Spreading joy is contagious this time of year, and rightly so. As the year draws to a close, it gives us the opportunity to reflect upon our journeys, express gratitude, and celebrate life, via an assortment of customs and traditions, spanning across the globe. It’s a season steeped in nostalgia, dusting off customs that have habitually become less conventional. It’s a time of sending cards instead of shooting emails.

This year, we abandoned our mice and grabbed pencils instead, deciding to capture the holiday spirit with warm wishes and a calendar for the new year. Our calendar highlights each season with illustrations of traditions we anticipate and relish every year. These events are only a taste of what makes New Orleans unique. We hope it makes our local clients grin and encourages our clients nationwide to come sample the many things we love about our home. As a starting point, we’ve offered our personal favorites for each season. Beyond that, we celebrate virtually everything from andouille to zydeco, so there’s rarely a dull time to drop in for a bite.

We hope you have a joyous holiday season. Once you’ve hugged your last guest farewell and packed away your holiday decorations, resolve to continue to celebrate life, prosperity and friendship into the next year. We will likewise await the new year, and a fresh slice of king cake soon thereafter.

The St. Bernard Project was started in 2006 with the goal of helping Hurricane Katrina survivors return to their homes, their communities, and their New Orleans, through the project’s volunteer-based rebuilding programs, as well as The Center for Wellness and Mental Health.

With the intent of helping rebuild the home of a family in need, the Mudbug team donned sanding blocks, spackling troughs, and drywalling accoutrements, helping to pave the way for a family to return home before 2011 to ring in the New Year with a fresh start and some fresh paint. Hopefully, the champagne cork will be diverted away from the “Wet Paint” signs.

Since it’s inception, St. Bernard Project’s Rebuilding Program has completed 333 homes in St. Bernard and Orleans Parish, with help from more than 29,000 volunteers and 2,500 donors. SBP currently has 50 homes under construction with the average rebuild effort taking volunteers 12 weeks to complete and $12,000.

Mudbug’s talents were assigned to a house in Lakeview, which was in need of some drywall. A group of us spent the day mudding (you see the irony here …. mudding Mudbugs?!), while others used their upper body strength to hang drywall in another room. I was impressed by the skill, ease, and unbridled confidence with which the St. Bernard Project project manager set me to work and provided insight on how to mud. After all, I know graphic design; I’m not inherently equipped to mud. By the end of the day, we were covered in mud and dust, and considered ourselves expert mudders/drywallers (although actual professionals may argue to the contrary.) I left the project with mud on my jeans, the ‘giving spirit’ fresh in my mind, and the satisfaction of knowing I helped another New Orleanian family. Now, as an accomplished mudder, I’m ready for Good Deed #10.

(More photos of the day’s events are available at our Flickr photostream)

“I am excited, as a small company, to be recognized as one of New Orleans’ best places to work,” said Mudbug Media president Scott Zeitzer, “We really enjoy what we do and it’s an honor to be recognized by such an important publication.”

Mudbug Media fosters pride and creativity in and out of the workplace, allowing for the achievement of success for both its clients and employees.

Growing from the personal passions of its team, Mudbug Media boasts a history of emphasis on non-profit service and volunteerism.

Among the outstanding benefits for employees are the option to telecommute and Tuesday Morning Breakfast Club. With eight employees working remotely from different cities across the country, Mudbug Media is a nationwide entity, allowing for improved customer service and staff mobility.  As part of the agency’s dedication to open dialogue and growth, Tuesday Morning Breakfast Club allows employees to meet weekly with president Scott Zeitzer to discuss innovation ideas and new strategies.

Started in 2003, Best Places to Work recognizes the city’s 50 top employers, including 35 large companies and 15 small. Honorees are chosen based on a questionnaire of benefits offered, including average salary, health care, paid time off, and employee programs, coupled with an online survey of employees.

About Mudbug Media

Mudbug Media Inc. is a full-service digital agency headquartered in New Orleans. Founded in 1998, Mudbug Media currently employs professionals specializing in online/email marketing, website design, mobile device apps, application development, and graphic design for local, regional, and national clients. More information can be found online by visiting www.mudbugmedia.com.

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Search

An in-depth look at search auto-suggestions.

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Programming

Contrary to new survey, you should investigate location-based apps.

Ideas for iPhone apps.

Flip! A jQuery plugin v0.9.9.

Dynamic FAQ Section w/jQuery, YQL & Google Docs.

App icons on iPad and iPhone.

Marketing

Do we really need to be social on social media?

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Design

A man, a plan and a Sharpie: “The Great Typo Hunt.”

100 pages of images, fonts, & amusement!

Showcase of delicious coffee websites.

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Design

Why 37signals’ Advice is irrelevant.

Listen to your mother and drink your Design Milk every day.

Learn how to Design the Experience.

Alphabet Book’s Visual Index of New Orleans.

For more local designs, check out Good’s New Orleans Issue.

Social Media

15 Excellent Corporate Blogs to learn from.

The origin of Twitter’s “Fail Whale.”

The 4 Hottest Social Media Marketing Trends explained.

How Social Media is Turning Us Into Responsible Voters.

Programming

An HTML5 Video Player in CSS with Silverlight and Flash.

An example of MarkerClusterer v3.

Marketing

How to demonstrate and deliver Lead-Nurturing ROI.

Mobile Video is expected to Double Reach by 2013.

An update on rankings for long-tail searches.

SEO

Do 301 redirects Dilute PageRank?

Google’s search party is over.

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Facebook

Facebook Open Graph: Coming to a Mobile Device Near You.

How to Protect Your Brand and Strengthen Your Facebook Presence with Facebook Community Pages.

Email Marketing

Using Email Marketing to Boost Social Presence.

Truncation traps: 3 more subject line lessons.

Why Email Metrics Are in Decline.

Infographics!

12 kickass SEO Infographics.

But really, what infographic isn’t kickass?

iPad

Thoughts on Designing for the iPad.

You can put the brand onto the iPad, But You Can’t Put The IPad Into The Brand.

In other news: your horse is thirsty.

Google News

Bing generates More Clicks Than Google.

Google Places API Could Do For Check-ins What Google Maps Did For Maps.

Make them relevant?

A Video

Sheena Iyengar on the art of choosing.

Chart of the Day

Digg users Have More Diverse Taste than Reddit readers.

Take that Reddit!

Can’t wait for the next link round up? Check back here everyday to see what we are interested in.

Utilizing our core competencies of interactive design and development, Mudbug Media has worked with the National Wildlife Federation on the creation of the organization’s new online music store – www.nwfmusicstore.com.

Making Beautiful (Nature) Music Together

Cory Zeitzer, our Director of Business Development, has worked with NWF extensively over the years, and was a driving force in the solidification of this fresh brand partnership. His insights served as guide to the collaboration of Mudbug Media and Puretracks Entertainment in the production of this site, the first branded online music store dedicated exclusively to the ‘Nature Music’ genre.

NWF’s Music Store features music from the Solitudes Collection, and includes everything from bird songs and ocean sounds to piano sonatas and lullabies. Each track features the highly esteemed sound recordings of Dan Gibson, the Juno Award-winning environmentalist and nature cinematographer.

Helping the Gulf Coast and Beyond

Proceeds from the sale of music on this site will go to benefit NWF’s various conservation and environmental clean-up efforts nationwide. In light of the recent Gulf Oil Spill disaster, the group’s dedication to these causes is especially appreciated by those of us here in New Orleans.

Going forward, the Mudbug Media team looks forward to the opportunity to promote this music site and its offerings through ongoing marketing efforts. Again, it is an honor to work with the NWF team in creating a better future for our environment and America’s extraordinary natural treasures.

How You Can Help

Whether you’re looking for a ‘green’ way to support the National Wildlife Federation’s service efforts, or enjoy the beautiful sounds of nature music, please visit www.nwfmusicstore.com. Your support is greatly appreciated.

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By the Numbers

3 tips for Building an Effective Landing Page.

4 ways to Keep Your Hospital’s Website Clean.

3 Twitter tools to take away from the BlueGlass LA Twitter conference.

10 Tips for Designing Mobile Websites.

Chart

More and more businesses are Warming up to the Mac.

Design

Abduzeedo has a great article about a Psychological Study of Web Designs.

Penguin Classics is celebrating its 75^th anniversary in publishing by letting you design your own classic book cover in the Speaking to the Past contest.

Six Revisions: useful information for web developers and designers.

Marketing and SEO

How Infographics Create Organic Links for websites.

Keyword Targeting: The Essential Guide for Website Owners.

The Paradox of Promises in the age of word of mouth.

Why Consumers Connect with Marketers via email and social media.

Bing Solidifies Growth as Yahoo loses share in Q2.

The next big thing for marketers: Social Magazines.

How the fashion magazine industry Plans to Profit from Digital This Fall.

Updated Bing Webmaster Tools.

Examining the differences between Email, Facebook and Twitter audiences.

Tips to help you Assess Your Email Opt-In Process.

Can’t wait for the next link round up?  Check back here everyday to see what we are interested in.

The plan was to add Quicksand to the team page of our website, which is a great place for this type of application.

Smooth Shuffle

The idea behind Quicksand is to create an easy transition between sets of data that overlap at some point.  This seemed perfect for our team page because some of our employees work in more than one department, and it is very hard to visually represent that type of overlap in an easily understandable way.

I set up Quicksand on the team page so you can choose from six different categories, and the pictures for everyone in that category will shift over into a smaller group.  The shifting effect is really where the beauty of the plugin is, with each picture sliding smoothly into place.  Most of the work I put in to this project involved making sure all of the data groups were correct and making sure the site worked properly in all of the major Internet browsers.

Results

Everyone has been really pleased with how the team page turned out, and I think it makes sorting through our staff here much easier for visitors and clients.  This plugin has helped reshape our website and avoid navigation problems as we hire new people and the Mudbug Media team continues to grow.

Click here to see Quicksand in action on our team page.

Let us know if these links are helpful or if we’ve left something out.  Tweet, write on our wall or comment below.

Google News

Google updates maps results in web search.

Google is Conducting Focus Group Research into social networking.

5 Things Google’s Latest Patent tells us about links.

A Chart

Time Spent On Yahoo hits an all-time low.

A Book

Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers.

Advertising and Marketing

Tech Firms Tout New Online Ad Formats that are supposed to outperform banner and search ads.

A look at Data Blindness in the SEO world.

A few YouTube Best Practices you might not have thought of already.

Turning Brand Advocates into believers.

Double-Digit Growth again for online ad spending.

5 Email Marketing Mistakes to avoid.

Twitter gets a Video Ad Network.

Engage your customers in 3 Simple Steps

A Tool

PIE – Progressive Internet Explorer.

And a Podcast

Mistakes We Have Made featuring Avinash Kaushik.

Can’t wait for the next link round up?  Check back here everyday to see what we are interested in.