Simply stated, a widget is anything that can be put “on top” of a web page. Now the technical definition, it is a rich media application that can be embedded onto a page within your digital publication adding more value.

Grab a user’s attention and engage them with the widget of your choice. It can be as simple as an image ad showcasing a sale, new product or even a discount code. Ballard Design makes great use out of their ad widget by including a special offer on page 2 that they can update at any time. For a more interactive ad, you could use a video in your widget, much like the Dublin, Ohio Visitor and Event Guide. After scrolling through a couple pages, you can see the interactive video they created. Makes you want to dance a jig and drink a pint!

R Stahl uses ad widgets to connect with their customers offering live chat. Dollar Tree promotes coupons and uses the widget to present terms and details. So clever

If you’re considering an ad widget, first find a size that works best for your product. For the best viewing experience we recommend the following dimensions: The prime sizes for desktop are 249 pixels x 600 pixels , 1566px x 600px, 249px x 929px, and 643px x 832px. The best size for a tablet is 600px x700px. And for a smartphone 250px x 250px usually has the best resolution. Second, decide if you want to host the widget or simply send us an image. Finally, think about what you want the widget to do. These are just guidelines though, if you would like to discuss further, we are more than happy to chat!

Take your digital publication to the next level and give users a fuller experience with an ad widget. Call our friendly sales team at 888.391.0202 or email at sales@dirxion.com and they can help get you started.

One thing April forgot to mention is the big personality she has!

Tell me a little bit about yourself.
My middle name is May. Just playing! I am 29 years old, married to my high school sweetheart (together over 12 years). We have 2 crazy boxer/german shepherd mixed dogs (Bella & Roxy).

How did you get started in customer service/QA/Operations position?
A co-worker of my husband had a sister working here. They had a customer service position open & I was hired. I love customer interaction, so it was a perfect fit! The rest of the duties have been added on throughout the years.

What do you love most about working at Dirxion?
Customer interaction & Co-workers!

What keeps you up at night?
My TV shows 🙂

We try to stay active and fit here at Dirxion, what is your favorite workout to relieve stress?
Cleaning. The best way for me to relieve stress is to clean my house or my desk at work. It accomplishes two things…Stress & Mess.

What do you like to do outside of work?
My husband & I go out every Friday with another couple for dinner. Other than that I hang with my family or stay at home.

What are you looking forward to most this year?
Good health!

Anything else you’d like to add.
I call everyone my BFF & love to use smiley faces. 🙂

We’re celebrating Earth Day, this marks the 45th year it’s been nationally recognized. In 1996, Dirxion advocated to help make the planet a little greener. We knew print was too important to disappear, but if we could help companies eliminate some of their print by offering a digital product, our green mark would get a little bigger. In the past year, we’ve digitized close to a million pages, I’d say that is a lot of trees. And that is just in one year, imagine what we’ve done in the past 19 years!

We’re still on the green track, every year we try to add something new. From adding small green touches to our website (www.dirxion.com) to getting rid of the vending machine and have a self serve vending area. We also share books in our community library, eliminate screen savers, recycle, and have plants everywhere! What green changes will you make this week?

Calling Dirxion should be one of them! Go green today and show mother nature some love!

Nordson, the world’s leading precision fluid dispensing systems manufacturer, just made it faster and easier for customers to find exactly what they are looking for. They just announced the release of Engineered Fluid Dispensing Product Catalog Sixth Edition. Not only is the catalog digital, it’s available as an app for offline use and it supports nine languages!

Nine languages? That’s right and that’s just the beginning of what this powerful tool can do! Find specific products and parts numbers through the keyword search. Quickly access additional info to products such as direct EFD web linking, data sheets, videos and add to cart. Request quotes through the cart, you can even share your cart with an EFD sales person. You can even create a mini-brochure! View the catalog up close and personal at catalogs.nordsonefd.com.

We took a creative turn this month. We interviewed Mari, our Marketing and Design Manager!

Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Hi Everyone! Well, I have been in the creative field for a little over ten years and six of them have been here at Dirxion! I am the Marketing and Design Manager and I’ve been in this role for about four years now and before this I was a graphic designer. Besides my love of typography, I’m also pretty obsessed with my husband, John, and my two kiddos, Annie (who is 3) and Auggie (who is 18 months – of trouble).

How did you get started in marketing/graphic design?
My father is a really talented architect and I always wanted to follow in his footsteps, that is until I realized you had to get thru two years of calculus to become an architect. Math was not my strong suit, but I really loved visualizing the big picture and drawing up concepts, so my dad told me to try graphic design, and well, here I am.

What do you love most about working at Dirxion?
At the past couple of jobs I held, thinking outside of the box was not really an option. Here at Dirxion, we are free and encouraged to be as creative as possible. If we get to far away from the box, we are reined back in a little, but it ends up being a good balance. Another good balance is the work/family life. Having two kids under the age of 3 can be a struggle sometimes, and having time off when I need to be home with them is a true blessing. It also helps that I work with some hilariously awesome people.

What keeps you up at night?
Do you mean besides the teething 18 month old child? Usually, my to-do list and brainstorming keep me up most nights. I have a pad of paper next to my bed so that when I have an idea or need to remember a task, I’ll write it down sometime in my sleep and have it for the next day.

We try to stay active and fit here at Dirxion, what is your favorite workout to relieve stress?
Two of my friends here at work and I just started a new TRX routine. There was not an ounce of stress in my body after we were finished. It was awesome. And of course, Dirxion volleyball is a must for laughs and a good time!

What do you like to do outside of work?
Spend as much time with my kids and husband as possible. That usually involves playing outside, taking walks with Bear (our dog), golfing and watching the occasional Pixar movie. Right now, Big Hero 6 is on repeat most of the time.

What are you looking forward to most this year?
Building more pages and design on our new website www.dirxion.com! It looks great so far thanks to Karen Wibbenmeyer, and adding pages and new features to it monthly is really going to build a robust site for our customers and prospects to enjoy. It’s going to be fun and fresh!

Anything else you’d like to add:
Sure! Right now I am in the running to be Woman of the Year for the Gateway (St. Louis) Chapter of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. My team is raising funds for pediatric cancer research and we are already halfway to our goal of $33,000. It’s pretty awesome how people come together for a really important cause. If you want to read more about our mission, you can visit my page at http://www.mwoy.org/pages/gat/stlouis15/mbarringer Thanks for reading!

Typography matters in the digital age. Preparing type for digital display is slightly different than preparing for print. The digital side deals with a much lower resolution. Therefore, fonts intended for web use can include wider letterforms and heavier thin strokes. If you plan to use smaller fonts, it’s best to use a font with more open spacing.

Another element to consider is point size. Different fonts set to the same point size do not display the same visually.

In this case, to make the best visual decision, view your product at 100% and let your eyes be the judge. Usually, the best size is between 11-14 points and don’t be afraid to use half points; i.e. 11.5pt.

We would like to showcase a few digital publications with great typography – Soma, Sun Valley Bronze, Richmond Travel Guide and David’s Bridal. Each publication has a variety of fonts, and they display beautifully in the product and reflect brand personality.

A step beyond plain text is foreign language characters. We support up to 13 languages! This section could get a little lengthy, I’ll save it for another blog post. Stay tuned!

These are just a few suggestions to help improve the overall readability. Our process allows us to work with fonts of any type as long as they are embedded in the pdf. As always we love providing tips to our customers.

If you have any questions or would like a free demo please contact our sales team at 888.391.0202 or email us at sales@dirxion.com.

View the new Soma eCatalog!

80% Of all women are wearing the wrong bra size. Yikes that’s a lot! Use Soma’s fit guide to find your size, then shop the digital catalog.

The dirxion family is one of a kind! While our customers get to meet some of our wonderful employees there are a lot of great ones behind the scenes. Every month we’ll be interviewing one of our awesome employees so you can get to know the personal side of Dirxion.

This month we bring to you Mr. Mark Thomas! Mark is our Director of Sales. Surprisingly he went to school for accounting but ended up in sales, how does that happen?! Around the office Mark is usually on the phone with business, in a meeting, or briskly walking by my office to avoid any questions I might have 🙂 ok ok so all that is true but Mark is a really good sport with a wealth of information on all our product lines.

Tell me a little bit about yourself.
This question got skipped, this must have happened before morning coffee (see last question).

How did you get started in sales?
I have asked myself the same thing. How did I end up in sales. A painfully shy guy in high school who did best in accounting classes, but don’t tell my boss. When you end up selling copiers in the first job out of college, suddenly it was game on.

What do you love most about working at Dirxion?
Will this go on my review? It’s a little cliche, but it’s the people. I’ve developed some very tight relationships with both current and former colleagues. Oh yeah and the work/family balance. Definitely helps to be able to get the kids on the bus. Did I mention I have to go pick up the kids.

What keeps you up at night?
According to my FitBit quite a lot of stuff. I really associate with watching too much Walking Dead.

We try to stay active and fit here at Dirxion, what is your favorite workout to relieve stress?
If I was to pick one Dirxion activity it would be tennis. It’s a good mix of player levels so one week can be a relaxing outing and the next you’re running all over the court.

What do you like to do outside of work?
Primarily it’s family time. Personal time is spent brewing the occasional batch of beer, fishing with friends, and most recently getting back into mountain biking. You may think with a max elevation of 1772 ft it might be hard to find good trails, but Missouri has many great trails.

What are you looking forward to most this year?
We’ve started off the year with a flourish of new customers. Our updated Tear Pages platform should have a real impact with our customers. I’m excited to see how different types of publishers adapt Tear Pages to their needs.

Anything else you’d like to add:
Strong coffee makes me a more pleasant person

From helping you pronounce Dirxion (it’s direction by the way ) to providing performance feedback, we do it all.

Not all digital publishing houses are created equal. Do-It-Yourself software will always have it’s place, but can limit the possibilities and customization that current tech allows. From the very beginning in 1996 we set out to make an innovative custom product with our strong development and production teams. You may not see our developers front and center, but they are hard at work staying ahead of the industry and creating new features!

In our line of business, applications with options are better suited to meet customer needs. The customizable elements of our platform and premier service provides a competitive advantage for our customers. Customers as diverse as Baker Furniture and Super Bowl champs New England Patriots have requested and received custom interface design elements to match their style.

Lawson Fleet Solutions recently implemented a slick catalog solution to ensure users can easily navigate to their desired products. The guide starts off with ‘hot dots’ that direct you to the primary product page, which then leads you to a page of related products. From there you are able to explore Lawson’s products with their e-commerce site viewable within a lightbox keeping the user in the catalog. Lawson required diligenceand precision for the creation of this digital catalog so that it is a great solution when users need to find exactly what they want quickly!

We want to hear your ideas and vision for your digital publication. Call our friendly sales team at 888.391.0202 or email at sales@dirxion.com and they can help get you started.

It’s cold in St. Louis but we can’t wait to discover the warm beaches at the Golden Isles in Georgia. Their beautiful travel guide will warm your heart, so get ready to pack your bags!