Utah Web Design Blog

The National Safety Council has awarded the Utah Safety Council website with the most Outstanding Safety Website award of all it’s 47 chapters. We develop web sites for the love of it but an unexpected award once in a while doesn’t hurt either. Thanks again for the opportunity to work on your project guys!

Yeah let’s dispense with the most obvious question first, any relation to Matt? Yes

Ryan comes to Red Olive from Zions Bancorporation where he worked with ATM software and wasn’t allowed to have razor blades near him. With a background in C++ and a desire to do more than earn vacation time we persuaded him to take a chance and leave the dark side. Ryan has a psychology degree from the University of Utah, which has proven to be an asset in the development of user centered UI development. Besides doing development Ryan will also be devoting a fair amount of his time to the ever growing search engine marketing sector of our business.

A client of ours, Daniel Ramjoue, will exhibiting his work in the Salt Lake City Gallery Stroll starting Sept. 19 through Nov. If have never been this would be a good time to start a new tradition.

The vibrant, dynamic work in Signs of Life is the second series by oil painter Daniel Ramjoué to explore signs familiar in the Salt Lake area. This new series is juxtaposed against pieces from series one, providing a visual history of the artist’s evolution and of the local past.

Artist’s reception & gallery stroll
Friday, September 19, 2008
6:00-9:00 pm
The 814 Gallery
814 East 100 South
Salt Lake City, Utah

Here are the three logos we designed that will be in the newest LogoLounge V book. The book will be published summer 2009.

Heres the letter they sent us.

Subject :       Congrats from LogoLounge

Congratulations Vince, your work has been chosen.

Congratulations on having your work selected for LogoLounge Book 5, the content is exceptional and the judging was extremely competitive.

The judging for LogoLounge Volume 5, has been completed. We are excited with the exceptional quality level of work selected for this fifth volume. This was an incredibly competitive judging session with over 33,000 logos entered for consideration. We are also very pleased to inform you that your work has been chosen for inclusion in the new book by an international panel of judges. This years panel included,  Andreas Karl of Karl Design, Von Glitschka of Glitschka Studios, Michelle Sonderegger of Design Ranch, Sarah Moffat of Turner Duckworth, Jamie Koval of VSA Partners, Vince Frost of Frost Design, Bronwen Rautenbach of The Brand Union, and Alex de Janosi of Lippincott.

Congratulations on having your work selected for LogoLounge Book 5, the content is exceptional and the judging was extremely competitive.

_

Thanks LogoLounge.  V

In an effort to gain a stronger online presence, Turning Point Centers hired the Red Olive Search Engine Optimization team to assist them in accomplishing their goal.

Turning Point is located in Sandy, Utah where they can offer their clients the backdrop of the majestic Utah Wasatch Mountains.  In addition Turning Point is equiped with secluded lush grounds, a tranquil facility, and attention to detail and impeccable service during the healing process from drug and alcohol addiction.

What makes Turning Point the Utah Drug Rehab of Choice?  The answer is simple, more personalized one-on-one care, smaller therapy and education groups, combined with an uncompromising dedication to healing is precisely what makes Turning Point, Utah’s Drug Rehab Center of choice for experiencing the change of a lifetime.

Thanks Noah for your hard work and keeping it free!

If you work with MS SQL server and have databases that handle lots of transactions then you no doubt have encountered the .ldf file growing to insane sizes if left unchecked. A large LDF file will result in the web application running extremely slow or most likely just timing out, not to mention affecting the performance of other databases setup on that same server. We used to manually detach the database rename the .ldf, once you re-attach the .mdf file it would start up a new .ldf log file and things would run speedy once again. While that worked it resulted in downtime, wasted resources, and unhappy clients.

Here is a solution that works perfectly and is automated. (assuming sql server 2000 or 2005 standard here)

1. Launch Enterprise Manager and open Management
2. Right click on Database Maintenance Plans > New plan
3. Pick all your options to backup your database with the schedule and save the plan
4. Drop down SQL Server Agent
5. Right click on Jobs > New Job
6. Give it a name and click on the second tab “steps“
7. Add a second step under the initial backup by clicking New
8. Choose Type TSQL, pick the database, and paste in this command

BACKUP LOG dbnamehere WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY
DBCC SHRINKFILE(dbnamehere_Log, 1)

9. Save it, click on step 1 hit adavanced and set “On success action:” to “Goto Step: 2” or it won’t run.

We have a log file that used to run to 18 to 30GB quickly and now it is 1MB on a daily basis, pretty sweet and with no real down time.  We have tried backing up the log and tried the built in shriking options with no luck, never worked.  Sure there are plenty of other methods you can use, hope this helps someone else out there facing the same problem.

We basically hit upon the next new trend in refreshments for business meetings that we are pretty positive is going to blow minds this summer — Otter Pops. No boring refreshments like colas, water, coffee or peanuts. We hope to have everyone sporting a day glow pop like some kind of radioactive glow stick protruding out of their mouths while we go over proposals — okay maybe it’s just a phase, but they’re quite refreshing. And thanks to Vince’s childhood reminiscing, we are now addicted to these (I’m partial to Alexander the Grape).

The final release of the day that is pretty cool, considering they deal with large metal structures, is our steel fabrication contractor clients — S & S Steel Fabrication. This is a triumph of inventive Flash and graphic design. Very beautifully designed both on the front and back end. The site feel is macho and tough like kick to the eye with a steel toe boot. And yes they really did work with NASA and helped construct the Universal Studios Terminator II ride, and that is awesome.

The portfolio page they have is quite a wower, with a nice automatic photo slide show of some of the steel structures and projects. Anyways I can go on and on, but after all is said and done, I think that this site will help raise their stock in the steel community. Our creative Utah Graphic designers at Red Olive are implementing their ever honed skills in design, whether its a Flash element or behind the scenes. And we have our contacts at S & S to thank for their business — enjoy the new site.

Another one of our Utah locals, Alpine Credit Union, is dawning a new online presence with interactive web controls and a cool graphic interface. It’s a sleek radioactive green and black with cool little images, such as the “teen savers” money tree and the soda car with its twist on low calorie loan percentages.

It’s soon to go live and should be searchable in no time. For their members, our web programmers made it possible so that the people at the credit union can update the site with information and links. One little addition is their handy used car section. A little classified shopping on the side is not so bad, especially where you can pick out a car and check the loan rates for that purchase is pretty convenient.

Red Olive is anticipating everything to work out well and we thank Alpine for their patience and due diligence — you all are gentlemanly and gentlewomanly as well as scholars — that didn’t sound as good as I had hoped when I read it back, but the feeling is there. Thanks!