Categories

April 06, 2006 | Greg Ness: Marketing-Driven Web Development Budgets See Healthy Increases

Several reports lately have pointed to large increases in corporate budgets for Web development. The latest confirmation of this trend comes from Piper Jaffray senior research analyst Safa Rashtchy via ClickZ News. One of the key drivers of this increased demand is the need to optimize company Web sites to get the most return from online marketing activities.

In the past, Web site development stood on its own, but now one of the primary drivers of Web site design and function is how it will be integrated into online and offline campaigns. Consequently, marketing people are becoming the primary drivers of the design, development, architecture and ongoing implementation process.

April 05, 2006 | Dean Froslie: Broadband Users More Likely to Consume Online News

A recent Pew Internet & American Life report has several noteworthy findings about the relationship between broadband Internet usage and online news consumption. According to the report, broadband users are far more likely to use the Internet as a primary news source. “High-powered” users – those who spend the most time online, do more activities online and were early adopters of broadband – are also the most likely to heavily use the Internet for news.

April 04, 2006 | Phil Leitch: Web Sites Go Naked Tomorrow

Dustin from Web Standards With Imagination has decreed April 5, 2006 to be the First Annual CSS Naked Day when sites should go sans style sheets for a day, in a sense, naked. So far, over 300 sites have signed up to take part and shed their CSS for the day. So what compels that many sites to turn off their CSS for a day other than trying to get that retro-web look that last I checked isn’t very popular these days?

The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and; well, a fun play on words. I mean, who doesn’t want to get naked?

April 03, 2006 | Greg Ness: The Wisdom of Crowds

The call to move more marketing dollars online started in earnest a few years ago with a limited number of brave pundits. Even then, most of those recommendations seemed to conservatively advocate that online marketing should not simply be an afterthought, and that it deserved a bigger share of the marketing pie. Things have changed.

Now, the advice to embrace online marketing is no longer “out there” and it seems quite suddenly we are dealing with what author James Surowiecki wrote about in The Wisdom of Crowds. It’s always great to push the business frontier and be an innovator, but many companies are more comfortable operating in the sphere of established thought…the wisdom of crowds if you will.  In a relatively short period of time, we have gone from the experts saying spend some budget online to many saying spend most of your marketing budget online.

March 30, 2006 | Phil Leitch: ZapTXT! vs FeedRinse

Since writing about FeedRinse earlier this week I’ve had a few people point me towards ZapTXT! as a possible alternate or competitor. On the surface the two appear to more or less do the same thing, both advertise that they can help “filter your RSS”. ZapTXT! watches your feeds and alerts you via SMS, IM or email whenever something you’re looking for appears in the feeds you add to the service. FeedRinse on the other hand imports your entire OPML file and then allows you to filter out what you don’t want to see. In both cases you still view your feed in whatever reader you are using.

March 30, 2006 | Phil Leitch: One Desktop App to Rule Them All?

It isn’t anything new to suggest that most people really need just one application on their computer and they’d be fine. But it’s only been the past year or so when the single-purpose Web app started proliferating that it became reality instead of something tech pundits (and geeks) talked about. In the past year alone enough applications have finally reached a point of usability via the browser that I’m finding I use my desktop applications less and less.

March 28, 2006 | Dean Froslie: Tracking the Trackback

When you read blogs, are you sidetracked by trackbacks? If you are, you’re not alone.

For serious bloggers, trackbacks are nothing new. They are continually used to fuel conversations, connect entries and make the vast blogosphere less daunting. But for newcomers to blogs, trackbacks are usually ignored or misunderstood.

March 28, 2006 | Greg Ness: Ad Spending Up With Internet Tactics Leading The Way

According to Nielsen Media Research, spending on advertising in the U.S. rose 4.2 perscent in 2005 over the 2004 figures. Largely responsible for that overall increase was Internet advertising which led the field with an increase of 23.3 percent over other media categories. News on the report came via MediaWeek. Other strong category increases included Spanish-language TV (up 16.9 percent) and cable television (up 11 percent). National newspapers had the biggest decrease in ad spending with -4.7 percent.

March 27, 2006 | Phil Leitch: 33 Days. 33 Wikis.

EastWikk Communications has started an interesting series of posts where they will feature the best practices of 33 sites being published using wikis. Each day they will explain what the wiki is for,  why they like it and what can be learned from it. Already they’ve looked at wikis being used for an open source legal resource, an autism resource, a band Web site and a flu resource. They’ve already covered a diverse set of sites with the first four posts so it will be interesting to see the remaining 29 ways organizations are leverageing the collaborative nature of wikis.

March 27, 2006 | Greg Ness: Speed-Building Businesses

A recent cover of Business Week magazine asked a pressing question: “Is your company fast enough?” The issue’s main story is about speed-to-market as the ultimate competitive advantage.

In a business world that is now flat and operating on Internet time, many business models can be conceptualized, implemented, tested and rolled out in what seems to be the blink of an eye. Assuming a company has its supply chain equation worked out, a new e-business can launch and expose its product(s) to a Web market as large as one billion, or to a specific niche that is far down the Long Tail.  Anybody who peruses the business press can’t help but take note of the quickening pace of new start-ups that seem to appear out of nowhere.

March 23, 2006 | Phil Leitch: How Web Sites Are Indexed

So you’ve just launched the new Web site that your team worked on for months and you do a quick Google search for a few of your keywords and you’re nowhere to be seen. How can this be? You did everything right. You researched SEO and carefully selected keywords and optimized your copy. Your pages validate. You even have a blog as part of you site. What went wrong? The answer is that you’ve done nothing wrong. Other than a common misconception many people make by thinking that search engines magically know everything about their site the moment it goes live. It’s an understandable misconception, after all most search engines aren’t exactly open about how their magic formulas work.

So, using Google as an example I’m going to try explaining how Web pages are indexed.

March 16, 2006 | Greg Ness: Teen Market Addendum

This story about a comScore Media Metrix report was just released and it adds to the information in the previous post. Teens spend a great deal of time online. They are already an important market and they will become even more important in the next decade as their disposable income expands.