A Rockhampton business took on the rest of regional Queensland in Cairns recently and came home with top place in one category and finished a finalist in another.

Almost Anything Web & Graphic Design took out the honours for Best Logo Design – Service at a gala dinner held in Cairns earlier this month.

Owner Yolinda Foss entered the awards find out how her team’s designs measured up against others, and to see if they have what it takes to be the best in the field.

“I’m really pleased with the results, especially as the judges were based in Brisbane and Sydney. We are standing up against their knowledge, and expectations of larger city areas, not just local judges”, she said after the win.

This award marks the second year in a row the design studio has won at these awards, picking up Best Logo Design – Commercial in 2005.

“It just proves that we have the talent here to get the work done,” Yolinda said. “There’s no need for people to think they have to head to Brisbane.

We have just received the latest addition to our family - a brand new wide format digital printer. At almost 2.5 metres wide, we had to do some shuffling to squeeze it in to the office! And to cap it off our laminating machine (not pictured here) is almost as big.

However, we can now print posters, canvas banners, flags, pop-up banners, stickers… well, almost anything!

So the next time you need a life-size poster of yourself, you know who to call…

Microsoft Excel is a handy program - but have you ever tried to use a formula to figure out something a little more complicated than basic maths? Like the differences between dates for example?

Here’s a handy little reference guide - I’m sure I’ll be visiting this in future!

A new web development method has been emerging that changes the way you interact with websites.

You’ve probably never thought about it before, but the standard behaviour for a website is that when you click something, a new page loads. Even the things on the page that don’t really change (masthead graphics, navigation bar and so on) still need to be re-displayed in your window.

Enter AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)!

This technique allows us to only change the part of a page that we need to, so web pages can in some ways behave more like a program that you’d run on your computer than a normal website.

Like everything, it has its advantages and disadvantages, and is therefore only suited to certain conditions - but it’s a cool new trick all the same.

Like to see it in action? Here’s our first ‘cab off the rank’ - Glen Fosslyn Droughtmasters Sire Search.

Most of you are probably using version 6 of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to browse the web. The next version (named version 7 stangely enough!) is available for download in Beta form.

Basically, they’re saying it might still have a few bugs, but it’s good enough to make available now anyway!

Then again, most of Microsoft’s final release software has bugs too, so what’s the difference…

Seriously, it’s got some nice new features, including tabbed browsing, better page printing and a built-in search box. If you’re not sure what “tabbed browsing” means, trust me: once you’ve tried it, you’ll wonder why it took them so long!

Certainly a big improvement over version 6 - and available for free! More information here.

The new website for LD Stitt Business Solutions features a simple, uncluttered layout and simply focusses on

• Services offered
• Existing clients and portfolio
• Experience

Visit the website.

The next version of Microsoft Office, Office 2007, is now not that far away. There has been talk about the menu and toolbars we have been used to for so long disappearing, and being replaced by a “Ribbon”.

Micosoft have now released a preview video that outlines how it will work. I must say it looks pretty impressive. I just hope that the features previewed here will work on computers now and won’t require us to upgrade our PCs in order to use them!

The preview runs for about 13 minutes and is well worth a look if you’re a regular Office user.