Glerin recently designed the poster for the 33rd Annual Virginia Cantaloupe Festival and brought a whole new look to the event.

Working with the Halifax County Chamber of Commerce, our goal was to start a new tradition of a collectable poster for all festival years beginning with 2013. This year's design has fun with changes in schedule and location from past years.

The festival is being moved to Berry Hill Resort, bringing back memories of the beautiful rolling hills that we enjoyed during the first years when it was originally held in Turbeville. Scheduling a month earlier to avoid the thunderstorms that have plagued past years resulted in a bit of local controversy since Halifax cantaloupes won't be ripe until the next month.

It's hard to believe Glerin has been around since 1996, and even crazier to think back on how different things were back then when I first started developing websites professionally. I had been playing around with website development for about a year before that.

To put things in perspective, a little trivia from 1996:

• The average American with internet access spent less than 30 minutes a month surfing the web.
• Many people thought AOL was the internet. It was the most popular site, reaching 41% of users.
• Travelocity opened online, and primarily travel agents were booking passengers on American Airlines.
• Apple stock sunk to a 10-year low of $18.
• Microsoft introduced the wheel mouse.
• Google was first developed.
• Netscape was the most popular browser.
• The 5 major search engines were Yahoo!, Magellan, Lycos, Infoseek, and Excite.
• IMDB.com came online.
• If you had internet access you were on dialup, waiting forever for your modem to connect.
• Average page load time was 30 seconds. (3 seconds today & people will leave your site!)
• Developers like me were coding their sites from scratch - no WYSIWYG editors (What You See Is What You Get).
• The internet was commonly referred to as the "World Wide Web."
• There were 2o million internet users in America; to put this in perspective, there were over 245 million in mid-2012.
• Time magazine featured Amazon as one of the best websites, amazed at being able to search for books by author, subject or title.

And to think many smart business people wrote the internet off as a fad!  It's mind boggling to try to imagine how much things will change in the next 16 years. Are you still waffling on your web presence?  If so, you need to start thinking seriously about the future of your business because there's no way it will survive in the long run without adapting to the new economy, of which the internet is the hub. Even now, 40% of consumers research online before purchasing offline.

For a little more nostalgia, check out these screenshots from 1996.

Time's review of Amazon's "revolutionary new way" to sell books:

We've all heard the saying "beware the cost of the lowest price," and this also applies in design.  The best option doesn't necessarily have the highest price, but often the lowest priced option has the highest cost.  "How?," you ask... Let me share an experience I had today, and how poor usability cost Walmart a sale. Add enough of these sales up and it could be a substantial chunk of change, even for a company of that size.

First off, remember that price is the sticker price of an item but true cost is arrived at by combining that price with what you stand to lose in sales, time, goodwill, efficiency, etc.

We needed an item for the office that wasn't available locally so I decided to order online.  I was on the road and a quick search on my phone gave the exact item I wanted for $99 at Walmart's online store.  Being in a hurry, I was prepared to order without shopping around.  The problem arose with the poor design of their mobile checkout process and Walmart's sale became Amazon's sale.

What do Aretha Franklin, Peter Criss (Kiss drummer), Chris Noth (Law and Order, Sex and the City), and Bill Cosby all have in common? They've all collaborated and co-written with Charles Kipps. Here's your chance to learn firsthand how to break into the entertainment industry from a guy who started with no connections and made it big in his early twenties.

In his own words, this is how he got his start: "One day I was in DC, and I heard a song coming through a window.  I thought it sounded interesting.  So I walked in and saw three guys singing a song called "5-10-15-20 (25-30 Years of Love)." I told them
that I wanted to take a demo tape of it to New York.  Now keep in mind that I was in my early twenties, and I told them I could do something with it.  I called a couple of people and ended up being directed to a guy named Ron Moseley at Sussex Records.  He loved it, and it went on to be a Top 10 hit and have a Grammy nomination that year.  The group was called "The Presidents."

Charles Kipps has won Emmy, Edgar and Peabody awards, and has 7 gold records. A few highlights over the years:

Continuing our annual tradition, we designed our Christmas card in-house.  This year's card was designed by Erin Kipps Brown, and the front is touched off by cotton to create 3d clouds.

We hope you have a wonderful holiday, and here's to a great 2013!