Are you looking to get your home spruced up with custom glass work or merely want to add some custom glass features to your kitchen, bathroom, or other rooms in your house? Vancouver custom glass, trading as LS Custom Glass, has just launched their new website which showcases their amazing talents in the glass business in the Greater Vancouver area.

LS Custom Glass offers premium custom glass products and installation in the Greater Vancouver, BC area. The Vancouver Custom Glass website has a gallery which showcases some previous custom glass jobs. LS Custom Glass supply and install:

• Glass Backsplash
• Frameless Glass Showers
• Mirrors
• Glass Counter Tops
• Handrail Glass

LS Custom Glass is owned and operated by Lachlan Scott, who has over 10 years experience and is a Fully Qualified Master Glazier, which demands a four year apprenticeship. The company’s foundation is built on service, quality and price, and takes pride in beautiful and functional glass highlights. The company prides itself on its green initiatives and is not only passionate about its customers glass products and installation, but is also conscious of the impact it makes on the environment.

The Vancouver Custom Glass website is very slick. It is built on WordPress and incorporates a user-friendly design with a very cool colour scheme. Check it out for yourself. Navigate through the images of uber-cool bathroom glass features, glass stair cases and premium kitchen glass features. If you are looking for custom glass in Vancouver then give the guys at LS Custom Glass a call.

In our regular blog posts we often look at good examples of nice websites in the Greater Vancouver area that service the public and private sector.

There are thousands of REALTORS in Greater Vancouver. Most seem to have websites; some are nice and some fall flat on their face. Real estate websites are a good example of something we can showcase here at WebsitesVancouver.

Your regular REALTOR website will have some snazzy graphics and images, some contact details and a few property listings widgets to show case properties for sale in different areas. There are a few real estate website platforms available such as MyRealPage and Ubertor. MyRealPage is a fairly customizable platform that allows for realtors to bring their own unique branding and style to their website. The MyRealPage platform also has lots of user-friendly features such as Map Search and MLS number search which can be easily customized and slotted into REALTOR websites.

A good example of a typical REALTOR website on the MyRealPage platform is theRedekops.com. The Redekops are a team of Realtors in the Fraser Valley area specializing in Fraser Heights real estate and have listings for properties for sale all over Surrey and the Fraser Valley area. Their site has an aesthetically pleasing look while offering full functionality and property search features.

Another REALTOR website built on the MyRealPage platform is PrivatePropertyRealty.com. This site focuses on Burnaby real estate listings and in other nearby cities such as Coquitlam, and the Tri-Cities and is a good comparison site to the previously mentioned one as it uses a different color scheme and image gallery style, but again offers full functionality and property search features.

A third example of a REALTOR website on the MyRealPage platform is PortMoodyCondos.ca. As the name suggests, the site focuses on Port Moody condos for sale. The site incorporates all the standard property listing features that MyRealPage offers while keeping a unique look.

WordPress is another platform being used by more and more REALTORS for their websites. Two examples of REALTOR websites using WordPress are CondoScore.ca and SmartHomeSellers.ca both servicing the Greater Vancouver area. Condo Score focuses on Burnaby condos for sale. As well as including MLS listings, Condo Score also allows users to review properties. Smart Home Sellers offers discount real estate packages in Richmond and the Greater Vancouver area. It incorporates all the search features that a regular real estate website has, but also has an online shopping cart function to allow users to purchase realty packages to buy or sell property. Both these sites build on WordPress look great and show how powerful and adaptable WordPress is.

Do you know of any other REALTOR websites we should feature? Let us know and we’ll feature them in our next website showcase feature.

Have you seen this logo popping up around Vancouver? Me neither, but I read on McFly’s twitter feed that it has been popping up all over Vancouver. So what is it? This logo is the creative brainchild of SplitMango. The ancient Chinese used to admire the mango for it’s peaceful qualities; that was until the mango got split. Listen, I don’t really remember the story but it’s a metaphor for the kingdom getting divided and creativity being reborn or something.

Anyways, Vancouver Web Design by SplitMango is a tag line you may or not have noticed at the bottom of several websites. SplitMango are a Vancouver web design and development company and are slowly gaining more notice through their portfolio and through their social media and SEO efforts. The Vancouver web design industry is choc full of one-trick-pony companies and large scale agencies. SplitMango is a company that gets the balance right–not too big and not too small. SplitMango prides itself on pleasing its customers. They offer a well-rounded suite of services that includes website design, development, branding and Internet Marketing.

When it comes to web design you can’t be too careful. Modern design has to look good, while being functional, and adhering to web standards. Whether it’s CSS or HTML5, a good web design company has to be up-to-date on the current techniques.

Check them out at SplitMango.com or call into their office at 938 Howe St. in downtown Vancouver.

According to the latest annual ranking compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), Vancouver is #1. Vancouver, for the second year in a row, sits at the top of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Liveability Ranking. The EIU delivers trusted business intelligence and advice to over 1.5m decision-makers from the world’s leading companies, financial institutions, governments and universities, so they know what they are talking about.

Vancouver websites

It’s the best city in the world, so check out our list of top Vancouver websites for inspiration and things to see and do. There are websites for sight seeing, activities, restaurants and more. Check them out and send us your suggestions of what you think Vancouver’s best websites are.

January 18, I started getting emails from brunettes instead of blondes. I suspected something was up, and I was right–Plenty of Fish had been hacked!

Over 300 people registered with the online dating website could have had their personal information stolen after the Vancouver website was hacked.

The CEO of Plenty of Fish, Markus Frind, said plentyoffish.com was hacked on Jan. 18 in an “incredibly well planned and sophisticated attack”. Frind runs the free dating website, out of an office in Coal Harbour, Vancouver. The site gets around 145 million visitors a month.

In a James Bond-esque scheme, the hackers then tried to blackmail Frind by requesting employment and money from him in exchange for the return of the information. The hackers claimed they had merely found a Apparently a “bug” in the website design and that they were trying to help.

The security guys at Plenty of Fish had since reset user all passwords from affected users and the company will carry out an external security audit to ensure similar attacks do not happen again.

The Plenty of Fish website, while free, still generates around $10-million a year in ad revenue, and is popular all around the world. We are going to add it to the list of top Vancouver websites because of its functionality, design, and because that’s where I met your mom.

Highly recommended by all the team here at Websites Vancouver: The Smashing Book 2 is a printed book about best practices in modern Web design. It comes from our heros over at SmashingMagazine which is actually an essential online resource for us in the website industry.

It’s a little late for a Christmas present, but Valentine’s day is just around the corner and this is a great gift for the (web design) lover in your life. The Smashing Book 2  shares practical insight into webdesign, usability and coding. It provides valuable advice for designing sites and applications for mobile devices and building successful e-commerce websites. It explains common coding mistakes and how to avoid them. It includes the principles of professional design thinking and graphic design and how to apply psychology and game theory to create engaging user experiences for the websites you design.

The book also feature interviews from web design professionals and industry experts on the future of web typography and other factors to consider for the decade ahead.

For full details on the Smashing Book 2 and to order it online click on the banner below:

Just picked up on the Twittesphere that there is a Vancouver Web Design Conference coming in June…the 2011 Interlink Conference takes place in North Vancouver, at the Theatre for the Performing Arts at Capilano University, from June 2-4.

It consists of a one day conference and two day workshop. There are some well respected experts speaking at the event, so it’s well worth a look for anyone with an interest in web design, website development or other web industry developments.

Chesney and I from the Websites Vancouver team will be there…we will be wearing our new bright orange company t-shirts, so keep a look out for us around the bar area, or hanging out near the cool people.

OOOppps…forgot to link to the actual Interlink Conference website. Check it out to see the full list of speakers and workshop activities etc.

If you are planning on getting in shape for the new year then this is great news for you: A new personal training website has just launched. Fully Fit is sport specific strength and conditioning website that has just launched in the Vancouver area.

Lewis Morrison, founder of Fully Fit, is a Masters graduated Sports Scientist offering professional services in Personal Training & Strength & Conditioning.

Check out the full range of personal training services at the new site: www.FullyFit.ca and follow them on Twitter @FullyFit

Google has just launched its Google Places App for the iPhone. I was walking around downtown Vancouver testing the App and as I did I compared it to Yelp’s App for the iPhone. Both are free to download from Apple’s App Store.

I am a big fan of the Yelp App and I have been using it for over a year. It gives user reviews and mostly they are bang on the money. It also gives me a list of restaurants, bars and business nearby, using the iPhone’s GPS capability. It gives a useful icon beside each listing with a handy $$ symbol telling me how pricey a place is.

The Google Places App looks like it’s half finished in comparison. It was displaying results from several blocks away, or several hundred ‘feet’ away. We’re metric here in Canada Mr. Google, so please fix that–I checked was there any settings options, but could not find any. Despite standing outside a ‘Waves’ coffee house, it did not display that business. Instead it gave me a listing for Caffe Artigiano 0.21 miles away (listings were sorted by user reviews–Caffe Artigiano had 101 reviews). Still, I would rather get a cup of coffee without walking 10 minutes to get it, and where it says on the review “the service…is about as bad as it can get”.

The Google Places App home screen offers nine categories for browsing: restaurants, coffee, bars, ATMs, Gas Stations, Hotels, Attractions, Pizza and Post Office. I clicked the Attractions button and it listed ‘Roxy Night Club’, ‘Commodore Ballroom’ and ‘Cellar Nightclub’ in the top three. These are not exactly highlights for a trip to Vancouver , and maybe Google wants to revisit its definition of ‘Attractions’.

Testing over. First impressions are it’s BAD like Michael Jackson was. Terrible actually. It looks like it was rolled out to soon. Anyone who uses the Yelp App will probably agree.

We’re at the end of the year and it’s usually customary to look back and see what was big in 2010. How about Battle of the Internet Giants: Facebook Vs. Google. Well Facebook has overtaken Google as the Internet King of 2010.

According to Google’s own Zeitgeist “Zeitgeist 2010: How the world searched” which is based on the aggregation of billions of search queries people typed into Google this year, Facebook was the most searched term in both the US and Canada in 2010. Youtube was second, and Google itself was third. (People Google “Google”?). Another source Hitwise.com, also claimed Facebook was the most searched term in the US in 2010, and it said Facebook was also the top-visited website.

Some Internet industry experts think that instead of Googling topics that interest us, we’re turning to Facebook to find content that comes with friends’ seals of approval. Facebook has an inbuilt search engine powered by Bing. Bing has a long, long way to go before it gets the kind of search respect that Google has. Especially in Canada, where some Bing features totally suck (ever tried to add a business to Bing Maps?). But, who knows, with Microsoft and Facebook working together, maybe 2011 will be the year that “Bing it” will enter the English language.

Best Vancouver Websites of 2010

I’m a huge fan of Facebook, and it’s one of my all time top websites. We have a page on Websites Vancouver for our top-sites but Facebook is too big to go in there. That page is reserved for our list of best Vancouver Websites that we happen to come across that might not otherwise come to the attention of the general Internet surfing public.

But just because it’s the end of the year, here’s our Top 10 list of local Vancouver websites of 2010:

1. www.vancouver2010.com (2010 was the year of the Vancouver Olympics so it had to be our No.1)

2. www.vancouver.ca

3. www.vancouversun.com

4. www.canucks.nhl.com

5. www.whitecapsfc.com

6. www.bclions.com

7. www.straight.com

8. www.vancouver.craigslist.ca

9. www.ctvbc.ctv.ca

10. www.cfox.com

That’s it from us for 2010…happy 2011!