Caffeine: Keeps Your Computer Awake When You Need It

Here’s a useful tool that ranks as high as a morning cup of coffee in my book. (Which is about as high as you can imagine.)

The type of caffeine that won't keep you up a night

Do you get annoyed when your computer screen goes to sleep in the middle of something you’re doing (e.g., having a meeting with a client, watching a webinar, or uploading a file)? Me too. That’s why I was so happy to discover Caffeine, (app store link) a cool app that allows you to override your screen saver settings and set the automatic sleep time to be whatever you want.

I love the fact that when the app is turned on, it shows a full cup of steaming coffee — and when it’s off, the cup is empty.

When turned on the cup is full, when off the cup is empty.

… This is one kind of caffeine that will never give you a headache.

Dateline: An Easy Way to Stay On Top of Your Schedule

If you’re a busy small business owner dealing with a hectic schedule, here’s a useful tool that can help you stay on top of what’s happening. Dateline is a nifty little app for Mac computers that displays a linear calendar right on your desktop that is automatically synced with your iCal program. The current date is identified with a colored dot that makes it easy to see where you are in the month and gives you instant access to your calendar and events.

I use this handy tool every day. Here’s what it looks like on my desktop:

Dateline on my desktop (pictured with my left foot)

You can move it anywhere on your desktop, customize the text, changed the color of the dot (I currently have red), increase or decrease the width and optionally add a small background around each number to fit in with whatever desktop picture you might have.

You can also set the application act like a normal window on the desktop or make it like it is part of the desktop.

It comes in a free and paid version that includes some advanced features and costs only $4.95. Well worth it, in my opinion.

Do you have a favorite time management tool for your Mac? If so, tell us about it in the comments.

Kafka’s Coffee and Tea

Kafka's Coffee and Tea

Client: Kafka’s Coffee and Tea

Need: A completely redesigned website to match their updated branding

Proposal: To create a website that embodies the feeling people get when they walk into the cafe.

Concept: A self-managed website with the ability to promote cafe events and showcase their product.

Solution: A WordPress-based website featuring a front page image slider along with an events calendar and a newsletter sign up.

Result: Improved search engine ranking over the previous site and a happy client who is engaging his customer through his own site to come back to visit his cafe.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing

We are talking with our email marketing clients to show their templates on our website.

For now check out our favorite email marketing provider.

www.mailchimp.com

Spoken Word

Hello and welcome to 32spokes web design. We are a web design company with offices in Sechelt, BC and Vancouver, BC. We’re here to help you get your website in gear and help you engage with your customers on the internet.

Our name comes from our love of cycling and how we approach building sites for the internet. Find out more about our process via our “about” page.

We’d like to send out some props to people and companies who have helped us launch:

• Helena Rae and Dandy Graphics. She took our ideas and analogies of a bicycle hub and its redundancy of multiple spokes around the hub that provides strength and backup and came up with this simple yet brilliant logo. We could not be happier with her work and involvement.
• Artist Jana Curll who gave us our own twitter bird on a unicycle. We needed something that both went with our colour scheme and was still fun and cheerful. She came up with this sketch and we just loved it.
• Andy Clark Vancouver based Reuters Photographer for our 404 page image from Velodrome at the 2000 Sydney Summer Olympics.
• Bikes on the Drive whose tree bike was our first contract – even before we were a company – and was the inspiration behind our name and mantra.
• Our hosting provider site5 whose robust equipment is only matched by their amazing customer service.
• Matt and the entire WordPress Core team. You have made the internet a whole lot easier to use.

Thanks for stopping by! if you would like to give us some feedback drop us a line via our contact page or via our twitter account.

Tidbits of goodness

Please browse the articles below to discover useful tools and information resources that will help you promote your business more effectively on the Web.

And if you’re looking for a tool or resource to answer a question or help you solve a specific problem, please contact us We’re happy to help!