Eric Meyer

Prompt Engineering: The Real Secret to Making AI Work for Your Website

So, you're thinking about using AI in your AI web development projects, or maybe you already are. That's great! But there's a skill that often gets overlooked, and it's absolutely critical to getting good results: prompt engineering.

Developing Custom WordPress Themes and Plugins for Retail

From crafting captivating store layouts to integrating advanced retail platforms, custom development can significantly elevate an online store's functionality and appearance. We discuss the process of developing Custom WordPress themes for retail and WordPress plugin development for retail, while equipping business owners with the knowledge to create standout online retail presences. 

Enhancing Customer Support with Chatbots: Reducing Costs and Improving Satisfaction

Imagine having a team of customer service operators available to deliver real-time responses and personalized experiences with no excessive costs associated with around-the-clock support. Welcome to game-changing chatbots in customer service, powered by advanced AI that makes them pivotal in the race towards over-exceeding customer expectations.

The Future of Web Development: How Chatbots are Transforming the User Experience

Nowadays, more and more businesses and developers would like to find new ways of improving users' experience on websites. Now, with the chatbots, user interaction and customer support are about to be revolutionized. It was said that they can raise user engagement as high as 30% and cut expenses on customer support by half.

Building Smarter Chatbots: The Benefits of OpenAI's Advanced Language Models

Today, artificial intelligence isn't just science fiction—it's changing our lives. Smart chatbots are a big part of this change, and OpenAI's advanced language models are leading the way. These models help chatbots understand and respond to human language better than ever before. Whether you are a developer, a tech fan, or a business leader, using these models can improve your chatbot development, making interactions more intuitive and personal.

What to look for when hiring a Laravel developer

Laravel is a PHP web application framework that provides web developers with the tools and foundations to get a web app up and running in no time. Over the last decade Laravel has become one of the most popular web development frameworks in use today. This article is focused on helping stakeholders in their decision making process while hiring qualified Laravel developers.

The benefits of using a headless CMS for SEO

In recent years we’ve seen a move toward static sites. The term “static” is really a misnomer here, because the type of sites we are talking about are anything but. 

Getting started with a WordPress maintenance plan

So you've decided that you need help with your company's WordPress presence.Great! That’s the first step, but now what? Eric Meyer, the founder and owner of Curious Minds, goes over what to expect.

Slowing Down to Speed Up

In life, and in business, there are no guaranteed outcomes. Yet it’s human nature to attempt to control and manage risk.

What is Technical Debt, and How to Deal with it

If you’re the owner of a large website or web application you may have heard your developers talking about something called technical debt. It’s frequently used in conversations about development practice.

What is JAMstack, and What is it Good For?

Alright, let’s get right to it. The JAM in JAMstack stands for Javascript, APIs and markup, and describes a methodology used to create and deploy modern websites. Your dev team may also call it a “static site.”

Fixing Fundamentals in Web Development Education

One of the challenges our customers often bring to our attention is the difficulty in filling lower level web production roles. It’s a problem that we can relate to at Curious Minds, as we face the same issue when on-ramping new developers on to our team.

What is Enterprise WordPress Maintenance? Part 1

If you are using WordPress as a critical part of your marketing or e-commerce infrastructure, understanding and addressing the ongoing maintenance needs of your installation is of paramount importance.

What's on Your Toolkit?

Afternoon, and Happy New Year from the folks over here at Curious Minds. For the first post of the new year, I wanted to do a quick overview.

The Hidden Cost of Offshore Development

One of the questions we get asked by our enterprise clients, is if we have considered using offshore resources for our client’s development needs. In the past, we’ve managed offshore teams for our clients.

Killing Flash

It’s been a long time coming, but the writing has been on the wall since the advent of the first iPhone. In a recent press release, Adobe announced that it would “stop updating and distributing the Flash Player,” within the next 3 years.

Seeding Relations in Ember Mirage with Factories

When we are working on an EmberJs project, for all but the most trivial applications, we like to mock API calls so we can develop the UI of our application independently of the back end.

Deploying Ember CLI Apps with the Lighting Pack

This is the first in a series on maintaining and deploying Ember.js SPA (single page apps). We have been using Ember.Js quite a bit over here at Curious Minds. In fact, it’s one of our very favorite front-end frameworks.

CIO Digest application prototype for iPad

Mobile application development is in full swing over here at Curious Minds Media labs. We’re getting really close to unveiling our newest addition to our Integrated Publishing Solution’s suite of services with a shiny new mobile application.

Tools of the Trade – free web development tools for Mac OSX

One of the things that I love the most about coding, and the web in general is the development of open and free standards. Along with those open and free standards comes the web development tools needed to build and deploy web applications.

Using the Factory Method Pattern

Throughout my career as a developer I have had the occasion to use the Factory Method Pattern when appropriate, and grown to rely on it extensively in recent months as several projects have dictated.

AS3 Tutorial – The Singleton Pattern

One of the most important patterns that we use over here is the Singleton. It’s used when you need to restrict use of a class to one or only one instance.

AS3 Remoting ArrayCollection Tutorial – Part I

Okay, we’ve all used the <mx:RemoteObject> tag before, but now that we are following some good design principles and using a model view controller setup, we want to get rid of that tag and put the remote object logic into its own class.

ActionScript Tutorial – Encapsulation, Get and Set

Ready to take the plunge into the wild world of oo ? Then here’s a quick tutorial that will get you started on one of the most important concepts behind oo -encapsulation.

Embedding Assets in Flex

Just working on another fun project here, and I thought that I would share something that I don’t see alot of Flex developers doing out there. That is organizing your image assests into asset classes as constants.

AS3/PV3D Loading Data

With actionscript3 comes alot of new changes. One of the most often used features of flash is importing/loading and dealing with external data.

Relational Deletes in MySql and Foreign Keys

Managing relational tables in a database is a topic that all developers will eventually bump into. There are quite a few ways of managing relational data, and the best solution sometimes can be hard to find.