toll free (877) 266-7725

corporate (310) 417-3544

CRE Rentals Offers Tips on Web Design (Part 1 of 2)

November 10th, 2009

There are a few types of businesses that don’t need a Web site—really!—as well as a growing number that do business only over the Internet. Whatever business you are just starting—with a few computer rentals from CRE and a dream—you may be tasked with building a site yourself. Just how do you go about it if you’re not a design pro?

Keep it simple

World Wide Web Your site needs to communicate your business’s mission and “value propositions” clearly—and cleanly. Give visitors what they need to make the decision that you want, whether it’s to purchase a product, engage your services or donate to your nonprofit. Although Flash animations are entertaining, they are no longer cutting edge. Minimize the “eye candy.”

Whether you are testing your new company intranet with an Xserve rental, or refining the site you already have, some basic design rules will help. It is easier to warn you about common “Web site woes” than teach you good design in a couple of blog posts. We will give you 10 great tips today, and 15 more next time around, to get you thinking (then doing).

1. Some Home pages make visitors click “Enter” or “Continue” to get to the real Home page. Home should be, well, Home!

2. Don’t waste space with an array of badges, Good Housekeeping seals or other certificates. If they are important, include them on your About page.

3. Be sure to include contact information. You’d be surprised how many sites leave out the most important details, like how to reach them or store location.

4. Visitors will leave in a nanosecond if they can’t figure out, immediately, what your site is about. Tell them clearly.

5. Do not “auto play” your favorite tune. If you really do need music, put “mute” and “off” buttons in plain sight.

6. Everybody speed-reads on the Web. Use short sentences, headlines, bullet points and lists to assist readers in “finding and filtering” your site’s content.

7. Forget fancy fonts, six different typefaces or eensy-teensy 5-point type. Don’t make visitors use the zoom control (which many don’t even know about).

8. Limit the Flash animations and video clips. Pages take longer to load, and overuse can irritate people.

9. Don’t go crazy with the color scheme. Super bright or very dark colors take some skill to use correctly, so stay in the “muted middle.”

10. This is your company’s “virtual face,” so no spelling or grammatical errors are allowed. If you’re not the best writer or editor, get professional help.

Above all, don’t let the Web work worry you. Just keep your cool, do some research, look at what good sites do (and don’t do) and do your best. CRE is here to help businesses, with everything from comprehensive office equipment rentals to high-powered workstations for exacting work in science, IT, the visual arts and audio engineering—as well as your bookkeeping and e-mail, of course.

Whatever you need, from laptop to computers (including Mac Pro rentals), our expert Account Executives are here for you. You can call us, send an e-mail or fill out our Quick Rental Quote form online, and the solution is on its way.

Blazing New Trails with Both Macs and PCs

October 30th, 2009

We are truly living in a virtual world now. Many of the best new ideas in computing and communications are technologies that transport your voice, your face, and your mouse, keyboard and touch-tone commands through cyberspace into someone else’s computer or other device. It’s all about “connectivity with control,” at least for this news cycle.

PC remote control

If you need help on your computer, it is now possible for someone at a remote location to log right onto your computer with you and even take control of your system. This is not some advanced, expensive add-on technology. It’s built right into Mac OS X’s iChat application, and is easily done in Windows Vista and the new Windows 7, as well.

This could completely change how your company maintains its PCs. Remote operators can log on to corporate workstations to perform a remote computer repair and/or ongoing maintenance—for PCs across the hall or across the country. You can also train remote employees by taking control of their screens and showing them what to do. If you want to test all of these capabilities without interrupting any ongoing work flow, consider renting iMacs from CRE. The iMac runs both Mac OS X and Windows, so you can test all the different setups and combinations.

Telephonic control

Let’s say you’ve decided to host your own Web site and/or a company intranet. Xserve Rental During the development and debugging period, you can rent an Xserve workgroup server and then, pair it with another high-tech Apple device—an iPhone. That’s right, an iPhone – there are some powerful and innovative apps being developed for remote network operations.

Imagine being on the road and remotely monitoring CPU, memory, disks, uptime, load averages and more, using only your iPhone. iPhone Applications If you have the Xserve set up the right way, you will never be out of touch with it. This incredible power can be in the palm of your hand, today.

More Apple talk

New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller may have inadvertently disclosed Apple’s long-rumored tablet computer device as he was speaking to his paper’s digital media group last week. Keller was discussing his hopes of delivering the news via an assortment of online media when he said, “I’m hoping we can get the newsroom more actively involved in the challenge of delivering our best journalism in the form of Times Reader, iPhone apps, WAP, or the impending Apple Slate…”

Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab posted a video and transcript of Keller’s talk. Online pundits and rumormongers pounced on the errant statement as a case of “Nerdian slip” (with apologies to Freud). The Times has allegedly met with Apple executives about the future of digital media and many have guessed that such discussions touched on the possibility of delivering content to an e-reader-like device from Apple. With sales of its desktops and laptops making records every quarter, some still question whether Apple would cannibalize its own business with a netbook or tablet, even one that “thinks different.” Interested in renting a PC or Mac? Request Rental Quote today.

Harvesting Entertainment from Render Farms

June 4th, 2009

Before the present Digital Everything Era, film editing was accomplished with the aid of complex, Rube Goldberg-like electromechanical contraptions—plus seasoned professionals wielding sharp razors. Classic animated films owe their existence to small armies of illustrators, colorists and photographers—plus other seasoned professionals wielding sharp eyes. Both kinds of productions were labor-intensive, costly, time-consuming, repetitive and tedious.

We are now three decades into the modern computer era, dating from around the time that serious processing power began landing on desktops. The new personal computers (PC’s) eventually evolved to give these animators and filmmakers, as well as the rest of us running businesses or playing games, capable combos of hardware and software onto which we could dump our labor-intensive, costly, time-consuming, repetitive and tedious tasks. Perhaps the most powerful symbol of how far we have come is the “render farm.”

Farms in Hollywood?

Today, film editors and animators have incredibly powerful software tools that require very brainy and brawny computers. Animators work with such applications as Maya, the Strata family, Toon Boom Animate Pro and a number of others, while film editors rely on Adobe Premiere, Sony’s Vegas products, Apple Final Cut Pro (or FCP, now at version 6), the Avid product line and several others. Some applications do 3D, some do texture mapping, some are strictly for character animation and a few combine multiple capabilities. Most of the top applications are cross-platform, running under both Windows and Macintosh OS X, but FCP is still Mac-only and Vegas is exclusively for PCs. Of course, both OS’s run on Intel-based Macs, so there is no lack of choices for production professionals whatever the hardware situation.

However, even with the fastest individual PC or 8-core Mac Pro, there can be a lack of computing power when it comes to rendering—performing the final output—from one of these software programs. While an editor or artist will use a single workstation to create and modify their movie or animated film, they can avail themselves of a group of networked computers—the render farm—to output their files into the final product we will see on screen. This means that the creative process can continue on a standalone workstation while the render farm crunches the numbers to produce those final, finished images.

No more bottlenecks .. rent a PC or Mac

CRE has been configuring render farm rentals from fast PCs and Macs for years, supporting the work of animators, filmmakers, video game artists and post-production professionals. When projects start backing up, clients have a rush job or a system goes on the fritz, entertainment industry veterans know that renting a PC-, Mac Pro- or Xserve-based render farm from CRE can be configured, flight checked and on its way to Ground Zero in no time. Considering the price tag on these potent computers and high-end graphics software, a render farm rental is a cost-effective way to get the work done (fast!) without making a five-figure purchase.

We have pre-configured our capable “render farm toolboxes” to handle most anything you throw at them. An extra 16GB of RAM in the 8-core Mac Pro rentals and the crystal clear, accurate color of the 23-inch Apple Cinema Display HD monitors add serious muscle to these state-of-the-art workstations (and we have 30-inch displays, too). When you request a render farm rental quote from CRE you can specify exactly what you need, tell us precisely what you’re doing and be 100% sure that our Account Executives will configure and deliver not just hardware and software, but an efficient, effective solution to your production bottleneck.

Next Entries »