Professional Web Site Design Blog :: CascadiaDesign

A noted “green sustainability” author kicked off the Design & Manufacturing Midwest Show on Tuesday by telling engineers and executives that they should view environmental regulations as business opportunities instead of as headaches.

Pamela J. Gordon, who authored “Lean And Green: Profit For Your Workplace And The Environment,” acknowledged that environmental compliance, customer’s “green” demands,” the tough economy and cost cutting form celebrity dresses and “quadruple headache” for engineers. Still, she said, manufacturers need to understand that there’s more to it than pain.

“When you put these four headaches together, you actually have a business opportunity,” said Gordon, who also serves as president of Technology Forecasters Inc. Gordon made her comments as part of green manufacturing conference at the show, which is being held in Rosemont, IL, this week.

By looking for environmental opportunities, Gordon said, manufacturers can find between 1 - 5 percent savings on cost of goods sold. Moreover, investments in green energy, such as solar panels, short dresses can yield a return on investment in five to 10 years, she added.

Gordon also suggested that engineers can boost the reliability of their products by employing green sensibilities. “You need to use a good ‘design-for-environment’ checklist for all your designs, just as you use a design-for-test or design-for-manufacturability’ checklist,” Gordon said. “About 80 percent of the items on that design-for-environment checklist will increase your product’s reliability.”

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s back to the future for plastics researchers at Ford Motor Co.

Henry Ford famously unveiled a “Soybean Car” in 1941 at an annual community festival in Dearborn, MI. Fourteen plastic panels strengthened with soy fiber reduced the weight of the car by half. It was never built because focus quickly shifted to military requirements.

Today a six-member engineering team at Ford is looking for new applications for soybeans and other sustainable materials in an industry-leading effort to replace hydrocarbon-based materials.

“Wherever petroleum-based materials exist - in plastic, rubber, foam, film or fabric - we are looking to minimize its proportion and replace it with a sustainable material,” says Dr. Cynthia Flanigan, technical expert in Ford Plastics Research.

The group, formed in 2000, has had tremendous success in homecoming dresses production to date. Soy-based foam seat cushions and backs will be used in more than one million Ford, Lincoln and Mercury vehicles by the end of this year, leading to a total reduction in carbon dioxide emissions of more than 5 million lb.

“We started looking at soy-based polyurethane foams in 2001,” says Dr. Deborah Mielewski, the leader of the customized bags group told Design News in an interview. The first foam produced in the lab had a rancid odor, poor compression set and poor mechanical properties.

“This is where the chemical companies and most of the supply base pretty much ended looking at hydroxylated soybean oil as a component in automotive foams,” says Mielewski. “My group had a formulation chemist named Christine Perry who said, ‘I think I can do it.’ She went away and made hundreds of different formulations, and the whole point was to balance two reactions: the crosslinking reaction and the blow reaction that makes the cells, and over a two-year period she did it.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Slash five pounds of mass from the electrical architecture of a vehicle in today’s fuel-conscious auto industry, and you’re a hero. Cut 10 pounds, and you’re an engineering god.

These days - amidst pressures to eliminate weight, cost and complexity - a lot of engineers are trying to be gods. In the labs of some of the biggest auto companies in the world, engineers are talking party dresses to tier-one suppliers and semiconductor makers. They’re absorbing theories about up-integration, domain control and zone control. They’re learning how to consolidate their electrical architectures, packing the functionality of 40 microcontrollers into 20. They’re finding out how to slim down their thick wiring bundles. These days, they’re listening.

“We’re all talking to suppliers of white dresses,” says Chris Thibodeau, director of global technology for electrical/electronic products at General Motors Corp. “They’re bringing in new concepts and we’re figuring out which ones will be right for us. We don’t have a number in mind, but when it comes to weight reduction, we’ll take all we can get.”

Indeed, today’s automakers are nearly obsessed with the idea of electrical weight reduction. But their dilemma with customized bags is like that of a very fat man who tries to lose weight by eating more. The diet on the horizon calls for more microcontrollers, not less. First, there’s safety technology - cameras, vision sensors, radar systems, lane keeping, collision avoidance and new dashboard displays. Then there’s the hybrid technology - motor controllers, battery controllers and energy management. All those features need dedicated processors.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read this Website design CSS Menu problem as SEO prospective. I have HTML site containing 4-5 Navigation Page as all site have. On Header like Home, About Us, Service, Contact Us, etc…..Same Footer links also… Now Look at Back side of site related to Wedding Favors; Candle Wedding Favors; Beach Wedding Favors

free automatic forex trading systems;
forex trading online accounts;
www.eazeyforex.com.

…..

I have anchoring their buttons with link like:

Home
Contact Us Etc., …..and same with footer.

Now I have made another pages put them in one folder. For example Folder Name Called….. ABC and other new pages goes to this folder.

When I made these pages there is design issues like images are gone and links are not appearing, etc….

<a href=”http://www.xyz.com/index.html”>Home</a>

<a href=”http://www.xyz.com/contactus.html”>Contact Us</a> (same as footer)

As SEO prospective which one is best. Will Google and other SEs see this as spam…???

<a href=”index.html”></a>
OR
<a href=”../index.html”></a>
OR
<a href=”http://www.xyz.com/index.html”></a>

I again remind you that this issue is for inner pages

End Of Long Story here, hope you get what im trying to say and give your best feedback here. From an SEO perspective they’re all good. If the crawler can follow them, it will index them. They’re intelligent enough to figure out if its your site or not and all three of those links are.

There is absolutely no difference to these links in Google; just make sure they all are not broken links with a free link checking program such as “xenu”

You may want to edit a file called “.htaccess” to add the “www” part of the web address if someone doesn’t type it in. The “www” part can be a pain when full linking with http://www.xyz.com/index.html, as the same page can be found at: http://xyz.com/index.html Google “.htaccess” for more info see orange county bail bonds site, where I have already seen the webmaster to fix this problem recently.

Crawler sees both of them as different pages. It is always better to link to the complete URL.