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The 2014 Kids Summer Reading Club (SRC) - themed "Funny Business" - is in full swing now!

The Kids SRC is designed to get children reading, with the use of a fun theme, posters, stickers, a reading record, bookmarks, completion medals, and novelty items. In addition each year they have a new designed website offering 7 quizzes (1 for each week of the program) word puzzles, and fun games.

This year's artist is Jeremy Tankard. Jeremy attended the Alberta College of Art & Design where he studied drawing and print-making. His early career focused on editorial illustrations for publications such as Time magazine, Fortune, The New York Times, Guitar Player, Royal Bank, and The Globe & Mail. However, when his daughter Hermione became a toddler, Jeremy found himself reading stacks of picture books and was reminded of the main reason he had wanted to attend art school in the first place - to create picture books!

Thank you!

A BIG thanks to BC Library Association for the opportunity, yet again. It's always a great experience working with you and so rewarding to be a part of helping our kids improve their reading skills.

The 2014 Summer Reading Club is sponsored by the British Columbia Library Association and your local public library with the assistance of Libraries and Literacy, Ministry of Education.

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JenTekk has been assisting the Canadian Society of Endocrinology and Metabolism (CSEM) with website support and consulting services since 2011. Last winter we determined it was time to upgrade their existing site.

CSEM's site was running on Joomla 1.0 which had reached its end-of-life years ago, leaving it completely outdated and vulnerable. We concluded it would be best to move CSEM to the latest stable release of Joomla 3.x - a fully Bootstrap responsive platform with enhanced functionality.

The update also included a more modern and polished look and feel for the CSEM website. The new site - built with Warp template framework - includes Font Awesome and UIkit, and is responsive / mobile-friendly back-end and front-end.

The new site retained CSEM's brand and colours, only with a cleaner & roomier feel, and updated content formatting. Oh and did we mention it also functions wonderfully on all mobile devices?!

Before

After

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JenTekk was hired to update the Green Acres Pet Care's website. It was originally built in 2008 using WordPress - however after some discussion we decided to not only update the site's look & feel, but also move it onto Joomla CMS.

In addition to moving their website onto a more robust platform, JenTekk also assisted with their new brand (logo) development and updates to content and information architecture.

The final product uses: Joomla 3, Gantry template framework, is responsive / mobile-friendly back-end and front-end, and uses ChronoForms by ChronoEngine for the Request a Reservation booking form.

The new site looks modern, functions wonderfully on mobile devices, and offers visitors more information and ways to go about booking kennel reservations for their pet.

Before

After

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A few weeks back I wrote an article on AWStats - a website activity tracking tool found on cPanel - offered by many hosting companies.

Today I'm going to help you make sense of your site's valuable statistics.

When you arrive at your AWSTats page you will see at the very top:

Last Update: the date & time your statistics were last updated, as well as the report period.

Reported period: is great if your site's been online for a while because you can compare your statistics from one month/year to another. Simply select your month from the drop-down menu to view previous months and click the OK button.  If you've been online for years, you can also select your year in additions to your month.

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Clients often ask me about being able to see their website activity. For example, they want to see how busy their site is, which pages are most popular, the sites directing traffic to their website, and where their visitors are coming from, as well as keywords and keyphrases used by search engines.

Google Anaytics is one of the most popular and comprehensive website visitor tracking software services out there, but can be a bit intimidating for newbies.

I do recommend adding Google Analytics to your website, however, if your hosting company offers cPanel Software with your website hosting package, there is an easier to understand alternative that you may appreciate - at least until you get your PHD in Google Analytics.

This wonderful website tracking tool is call AWStats - Advanced Web Statistics.

AWStats is a logging tool that generates ample website statistics, and presents them through a very user-friendly graphical interface.

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A while back, a good friend of mine Liesa Billings of Rustic Buds asked if I would write about what it was like growing up on a blueberry farm. Liesa writes about restaurants, farming, and sustainable food resources in and around the Greater Vancouver Area and was naturally curious.

Taking that trip down memory lane and what I'd discovered was as much a surprise to me as it was to Liesa. I won't spoil the read, but suffice to say I need to go back to those days more often and appreciate that I was - and still am - blessed.

TOO MUCH of a good thing?!

It may seem hard to understand that too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. Growing up on a blueberry farm had its perks and "not-so-perky" side! I am sure that I look at blueberries in a completely different way than most. For example, as an adult, I have never had the desire to purchase blueberries, or to eat them. I guess you could say I got my fill as a child - enough to last me a lifetime. As a little girl I really couldn't appreciate the quality of blueberries that my Father grew... they were fresh, sweet, big and juicy. I thought this was how *all* blueberries were. NOT so.

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The website development process varies from project to project depending on the customers needs and the web development company. The following is a general overview of some of the steps you may encounter while developing your own online presence.

Initial Consultation (s)

• Get a good feeling for if you'd like to work with this web development company. Just because you meet with them for an initial consultation doesn't mean you are obligated to hire them.
• Discuss your marketing needs. You may want to read Website cost and pre-quote questions to determine your website requirements.
• Ask questions, and also for recommendations and feedback on your marketing requirement needs and possible solutions.