Campbell, Harrington & Brear

September 11th, 2012
Posted By: Christian

CH&B Art Director Kris Heilman Is Featured in Susquehanna Style Spread

Susquehanna Style magazine reaches more than 70,000 readers over 10 South Central Pennsylvania counties. This month, they’re all privy to something really wild: Our very own Art Director Kris Heilman is modeling the essential styles for fall 2012 in a spread spanning seven pages.

Wilder yet? Her co-models are badgers and tigers and boars (Oh, my!) as well as other fuzzy friends from a remarkable taxidermy collection found in the nature education center at Nixon Park in York County.

Stylist Hilary Arthur asked Kris if she’d be interested in doing the shoot, and Kris, who’s game for pretty much anything other than buying Power Ball tickets, agreed to help.
Although she had done a bit of modeling in the past, Kris says, “This was kind of nerve-wracking with 10 people on the set. I’m usually on the other end of it. I’m used to being the art director. There was a part of me that wanted to say, ‘Let me see what the picture looks like.’

“But I just tried to have fun with it. It’s kind of hard to take it too seriously when you have a chipmunk on your shoulder and a kangaroo standing behind you.”

In fact, she says, that’s the lesson she’ll apply next time she’s directing a session. “I would say the most important thing I learned is to make the model feel comfortable and keep it light-hearted, because I think that produces the best results.”

Check out Kris and her furry menagerie at Susquehanna Style.

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August 2nd, 2012
Posted By: Christian

Responsive Web Design Optimizes Mobile Experience

If your website’s analytics indicate a significant amount of traffic from mobile users, it’s time to incorporate responsive site design.

Responsive site design allows the site to fluidly adjust and rescale to the screen size and orientation (horizontal or vertical) of any mobile device or desktop computer. That’s right, any mobile device.

It’s fairly new. It is truly responsive in that it uses media queries to re-structure content specifically for each individual device’s display size. And because it can be fluid and adjust to any given display, it adapts to all current and future devices.

It is also the ideal way to ensure the best possible user experience, regardless of device. A truly responsive site quickly loads everything the user needs to see while stripping out superfluous content. Plus, responsive sites scale down immediately, so mobile users don’t have to zoom in.

Some businesses have tried to accommodate the mobile explosion by designing a separate website for mobile users. Unfortunately, since those mobile web addresses differ from the main web address, links shared from mobile browsers do not improve search visibility for the main site.

Furthermore, these separate sites created for Mobile users are confined to one single device size (generally, an average cell phone’s vertical orientation display size). As a result, they do not adjust for tablets or the larger display sizes of certain mobile devices.

Because responsive site design is code built into the architecture of your main site, your single site benefits from shared links regardless of the source and it immediately orients to any screen size.

At CH&B, we recommend ‘mobile-first’ responsive site design for clients experiencing significant mobile traffic.  Mobile-first optimizes the load time for mobile devices by prioritizing content, compressing vital images, and eliminating the loading of items that mobile users will never need.

Responsive site design is not an easy fix, but it is a long-term solution that will enable you to accommodate every single web-enabled device – even future iterations with new and ground-breaking sizes. And with 77 percent of the world’s population owning a mobile device, this is not an issue that’s going away.

For more information on responsive site design and mobile-first, contact Angela Wenner via email or call 717.846.2947.

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