June 1^st – Toronto, Ontario

The City Deal of the Day network has just received a new design and nearly doubled its current market reach by launching in another dozen cities. As the deal of the day business continues to climb, so does the leading deal of the day aggregator. What started as TorontoDealOfTheDay.com in July 2010 is now a network of twenty Canadian cities and six American. Offering a one stop shop for daily deals has been a big hit with consumers looking to get the most bang for their buck.

The network is powered by Web Surgeon Design & Development, who are proud to announce the first City Deal of the Day contest. Located at www.citydealoftheday.com/ wagjag-contest/, users are able to enter once a day for their chance to win 1 of 4 One Hundred Dollar ($100) credit vouchers from WagJag.com. Because every deal WagJag offers saves you at least 50% off the regular price, it’s like winning $200+. Contest closes June 30^th.

For a complete list of cities currently offered by City Deal of the Day, please visit citydealoftheday.com.

About City Deal of the Day

City Deal of the Day is your home for the best daily deals in your city. When other deal of the day websites are updated, they automatically add their deals to the home page. Get all of the savings on just one website, without all of the emails.

About Web Surgeon Design & Development

Web Surgeon is an online design & development company based in Toronto, Ontario. Web Surgeon is dedicated to providing impressive websites at affordable prices. Web Surgeon has been working hard since 2005 to meet the aesthetic, usability and backend needs of all its customers.

iHome Portable Speaker

The Good:
For a measly $20, you get an ultra portable iPod speaker that uses one cord for USB & a standard 3.5mm audio jack. The built in rechargeable batteries alone can save you $20 for a summer.

The Bad:
As expected, you can only get so much volume and sound quality from a speaker this small and cheap. Don’t expect this to be as effective in a big, noisy environment.

Sony mp3/radio/usb/iPod Car w/ SanDisk 16gb Cruiser

The Good:
You’ll never have to listen through radio commercials or burn another CD again when you have almost 3,500 of your favourite songs in your car – all the time. Though those options are still available.

The Bad:
The USB has an extremely annoying blinking orange light, I highly recommend a strip of black hockey tape. I don’t recommend throwing a bag of camping gear into your front seat, the USB may snap.

Duracell Pocket Inverter 175

The Good:
The power inverter comes with one AC outlet and one USB port, allowing you to charge two devices simultaneously, so you can keep the batteries going on your cellphone, iPod or even laptop when you’re on the road.

The Bad:
It still takes up some more space in the front seat, and not all vehicles have dual cigarette-lighter adapter’s, where the GPS might be.

Most people start off teaching themselves the basics before reaching out for professional training, if at all. I was no different, starting at the tender age of twelve or thirteen using Notepad when IE6 was launching and it was supposed to be popular. I soon learned the limitations of static pages, moved onto a free web host that allowed PHP and MySQL, and haven’t left those beautiful languages since. The first thing I remember building for my friends was a very basic password protected picture gallery to share our weekend adventures in private. Mediocre grades didn’t prevent me from being able to work on my high school website as a course for a couple semesters. Using PHP to speed up math homework, and Photoshop to breeze by multimedia projects did help my marks as the years went by. By sixteen, I was designing my first commercial website, and was technically being paid to get a credit, to work from home. That’s probably the point where hobby lead to career, and so far I can’t complain.

During my one year of college for Web Design & Development, I was surprised to be the youngest in class. More surprising though, was the fact that nearly a fifth of the class was above the age of thirty-five. Perhaps it’s just odd to me because my parents are just now learning how to send a text message, but I wonder how well it worked out for them. The class didn’t teach me a whole lot I didn’t already know, but there were a few tricks in there, and a nineteen year old with a piece of paper is easier to hire than an eighteen year old without. A few months later I was hired full time to develop websites in downtown Toronto, and have been doing so ever since.

There have been plenty of discussions on whether further education is a necessity for the field, but I’m curious to know when most web designers and developers get started, and what program/language it was that sucked them in.

There’s a unique look to it, and an interesting use of the ‘W’, but it’s also very crowded with some questionable font faces and sizes. The redesign uses the same colour scheme and a similar menu, but it’s much easier to read and navigate. I’m also a big fan of WordPress 3.0, officially sending the blogging tool into a CMS in my opinion, and the implementation of WordPress MU to allow networks is fantastic. Therefore, compiled with my desire to write the occasional blog post to improve my writing ability, it was an easy choice.

Hopefully this website’s quality is deemed well enough that Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, WaterProof and Hyundai won’t mind being associated, but these are the products I use on a daily basis. I’d also like to send out a special thank you to Genia Shapira for the photo of me and my car with the custom plates you see in the footer of the website.

Please let me know what you think of Web Surgeon 2.0 in the comments, thank you.