Engaging presentations are crucial for successfully captivating an audience. You have a lot to say, and all of it is good. But while it’s easy to fill your slides with text, it can be challenging to visualize that text into a presentation that promotes your message. So we would like to share with you some inspiration and some fundamental presentation guidelines, both from our own portfolio and from  Slideshare, a San-Francisco based company that provides a platform for businesses and professionals to share their presentations online.

SlideShare recently announced winners for the ‘World’s Best Presentation of 2009′ and I have to say, the winning presentations certainly grab your attention. Among them are Dan Roam and Dr Tony Jones’ collaboration called “American Health Care: a 4-Napkin Explanation.” Voted as the winner of Slideshare’s Best Presentation of 2009. It’s clever, simple to understand and far shorter than reading the written health bills.

Let us know how we can help you improve your presentations. Check out our portfolio of completed projects.

Having a web presence is relatively easy and certainly valuable to businesses, organizations and even individuals. But before pulling together your website you’ll want to weigh some options.

An important tool, you should consider is a  content management system (CMS), which will allow you to control individual content pages, navigational menus, meta data and more with a simple process. Unlike updating individual files, uploading via FTP and crossing your fingers that it works properly AND looks good. This is an important development consideration prior to starting.

Second, relying on a webmaster has it’s benefits but there are some serious drawbacks, expecially when in a pinch. If you’re about to launch a marketing campaign, you have very last minute changes to a webpage but your webmaster is out…who do you call? Ghostbusters can’t help you out this time.  Teaching a few people how to make website updates makes more sense – they log into a web-based platform, make the changes/updates and publish the changes. This can save you from the potential problems of relying on one sole individual.

Third on the list is accessibility. I mentioned this a bit in the previous paragraph that a CMS is a web-based application which means you can (typically) log-in from any computer that has internet access. Even if it’s 3am on a Sunday you can make changes to your website without waiting for your webmaster to manually upload HTML files.

Not everyone will have the same needs, and in some cases, a CMS simply isn’t needed or a proper suit. Be sure to look at the options and understand the benefits of using a CMS. Contact us; we can help you determine the best route possible. And, we have CMS options to fulfill your needs…if that’s the route to take.

Despite Microsoft Word being around for a very long time, there are still issues we face when using it in conjunction with other applications. One common issue is the hidden/embedded code within a document file.

Our clients typically use Microsoft Word to provide content which would be added to their website. But, it’s not a simple copy and paste job as you’d like to think. Unfortunately MS Word can give you many more problems than you’d care to deal with simply because of the hidden code it adds when trying to copy and paste that content.

The image above is a snapshot of the code that is added to the WYSIWYG editor and unfortunately, you can only see this by viewing the HTML portion of the editor. This means that if you copy the text from Word and paste it into your CMS, there is a good chance you won’t notice this code and continue to be frustrated as you attempt to format the text.

So now you’re asking, “Why is this a problem?”. Simply put, you’ll struggle to have your content displayed the way you initially intended.

The way you can get around this issue is by using Notepad or a similar program. Copying the content from Word and pasting it into Notepad will strip all the unwanted code from the text. From there you can copy the text from Notepad and paste it into your editor/CMS. This will provide you a clean copy of the text that can be formatted properly from within the CMS. Keep in mind, when you do this you will lose all of the formatting – bold, italics, colors, etc., so keep the Word doc handy for reference.

Building complex custom animations in PPT is a frequent requirement here at CGI. Using the Selection Pane is a powerful tool that helps speed production. Remember using the Tab button to drill down to an object buried under multiple layers? Have you ever been frustrated by an animation sequence because you chose Picture 3 instead of Picture 2? Then you’ll love this feature.

In PowerPoint 2007 from the Home ribbon look for the Editing toolbar which includes Find, Replace and Select.

Open the drop down menu for select and choose Selection Pane.The Selection and Visibility task pane offers some powerful options.

Here you can assign a logical name to objects by double clicking on the name in the task bar. If I use two grouped shapes to create a mask effect I can name the Group to be “Mask”. It is good practice to assign names to objects as you build a presentation because updating an object name on slide 3 will not automatically update it throughout the presentation.

Do you need to edit a piece of text that is hidden behind other layers? In the Selection Pane choose Hide All at the bottom of the task bar and then click on the visibility box next to the object you want to edit. Make your change and select Show All at the bottom of the task bar.

Tired of using Send to Back, Bring Forward to get your layering right? When you choose Arrange you will find the Selection Pane option at the bottom of the menu. Open the Selection Pane and use the Re-order arrows to move the object into the correct position. Arranging your layers so that text peeks out from under “Mask” rather than on top will be simple to correct by reading your list of labeled objects.

Keep both the Selection pane and Custom Animation task pane open and you will fly through your animation sequences. “Grab” an object from the Selection pane and “Add an Effect” in the Custom Animation pane.

One more thing, just because you can animate objects faster now doesn’t mean you should. Be selective about adding drama to your presentation; you don’t want your audience reaching for the Dramamine!

Why would I use an htaccess file?

Developing our client’s online presence is a big part of what we do here at CGI Interactive.  Besides keeping me gainfully employed, a professional and easy to use website keeps you looking good to your current and future clients.  Arguably, nothing is more important than fresh content.  Last I checked it was 2009.  No more animated GIFs with a letter going into a mailbox or frame based navigation with awkward double scroll bars.  No, these days everything is slick and content managed, dynamic and free; for computers and technology, it’s like the 60’s.  But with Woodstock days away your homegrown content management page URLs are looking totally square, man.  Who wants to look at something like this:

Personally, I don’t care.  I’m a developer and I know the world can be cruel to a newbie trying to get their feet wet in the “variable passing through the url” pool.  But any marketing person can tell you with all the zeal of a red carpet reporter that your style is just not going to cut it in Hollywood.  People want to look at this:

Maybe your marketing team has a great idea for a microsite, but you’re running short on budget to get hosting for it.  Sure seems like a waste to pay $10 a month for a whole server just to host a few small pages.  With htaccess you can host the files on an existing webserver and map requests for a specific domain to that folder only.

Maybe you’ve got a blog and you’re tired of providing free advertisments for miracle diets but don’t want to shut down comments completely.  If you’ve got the IP address of the offenders you can block em’ out for good.

Htaccess is a truely versatile tool but getting into it can be intimidating.  First things first:

Configure Your Server

The easiest way to do this is to just call your hosting company and ask if htaccess is enabled.  For those unfortunate developers, like myself, who are responsible for their own server the process is a little more challenging.

-For an Apache Server-

1. Open http.conf in your favorite text editor.

2. Find this line:

;LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

3. Remove the comma so it looks like this:

LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

4. Find this:

<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Satisfy all
</Directory>

5. Change it to this:

<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Satisfy all
</Directory>

6. RESTART APACHE!!!

-For an IIS Server-

1. Cry deeply because you do not have an apache server.

2. Apply for stimulus money and purchase this product: http://www.micronovae.com/ModRewrite/Purchase.html

3. Alternatively, convert to Apache.

Okay, so now you’ve got apache restarted and it should be ready to do your bidding.  Test this by creating a file called .htaccess in the root directory and typing some nonsense into it.  This should throw an ugly configuration error when you try to access the server.  This means apache is looking for and responding to the .htaccess file.  It bears mentioning that errors in your .htaccess file will cause your server to be inaccessable, so if you’ve got live sites and slow fingers you might want to play around on a test server first.  You may have to set a preference on your FTP client or server to show hidden files, as the “.” in front of the filename will generally cause the file to be hidden.

Attractive URLs

Now if you want to address our first example from above and make your totally square URL hip, you should have this in your htaccess file:

Now, for each URL you want to beautify the directive looks like this:

This says, if someone is asking for the page home.html, Apache will display the contents of index.php with the query string variable page equal to the value of home.  This means you would direct people to home.html in links you are sending out.

Multiple Sites on One Server

Now, our second example involves having multiple websites on one server.  To accomplish this you should have the separate folders or directories for each site.  To make sure the right domain name goes to the right folder you’d put this in the htaccess file:

This says, if someone comes here looking for yourOTHERsite.com, and they are not requesting a file that is already in the otherSite folder, you should direct their request for files to the otherSite folder.

Stay Out

Take back the web!  Use the following line to exclude unfriendly IP addresses from your server (yes that’s a real spammer IP address):

To add more IP addresses just add another “deny from” line under the existing one.

So that’s a quick and dirty intro to .htaccess.  I glossed over some things like the regular expression syntax used to match page URLs (all the ^, $, !, (.*) business) but that’s a whole other lesson entirely.  If you need help bringing your site to a new level you can always contact sales@cgiinteractive.com

Anymore brain busters?