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Friday, May 9 2008

On a whole, the art of Web design has begun to be better understood as a necessity in the world of ecommerce and content management. After all, content is only as good as its design and vice versa. Once viewed as something that made your site look pretty but had little significance to the bottom line, web design is now considered an integral part of a site’s success.

Monday, May 5 2008

Not only do many websites have unreliable metrics; they’re usually measuring the wrong things.

Friday, May 2 2008

The twists, turns and tips you need for staying up-to-date by the water cooler.

Highlights of the Week

• Socialtext 3.0 - New Ways to Share Information in the Enterprise. Getting users to actually utilize wikis in a meaningful way.
• EMC Provides OEM Developers with a new Toolset. Providing everything a developer needs to build content rich software.
• Alfresco Quietly Releases Latest Enterprise Edition. Giving the gamers a CMS that goes beyond regular content management.
• WordPress Gets an Overhaul with 2.5. Aiming to offer better functionality and continues the ease of use tradition — all in a more aesthetically pleasing packaging that works better for you.
• Yahoo’s Going Open Social With a SearchMonkey. Unlocking another social network. Wee!
• eTouch Losens Global Tongues with Latest Wiki Build. With Enterprise 2.0 collaboration in focus, this release carries a few goodies that may make your team smile.

Most Popular Articles

And these are the articles you couldn’t get enough of — if page views are anything to go by, anyways. So what was your fancy? Popular CMS, and a whole mess of Sharepoint!

• How They Hack Your Website: Overview of Common Techniques
• Web Content Management with SharePoint MOSS 2007 (Part 1)
• Results: Most Popular CMS in Technorati’s Top 100
• Is Ning The Next Facebook or MySpace?

The Economy is in the Dumps but Content Management is Booming

If you’re looking to advance your career, or if your org has got empty seats in need of savvy CMSers, you’re in luck. Catch the best fish of the season on our content management industry job board.

Featured Jobs:

• Director of Content Quality at TripAdvisor
• Director of IT Business Analysis at McKesson Corporate
• Executive Editor at Grist
• Internet Marketing Manager at Harrah’s Entertainment
• Web Technology Coordinator at Longwood University
• Web Design & Development Specialist at University of Nevada Las Vegas
• Internet Product Manager at AT&T: The Berry Company

Wednesday, Apr 30 2008

It’s a rare organization that does not track at least a minimum set of web analytics for their customer facing websites. The problem is rarely that there’s no data. Rather it’s what to do with that information once you have it in your hands. More often than not, it’s under utilized and probably finds it’s home in that virtual pile on your desktop.

It doesn’t have to be that way. There’s an upcoming Webinar co-hosted by Bridgeline Software and the Gilbane Group that will show you how to better use your analytics data to make decisions and improve the customer experience, and in the end improve your bottom line.

Friday, Apr 25 2008

The twists, turns and tips you need for staying up-to-date by the water cooler.

Highlights of the Week

• Microblogging Your Way to Greatness. Five best practices for making your microblog marketable and useful.
• Drupal Themes Becoming an Industry of Its Own. TopNotchThemes is a startup, created by Collective Minds with a promising outlook.
• Using a SONAR for Enterprise Social Networking. Not just another social networking site; it’s an intelligent social network designed to increase cohesion, collaboration and innovation in large organisations.
• The Google Sits At the Top Yet Again. This is the second year in a row Google has topped this list, and if you want our two cents, it won’t be the last.
• Search Engines Catching up to Social Media in Links to Online Video. Online video is huge and is only going to get bigger.
• Microsoft Purchases Farecast Travel Site. Microsoft’s spending spree results in Seattle-based airfare prediction and travel site.

Most Popular Articles

And these are the articles you couldn’t get enough of — if page views are anything to go by, anyways. So what was your fancy? Popular CMS, and a whole mess of Sharepoint!

• How They Hack Your Website: Overview of Common Techniques
• Web Content Management with SharePoint MOSS 2007 (Part 1)
• Results: Most Popular CMS in Technorati’s Top 100
• Move Over Lotus Notes, SharePoint is Filling Yer Shoes

The Economy is in the Dumps but Content Management is Booming

If you’re looking to advance your career, or if your org has got empty seats in need of savvy CMSers, you’re in luck. Catch the best fish of the season on our content management industry job board.

Featured Jobs:

• Associate Content Developer at Conker Media, Ltd.
• Director of IT Business Analysis at McKesson Corporate
• Executive Editor at Grist
• Internet Marketing Manager at Harrah’s Entertainment
• Web Technology Coordinator at Longwood University
• Web Design & Development Specialist at University of Nevada Las Vegas
• Internet Product Manager at AT&T: The Berry Company

Drupal is a big business in its own right, but it’s also spawned a formidable industry of its own — template and theme retailers. The newest addition to the fold is TopNotchThemes, which has just launched its first all-Drupal high-end theme store. From what we’ve seen so far, it looks pretty promising.

Thursday, Apr 24 2008

Blogging has been around for some time now, but there is a new aspect of blogging that is on the rise across the web. That aspect is microblogging. Much like the advent of text messaging, microblogging is taking the idea of being connected to the next level and sweeping the world over.

Wednesday, Apr 23 2008

Spend forty-five minutes with Steve Souders and you too can have Even Faster Web Sites. That’s the plan anyway.

O’Reilly Media presents a free webcast with the author of High Performance Web Sites and former Chief Performance Yahoo!, Steve Souders.

The book High Performance Web Sites is based around the 14 most important rules that Souder discovered during his research and work on site optimization. If these rules are followed, he claims they can chip 25 to 50 percent off the response time when users request a page. Souder’s techniques have improved the functionality of such sites as Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Front Page.

Now at Google, Souders has been busy working on a new set of best practices to make web sites zoom, zoom fast. Benefiting from his extensive background in web performance, participants will learn about the Performance Golden Rule, review his performance best practices and watch how YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug, analyzes the top web sites in the world.

Joined by Andy Oram, author, blogger, and senior editor for O’Reilly Media, the webcast is sure to lend a hand in helping attendees harnessing the efficiency of their web sites.

The webcast is scheduled for Thursday, April 24 at 10 a.m. PST. Register today!

The key to successful conversion rates is getting information to the right people at the right time.

Internet technology provides businesses the ability to pin-point markets at precise moments. However, if you’re not delivering the right information, the entire effort, investment and process is severely flawed.

Friday, Apr 18 2008

The twists, turns and tips you need for staying up-to-date by the water cooler.

Highlights of the Week

• CIOZone Study: Move to SaaS Model or Die. Study shows that SaaS plays a significant role in the success and growth of companies.
• FaceBook Blogging Mania with Six Apart’s Nifty FB App. The new Blog It FaceBook app is double barrel publishing fun.
• News Aggregation - The Downfall of Web Journalism. Does aggregation cheapen content or increase its value?
• Open Source – The Future of Software As A Service. No longer is it just open source against proprietary solutions for better cost savings, it’s now SaaS against open source for the same reasons.
• Web Designers Get Officially Cushy with Their CMS. CushyCMS officially enters the content management fray.
• Is Ning The Next Facebook or MySpace?. If you’re looking for an easy to use alternative that doesn’t involve having to get a new hosting account, then Ning is your thing.

Most Popular Articles

And these are the articles you couldn’t get enough of — if page views are anything to go by, anyways. So what was your fancy? Popular CMS, and a whole mess of Sharepoint!

• How They Hack Your Website: Overview of Common Techniques
• Web Content Management with SharePoint MOSS 2007 (Part 1)
• Results: Most Popular CMS in Technorati’s Top 100
• SharePoint Web Content Management Licensing was Botched

The Economy is in the Dumps but Content Management is Booming

If you’re looking to advance your career, or if your org has got empty seats in need of savvy CMSers, you’re in luck. Catch the best fish of the season on our content management industry job board.

Featured Jobs:

• Director of Content Quality at TripAdvisor
• Business Analyst, Technology Architecture at Target
• Manager, Information Technology at Target
• Director of Content at b5Media
• Technical Data Architect at IBM
• Web Editor at Smithsonian Magazine (online)
• Internet Product Manager at AT&T: The Berry Company

Thursday, Apr 17 2008

San Francisco-based Six Apart — makers of Movable Type, sellers of Live Journal — have just unwrapped a lovely new piece of technology. Some call it blog fire-hosing, but we’ll go with rather heavier metaphors and say their new Blog It FaceBook app is double barrel publishing fun. It’s buckshot blogging. It’s strafing the blogosphere. It’s like going hunting with Cheney — you know, pull the trigger once and you get two birds and all your friends, right in the face.

As with any website, design can be key to your overall performance. Many already know that WordPress offers some great features for blogs and sites alike. But did you know that you can get great magazine style themes to ensure maximum design efficiency online?