. Go ahead and try typing something into the ‘What’ & ‘Where’ boxes and hitting enter or the ‘Find’ button above and see how the widgets work and function.

I personally like the cohesive design on all of these. Some sites have multiple platform widgets and gadgets, but haven’t kept the design the same across the board. Maybe because there were multiple people working on the different platforms? Perhaps. Not the case here though. I saw the design & development from end to finish and the result is there for you to see.

Can’t wait for our next versions of these to come out! In the meantime, enjoy!

Chris J. Politzki
Studio 119 Degrees

Stay tuned! Formulating a new design for the site. It’s about time I must say… the site has been effective, but needs a freshening-up, so-to-speak.

Chris

Update!!!

Monday, March 9th, 2009

I recently found the time to update the Studio 119 Degrees Web Site. Please have a look and make a comment here as to what your thoughts are on the new look and feel to the site.

Thanks!

Chris J. Politzki
Studio 119 Degrees

Just set-up my first Blog here… Within the next few days I’ll start posting items of interest.

Keep checking in!

Chris