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Friday, May 9 2008

Any good web publisher knows that it isn’t just content that keep readers reading and visitors returning. Interface design can be just as important as quality content. A bad website design can drive your audience away or seriously erode their confidence, just as they’re coming through the door.

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.

Thursday, May 8 2008

Ahh, our insatiable need to spend hours viewing online video, whether it be our favorite episode of The Family Guy, or that hilarious commercial on YouTube. Yes we definitely are a world of watchers. And organizations are getting smarter everyday figuring how to use this vice to their advantage.

Online video search engine provider, blinkx, aims to help those organizations by providing the blinkx Advanced Media Platform, a video content management solution that will “unlock the potential of video assets and maximize their monetization”.

Wednesday, May 7 2008

Can print media survive the transition to the Internet?

It’s an awkward question at best, whose answer has seemed quite dismal over the past year. But now, with a struggling economy and fledgling print audience, International Data Group (IDG) has sought a probable answer.

Seems like it was only yesterday we were talking about IBM introducing a Quickr Content Integrator that will help move organizations away from SharePoint. Oh, right it was yesterday…

Today, we see that IBM may actually be wise enough to tackle the SharePoint challenge from both ends. Another IBM partner is helping to bridge the integration gap with SharePoint. The partner — Mainsoft. The solution — SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes. If you are one those organizations that has a mixed technology environment — and you are not alone — this solution will go a long way to help.

Tuesday, May 6 2008

What’s the typical audience composition for a Technology blog? We didn’t know, so we vowed that we would move mountains to find out. But several months with a shovel in the Sierra Nevadas produced little in the way of usable data. And so we moved on to Plan B, and sought out the services of the Quantcast website metrics gathering service.

Monday, May 5 2008

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

Thursday, May 1 2008

We’re all dressed up or down and off to go interneting. And by interneting, we mean we’re going content consuming.

You’re dressed up. I’m dressed up. So what we want to ask is: What’s your content wearing?

No, this isn’t your CMS trying to seduce you. It’s a valid question. As we’ve discussed many times here, there’s much more to content than management. You are what you wear or what you eat…or some such thing. And the same goes for your content. So let’s talk about its personality.

Google Analytics is one of the most popular web analytics tools in use today; partly because it’s free, partly because it’s fairly straightforward to use. Now Google ratcheting up the analytics game with their latest feature set in the analytics tool shed: Google Analytics for Bloggers.

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.

Tuesday, Apr 29 2008

Even since the Web descended down from the heavens (through a series of pipes and tubes, of course), we web folks have been obsessed with gathering, analyzing and spouting our wisdoms about metrics. By far the most popular metric these days is the length of time spent looking, reading or otherwise examining the screen in front of us.

It is to be accepted and otherwise unquestioned that the longer the time a user spends on a page, the better. So you can imagine the relief of online newspaper publishers when they learned of the results from data collected by Nielsen Online in March 2008.

Monday, Apr 28 2008

Once upon a time personalization was a magic and wonderful word. The promises came and went, largely unfulfilled. That’s not to say that the technology didn’t work. It did. Nor is it to say that the basic ideas were bad. They weren’t. The problems by and large were related to how people attempted to use the stuff and the complexities and costs related to integrating it.

Amazon and others have continued to pursue the grail, if in modest strokes. Now were seeing web content management vendors investing in this direction. I say “grand!” If it’s done simply and with out too much ambition, personalization can be a great tool.