A silver lining on the current job market?

I recently came across an article on The Work Buzz that provided some interesting figures on current trends happening in today’s job market. It shows that half of the workers who were laid off in the last three months have already found new jobs! And, more than half were able to either maintain or even make gains with their new salaries! This seems to be in line with what we’re currently seeing here as well, which only reinforces their statistics. This should definitely be great news to the many still out their looking to find their next great thing! Hang in there folks, it looks like we’re slowly turning things around!

Here are some of the other interesting facts at a glance:

Changes in Pay
Looking at workers who were laid off in the last 12 months and found new jobs, more than half (56 percent) reported they were able to negotiate comparable or higher pay for their new positions. Forty-four percent of workers took a pay cut, down from 49 percent in March.

Transferring Skills to Other Industries and Fields
Workers reported they are applying their skills to new areas. Similar to the last survey, 38 percent of workers who were laid off in the last 12 months and landed new jobs said they found work in a different field than where they were previously employed. Of those workers, the majority said they really enjoy their new positions.

Relocation
Workers are no longer just looking for positions in their own backyards. One-in-five workers (20 percent) who were laid off in the last 12 months and found jobs relocated to a new city or state; up from 13 percent in March. Of those who are still looking for employment, 44 percent reported they would consider relocating for a job opportunity; up from 39 percent in March.

Starting a Business

An increased number of job seekers have adopted an “if you can’t find a job, create one” way of thinking. Nearly three-in-ten workers (29 percent) who have not found jobs are considering starting their own business; up from 25 percent in March.

Altering Appearance
The competition for a smaller number of jobs is driving some workers to alter their everyday appearances in hopes of making a stronger impression. More than a quarter (28 percent) of workers who were laid off in the last 12 months said they have changed their appearance to make themselves more attractive to potential employers. Fourteen percent said they have lost weight, 8 percent have changed their hair color or hairstyle and 5 percent are dressing to appear younger. Teeth whitening, enhanced makeup and cosmetic procedures were also cited.

Posted in mbps, placement, trends

StaySafeOnline.org Launches Updated Section: National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM)

StaySafeOnline.org launches updated and expanded section: National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM)

National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM), conducted every October since 2001, is a national public awareness campaign to encourage everyone to protect their computers and our nation’s critical cyber infrastructure. This year’s theme is “Our Shared Responsibility”.

The expanded section now contains an events calendar, links to become an official endorser, and collateral material downloads.

Also check out the newly redesigned Top Tips page.

Posted in Development, Drupal, NCSA, StaySafeOnline.org, client, design, launch

Uplifting Athletes adds Boston College Chapter

We couldn’t be happier with the feedback we’ve been getting on the success of the Uplifting Athletes site.

We are please to announce that they have added a new chapter to their cause and site…

Boston College

Adding the new chapter to their existing site was fairly easy since we’re using Drupal to manage the site. We look forward to adding many more chapters to the site in the near future.

Posted in Development, Drupal, Uplifting Athletes, client, design, launch | Tagged

DC Design Babes Event – June 25th


Mediabarn is a proud sponsor of the upcoming DC Design Babes Event next week! Hope folks can make it downtown for some networking and a good time with friends! Looking forward to seeing everyone! Click here to register!

Posted in mbps, placement

Mediabarn Launches the New SIIA.net Redesign


Another successful launch! The Software & Information Industry Association launched its redesigned web site last week (SIIA.net). Mediabarn was privileged to have partnered with SIIA to help with the user experience, design and development of the site. The project was definitely a team effort, with Mediabarn joining forces with not only SIIA, but Metisc as well, a Joomla! shop in Australia. Loved the early morning status calls!

The new SIIA.net is not only more organized with a cleaner design, but also has a dynamic site structure that can easily be expanded on. Just about all of the site is driven by a single custom Joomla! template. The dynamic nature of the template allows for content blocks, widgets, modules to be easily placed throughout the site with minimal effort.

Congrats SIIA!

Posted in Development, Joomla, What's New, design, launch, studio

IE 8 is fast upon us – NOW WHAT!?

I’m actually pleased with the news that MS is pushing Internet Explorer 8 (IE 8) as an automatic update.

Have you been using or testing your sites in IE 8 yet? If not, you need to be! The numbers aren’t that high yet, but I bet they will –thankfully– be increasing rapidly.

Why thankfully? Well, mainly because IE 8 supports (almost) all of the CSS2.1 specification. For full details check out quirksmode’s CSS Compatibility Chart. This means, in theory, that a single set of CSS can be written and –drum roll please– it will render correctly in IE 8.

Wait! Wait! Wait! Stop the dancing…


…what about that little button there? Yes that one, right there, the “Compatibility Button”! Holy Toggle Switch Batman, why would I want to render a site in IE 7 ‘mode’ in IE 8?

Well, for one thing, not every site is well maintained and it may be a while before people get around to updating their code to work in IE 8. This toggle switch may make your site more palatable to new IE 8 users.

Why do they need to update their code, you ask? There are several ways, that we won’t get into here, to get older versions of IE to render ‘correctly’ – meaning: look the same as more compliant browsers. These ‘hacks’ or work-arounds will make IE 8 render incorrectly. Hopefully, your work-around of choice has been to use conditional comments to deliver separate CSS files to IE 7 or older. I have been for a while, so I’m really not able to speak to how to un-hack or add-a-hack your CSS if you’ve been using other methods.

If you have been using conditional comments, simply updating your conditional statements to exclude IE 8 from receiving the custom IE CSS takes only a few seconds. Something like this will do:

< !--[if lte IE 7]-->

Now, to prevent people from using that little IE 7 Toggle Switch and potentially setting your site to always render as IE 7 (and not just for them), add this bit to your document head:

< equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8">

This should fix you right up, assuming you’re coding valid HTML and CSS to start with. You’ll still have to deal with IE 6 & 7 for a little bit longer unfortunately, but the light is at the end of the tunnel now.

–”And now,” cried Max, “let the wild rumpus start!” *

Posted in Browsers, CSS, Compatibility | 1 Comment

NCQA Accrediation and the UXL

We love that the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) has added a usability testing component to their accreditation process. They are giving insurance companies credit toward accreditation just for testing their websites. This will improve the quality of the interface for all of our insurance company’s online presence, yeah!

Posted in uxlab

Mediabarn launches new NCSA site redesign and C-SAVE section.


A little under 6-months after delivering the initial site redesign for the National Cyber Security Alliance‘s StaySafeOnline.org site, we’ve done it again.

The initial project utilized an existing design from another firm. Mediabarn made some minor tweaks to the existing designs focusing on content organization and usability issues. We developed the site in Drupal, an open-source CMS, launching in late 2008.

Since the initial launch we have continued to support NCSA with their site content needs and adding several bits of new functionality.

The latest redesign brings a major new face lift to the site without changing the overall structure of the site and it’s navigation. None of the content stored in the Drupal CMS was effected by the new design, requiring zero republishing of content. The new design was delivered as fresh Drupal Theme, actually a Zen sub-theme, in under 2 months from concept to completion.

With this redesign we also launched a new site section, Cyber Security Awareness Volunteer Education Program (C-SAVE) .

This project was and continues to be extremely fun to work on. Look for more on this project in the near future. Make sure you check them out.

Posted in Development, Drupal, Zen Theme, launch

Consumer Guide Automotive is live!


We are so pleased to announce that the redesigned Consumer Guide Automotive site has launched. Mediabarn partnered with HowStuffWorks to help create a new UI and design – it was a really fun project to work on! Check it out here and start car shopping!




Posted in launch, studio

Mediabarn talks it over with Students from Penn State

Today Media Barn met with students from Penn State’s IST College, to give them a tour of our business. We also did a UI test exercise where we plucked students from the group and had them walk through one of our recent launches, while the rest of the team watched. We had a great time, they were a bright group.

Posted in Uncategorized