Free Nonprofit Website

June 9th, 2010
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vOfficeware is an actively involved with the nonprofit community. With some 30,000 nonprofits in the greater Washington area, it is hard not to find nonprofit clients. Through our association with the ASAE, our DC web development team has completed challenges such as integrating iMIS with WordPress and integrating event planning CRMs. vOfficeware, however recognizes the other side of the nonprofit spectrum. About 90% of these 30,000 nonprofits have just a few members and are mostly volunteer run with budgets of less than $100,000. Our nonprofit website design service: NonprofitCMS.org was developed to be an affordable platform for these types of organizations. NonprofitCMS is a branded version of WordPress that combines several open source or cost effective plugins to be an easy to use and easy to manage platform for small nonprofits. Event registration, donation management, newsletter management, and outreach are its core focus areas. Prices run from $1199 to a few grand dependi

Stokefire (TM) – Located at Madison Ave, Washington DC

June 7th, 2010
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The agencies we work with can be labeled either as "Creative," "Interactive," or "Marketing" firms. Our mission at vOfficeware is to be the problem solvers for these creative partners. The challenges we face seem to fall within the realm of technology. "Make the page drop down like a see-saw" translates into "code up some jQuery / CSS to adjust the elements on the DOM." While for us engineers this is the height of excitement, for our creative partners it is simply a solution to their vision. Stokefire is a bit different than our usual partners -- as they say, they are an "un-same" agency. They specialize in the branding. Their president calls himself the Thing-namer. Thing-naming...that's it, that's what they do! I came across Stokefire's website after being inspired watching Art & Copy. While the "Madmen" and big shots may scorn at this film, I was exhilarated at learning invention process of iconic catch phrases. This documentary made me feel like I was part of the creative

What if all fonts were Web-Safe?

June 5th, 2010
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Our creative partners have always cringed when we tell them we have to scrap their gorgeous custom font and replace it with something like plain-old Verdana. For the past 3 years, we have convinced some of clients to enable websites using Cufon or SiFR. These solutions worked around the web browser's limitation of using fonts the viewer does not own by mixing Javascript and Flash or SVG to re-draw text in the custom font. Both technologies produced an unpleasant user experience as they sized and displayed fonts in real-time to the user. Especially on slower machines, users would see the font drawn and redrawn at several decreasing sizes until the process was "just right." Google, in coordination with TypeKit, has released an elegant solution to this problem. The WebFont loader allows us to leverage custom fonts to be rendered natively by the web browser. That's right your CSS file could say font-face:"Your font name" just as easily as "Arial." In other words, there is no learni