Welcome to the Studios!

FortySixTen Studios is a web design, custom programming, and consulting company based out of Terre Haute, Indiana. We offer a wide variety of services, all of which are helpfully detailed here on the site. So, get to the clicking, and then contact the Studios when you've got questions or you're ready to get some work done.

Latest News: A Portfolio? Scandalous

Well, after much internal dilly-dallying, our portfolio of client work is once again online. It will be added to over time (much like everything else around here), but it does give you an idea of the kind of things we do for other people around here.

Yeah, it probably could have been done faster, but there's a whole lot going on. We've got a lot of project work swirling around, and I'm easily distracted by shiny things and programming web versions of games my son made, which tends to slow things down.

Better late than never, though, as me ol' Gaffer used to say.

Larry Swank
Lead Developer and Other Stuff
FortySixTen Studios

Posted on August 5th, 2011, 8:41 AM | View the full News Archive

Latest Article: Websites That Work

We used to have a tagline for the Studios which promised "Websites that Work." What did we mean, exactly? Well, we always came back around to the point that a website and a book are, at their core, two media with the exact same function: to disseminate information.

Now, go on a little journey of the mind with us as we take that example further. Imagine a book. Not hard, but let's get a little more specific and imagine a beautiful book; a gorgeous, leather cover, beautiful gold scrollwork all over the cover, and a strong binding. Inlay some little gemstones in it in your mind if that's your thing. Now you have this absolutely gorgeous book and you go to open the pages, you can't; they're stuck together in big clumps, and the pages that you can actually open are nothing but crayon scribblings. The book's useless as a book, because it can't give you any information. It's a great coffee table decoration or paperweight, but a useless book.

Same thing with a website. You can have the most beautiful website in the world, with gorgeous graphics, a fancy Flash intro, or whatever else you like to see when you hit the web. If that website doesn't make it easy for you to get the information you're looking for, though, it's completely useless as a website. It might be fine as a piece of electronic art, but unless that's all you were trying to accomplish when you built the site (or, more likely, paid a bunch of money to have the site built), it's useless to you.

"But my site has to be pretty! It has to be flashy! It has to have fancy colors or it will never get any kind of traffic!" Really. Take a second to go to the world's busiest website and see how "pretty" the page you land on is.

Pretty is good, but function is king. If the website you build isn't easy for you to get information onto it and easy for your visitors to get information off of it, it's useless. Keep that in mind when you're planning your next web project.

Larry Swank
Lead Developer and Other Stuff
FortySixTen Studios

Posted on June 6th, 2011, 1:25 PM | View the full Article Archive

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