Two weeks ago when I was in Las Vegas attending CES (The Consumer Electronics Show) with a good friend of mine from Evident Productions, we came up with idea for a blog series. So over the next month or two I will be blogging about my experiences at the show from a little point of view than many blogs you may find that have talked about CES.

I will be doing this series as a multi-part series that focuses on design, quality and production side of the entire trade show experience rather than focusing on the products that were presented at the show.

That’s about it for now! Hope you’re having a great day where you are!

• Showcasing our clients and the work we’ve performed for them
• Providing information about our services
• A simple quotation form
• Updated blog design to display our thoughts and musings
• Twitter feed in a more organized fashion
• Prettier more functional design.

Here’s what we came up with so far. Look for it soon live on our site!

In Safari for Windows you have a choice. You can use native Windows ClearType rendering for fontsor you can use OSX anti-aliasing. Turning it on and off is simple:

Take your pick, it’s easy! Just go to Safari Preferences, choose the “Appearance” menu and set Font smoothing to whatever you fancy! It’s that easy!

Software list:

• Apple OS X
• Windows Vista
• Adobe CS4 Master Collection
• Textmate
• Ultra Edit
• Adium/Pidgin
• Skype
• Smart FTP
• Fetch
• Putty
• GIT

Hardware list:

• Mac Pro (Quad Core with 8GB of RAM)
• Macbook Pro (Dual Core with 4GB of RAM)
• HP Workstation (Quad Core with 4GB of RAM)
• HP Elitebook (Dual Core with 4GB of RAM)
• Mac Mini (Coming soon to the family)
• 3 VPS Servers (Slice)
• 1 Grid Server (MediaTemple)
• Amazon WS, S3, EC2
• HP, Viewsonic, Dell and Asus Monitors
• Wacom Tablets

There you have it. That’s our weapon list.

The Lost Tribes of New York City from Carolyn London on Vimeo.

Step 1: Figure out what you’re going to do with your site

All too often, first timers pick their web host by cost. They find some company that offers hosting and a bag of cookies for $2.00/mo and immediately sign up. This is by far not the best idea. It’s much easier to sign up on a good web host then move your hosting from one host to another in the future. The first thing anyone should do is decide what they’re going to put on their site. Maybe a blog? Or perhaps it’s just a 3 or 4 page site advertising your new plumbing service. You might even be thinking something more advanced like an online forum to discuss healthy foods and medicines. Any of these 3 simple website have a wide range of technologies and services needed from the web hosting company. After you’ve figured out what you’re going to do with your site, go to Google and search for a host that supports what you want. So lets just say you’re going to run a small business website on Wordpress. Go to Google and search for “Wordpress hosting.” Start looking through some of the hosts. So thats it for Step 1. Decide what you’re going to do with your site.

Step 2: Find a company with a good reputation

So far we’ve already decided we’re going to build a small business website using Wordpress. We’ve searched Google and found over 1,000,000 results on Wordpress hosting. The next thing would be to see who Wordpress recommends. It just so happens that Wordpress happily recommends hosting companies that run Wordpress at an optimal level. (Wordpress Hosting Page) Your next step might be going to Google and searching for reviews on the top hosts from that page. A search might be something like “MediaTemple hosting review.” You’ll see a very wide variety of results. Pick a few and just start reading to get a general feeling about the company.

Step 3: Looking for the right features

Another question we see quite often is “should I use Windows or Linux hosting?” We usually answer that with Linux. But here’s why. Linux tends to have a LOT more opensource and free applications built for it. Some examples of this are Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal and so on. While you may still need to hire someone like 26AM to do development work for you, you can save a lot in not having to actually pay for the software. Windows however may be what you need if you’re interfacing with some special Windows database in your network. More often than not, Linux will serve you well. The next items to look at are below:

• Storage/Harddrive Space – How much space do you need? Are you posting a bunch of videos? Look for no less than 10GB of space.
• Email – How many email addresses do you need? Most hosting companies offer more than enough email accounts.
• FTP Access – Be sure your hosting company lets you use FTP, this is the most common way of moving files from your computer to the server
• SSH Access – If you’re working with a development company like 26AM, you’ll make your developers life many times easier with SSH.
• MYSQL (Database) – You will almost always need MYSQL if your website contains any dynamic components
• PHP or Ruby on Rails – Two technologies that are needed to run almost all modern websites.

Step 4: Cost and Value

Cost is not our main concern when picking a hosting company. We’ve gone that route before and have found ourselves very dissatisfied. While the hosting companies we used did in fact meet the above criteria, they were frequently down for maintenance or had terrible customer support. It’s important to find a hosting company that will hold your hand through out the hosting process. They should be available into the evening hours for support, they should offer telephone and email support and they should have an uptime guarantee. The cheapest hosts are often NOT the best hosts. Do you really think if you’re paying $2.00/mo that Company X is going to make you a priority?

Step 5: Some companies we like but don’t necessarily use:

• Rackspace
• Slicehost
• MediaTemple
• Joyent

So I thought I’d settle the speculations surrounding our studio. Twenty Six AM came about at about 2:00AM one morning about 2 years ago. I was pretty fresh out of college and really didn’t like the name I’d used throughout college: Sudarma Studio. It was 2 in the morning and I was browsing other studio websites and decided to call my new studio: 26AM. 1 year later Josh became the other half of 26AM as our programmer/admin/developer. 26AM really reminds us of the hours that we put in to make great projects. Whether it’s 2 in the morning or 1 in the afternoon, we put in tons of effort to make great sites and designs. And that is how we came up with 26AM. At times a reminder of our humble past and at times a reminder of our desire to work hard.