Entrepreneurialism Sparked in Youth by Junior Achievement

Posted By: on May 10th, 2013
Filed Under: Edmonton, Events, News

JA-Alberta-Business-Hall-of-Fame-StageJunior Achievement is the only organization that teaches entrepreneurship, financial literacy, and work readiness to students at all levels of the school system. This organization maximizes student potential by exposing them to real life business leaders that teach tangible, relevant, and relatable lessons in order to prepare them for success in the global economy.

Recently Top Draw web designer, Wendy Yeung, created an infographic to be used as a quick fact sheet regarding the impact that the local JA Northern Alberta and Northwest Territories office has made on young individuals. As illustrated by the infographic, JA Northern Alberta & NWT delivered programs to over 20,000 students in 2013 and is striving to achieve their goal of reaching 40,000 students by 2016, with added help from quality volunteers and financial support from our Alberta business community.

Continue Reading →

NAIT Promotional Campaign Planning Awards Banquet

Posted By: on May 8th, 2013
Filed Under: Edmonton, Events

For the past 32 years, NAIT has held an awards banquet for students enrolled in the Promotional Campaign Planning course. As part of the curriculum, students create campaigns for various clients and present their proposals to their peers and the course instructor. After the class presentations, the top teams are judged by a panel of industry professionals. Upon completion of the final presentation, the panel provides constructive feedback and determines the winners of numerous awards.

Continue Reading →

Art on the Block is Fast Approaching

Posted By: on May 7th, 2013
Filed Under: Edmonton

At Top Draw, we are fortunate to meet awesome folks who are not only great at what they do, they help make Edmonton a fantastic place to work and live. Two of those clients are Carolyn Patton and Oksana Gowin, whom we worked with while developing websites for ATB Investor Services and the Art Gallery of Alberta. Staunch supporters of the arts scene (as well as many other great causes) in Edmonton, these ladies recently asked us to lend our expertise in helping promote a special event of the AGA – Art on the Block. And we just couldn’t say no!

Continue Reading →

Protecting Your Brand Online

Posted By: on April 29th, 2013
Filed Under: SEO & Online Marketing

EA sports worst company

No business or person is perfect. Even if you’ve done a good job avoiding trouble and staying on the straight and narrow, sometimes trouble comes looking for you. From an online perspective, negative comments, reviews or posts about your company or products can show up in several ways.

Continue Reading →

Editing Images for the Web with Irfanview

Posted By: on April 23rd, 2013
Filed Under: Web Design

Image editing can be a real bear. For people who aren’t familiar with it, there are a lot of new terms to learn and the software seems complex and expensive. If you’re not a pro at Photoshop and you just need to capture, crop, or resize a few photos for your website, you might fall in love with a quick little program called Irfanview. *This guide is meant for photo editing beginners.

Continue Reading →

Styling Mobile Telephone Number Links

Posted By: on April 15th, 2013
Filed Under: Web Development

A styled mobile link on TopDraw.comWhile cross-browser testing, you’ll run across mobile devices automatically restyling telephone numbers as hyperlinks. How do you handle this?

You’d think this would be a no-brainer to figure out but I decided to use google-fu to double-check that I was handling the inserted link correctly. I was a bit surprised by what I found – advice on how to disable mobile device telephone links!

Continue Reading →

Congratulations to LJ Welding – Alberta Export Award Winner

Posted By: on April 10th, 2013
Filed Under: Edmonton, News

Exporting to over 35 countries around the world

LJ Welding LogoIt’s extremely satisfying to work with a company from its early years and watch them grow and prosper. When we first met the partners of LJ Welding Automation in 2006, shortly after they purchased the company, 99% of their customers were based in Alberta. They now export to over 35 countries around the world! This accomplishment recently won this welding equipment manufacturer a prestigious Alberta Export Award at the 2013 event in Calgary…and we just wanted to say congratulations!

Continue Reading →

Innovative Investment Advice Site Coming to Life in Alberta

Posted By: on April 9th, 2013
Filed Under: Edmonton, News, Web Development

Honored for the opportunity to work with ATB in the ambitious goal of creating an innovative online investment advice tool—MasterPlan—the pilot phase has just wrapped up and results are now being analyzed. Reflecting on what we accomplished to date—the concept, sheer scope and complexities of the project—provided a formidable challenge, but one that was eagerly welcomed.

This article sums up a recent interview with Rita Sly, Managing Director, Mass Market for ATB Investor Services about her experience working with Top Draw and creating MasterPlan.

Continue Reading →

For the Win Wednesdays 7 – Building Dashboards

Posted By: on April 3rd, 2013
Filed Under: SEO & Online Marketing

dashboard

Do you have common metrics that you need to report to higher ups or other departments in your company? ‘Dashboards’ in Google Analytics offers a way to filter for commonly retrieved information, and I use it to quickly provide insights that need a lot of filtering or refinement. There is information that you can easily pull out of a dashboard widget that would be difficult to get from the regular GA reports. Instead of describing how to create widgets in a dashboard, I’d encourage you to just try it out. It’s pretty straight forward, and I’d rather describe some common widget setups that can get you started on creating some useful dashboards.

Continue Reading →