Web Technologys Explained

I just read the following article title "Advanced Web Design: A Primer" over at Sitepoint, its offers a pretty comprehensive breakdown and explanation of all the current web technologys including:

• Clients and Servers
• Client-side Technologies: JavaScript, VBScript
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) & Dynamic HTML (DHTML)
• Java
• Server-side Technologies
• Common Gateway Interface (CGI)
• Server-Side Scripting Languages
• Perl, PHP, ASP
• Cold Fusion, Server-Side Java (Servlets, JavaServer Pages, etc.)
• Database Servers, MySQL

Interestingly Flash, Silverlight, .NET and Ruby on Rails where left out of the list, but apart from that its a good overview and read. So if you need to brush up on the state of web development technologies out there I suggest reading it. If you want to learn even more about building web applications check out 37Signals online book.

Groundbreaking new products: Apple iPhone and Microsoft Surface

This year we will see two groundbreaking products released from Apple and Microsoft that make the web more accessible and easy to use:

• iPhone
• Surface

If you haven't heard about these products, then i suggest you view the above linked sites...

Education And The Future of Technology

Today it seems to becoming increasingly challenging to hire and find qualified workers in the web and new media field a co-worker sent me a link to the following video. Some interesting facts I extracted from it were:

"... the top 10 jobs that will be in demand in 2010 didn't exist in 2004.We are currently preparing students for jobs that don't yet exist... using technologies that haven't yet been invented... in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet."

Definitely some interesting statistics on the future of education and technology! One thing I’ve learnt about one of the webs leading company's Google recruitment doctrine is that they hire their programmers and engineers to be agile. For instance you may be hired to work on Gmail, but could also be tasked to work on Google Maps. They believe in hiring workers with skills and aptitude that don't pigeon hole them into a specific job or career path. Add to that the 20% time they give you to work on R&D which has given birth to Google Transit among other amazing projects and you can see why they are the leader. So maybe Google is ahead of the curve here! They realize that hiring people with a broad base of skills and the ability to learn quickly and multi-task is an asset to their organization.

Steve Job's 2005 Stanford commencement speech still an inspiration

When ever i'm in need of inspiration or feeling a little down I can always listen to Steve Job's 2005 Stanford commencement speech.



Download:

• Video - Itunes
• Audio - Itunes

Yep i'm a fan of Microsoft and Bill Gates, but Job's is the man. So next time you need a lift, take a listen... I recommend putting this on your Ipod. And remember "stay hungry, stay foolish"!

Buzzillions the ultimate in site taxonomy & user generated content!

Yesterday I met with Jeff and Arun from Powereviews about their consumer product portal Buzzillions. This website is a great example of the use of taxonomy and user generated content to create a website with a wealth of content and an intuitive user experience.

They've used their rich database of tags and their search/taxonomy engine to provide a fresh way to drilldown and find the right customer reviews with their "Consumers Speak" navigation, see below:



Fresh approaches to navigation like this are exactly whats needed with modern websites with content that is so deep and often hard to find (requiring to many clicks to drill down). I encourage you take a look at Buzzillions it's a well designed site, and just might help with your decision next time you want to buy any type of product.

Product Information Management ... beyond traditional CMS/DMS

I saw a lot of cool products at the Internet Retailer Conference (IRCE 2007) in San Jose. However the one technology that resonated with me the most was Production Information Management (PIM). In this modern day and age when building a website generally it’s generally always on a Content Management Systems (CMS) platform which enables you to truly split content from the design of the site.

The one limitation of traditional CMS is that they are generally focused on doing page level copy very well, but don't offer enough flexibility and scalability when it comes to warehousing large amounts of product specification and data. Enter PIM.

PIM enables you to create your central data store or content warehouse where web copy, product information and specifications, files and assets are all housed in one place and are truly versioned. Depending on the package the technology lets you create structured or un-structured relationships with the content that is housed in the system via taxonomy. Adding targeted or personalized content to users becomes a much easier prospect with a PIM engine behind the scenes.

This of a system where every content item or asset is housed in a data warehouse that is truly version and can be shared with any number of platforms (web, print etc) via XML, Web Services or through an API and you have one very useful tool.

The two vendors I met at IRCE 2007 where Stibo and Catapult. The following diagram is an excerpt from Stibo's sales presentation of its STEP product. It really helps to show how a PIM software solution can be implemented and used to its full effect:

You can centralize it all in one place and provide a system to divide labour to keep things up to date and fresh in one place as well as enforce workflow. It also provides a framework to allow true de-centralized content, so you can offer direct feeds to suppliers, partners, dealers or other 3rd partys.

By truly embracing a PIM system you can throw away your old offline spreadsheet or Access / Filemaker database. And Forget dated versions of Quark, Word or other electronic documents that store product data. Breathe a sigh of relief! :)

Internet Retailer 2007... Community is King!

Last week I visited in the Internet Retailer 2007 conference in San Jose, California with a co-worker Chris Larson an Interactive Strategist at my employer Hanson Dodge Creative. It was an amazing trip to the Silicon Valley, my first time and I've returned with plenty of new information and ideas on how the web is breakdown down the barriers of traditional bricks and mortar establishments.

We started a blog while we were out there for 5 days to record some of our learning and our antics.

My three major takeaways from this conference were:

1. Community driven websites, sites that give users a sense of ownership and contribution are the way of the future. Community is King!
2. Buy versus Build. ASP or Hosted web software solutions with solid API's and support for Web Services and syndication are replacing the need to build it from scratch. They are cheaper, turnkey and will offer a greater ROI.
3. Big company’s do their research and development by merger and acquisition.

I have much more to share, but wanted to get these high level idea's down and expand on them at a later date.

Create Gadgets another way to build web traffic!

I'm amazed at the number of Gadgets that are being created for Window Vista sidebar and personal portal sites like Igoogle.com. This seems like a no brainer way of driving more traffic to your website, by offering users a way to syndicate certain portions of your sites content.

For developers check out Codeproject who offer some great insight on how to develop them for Windows Vista, or Googles developer site.

Powerpoint meets Youtube = Slideshare

A co-worker shared this new web start-up with me called Slideshare. It basically offers the same feature set as Youtube but with Powerpoint. Once you upload your presentation you can share it with others, embed it in a blog etc. I found this article that explains it in a little more detail.

This comes after a recent project where we reviewed a number of Powerpoint to Flash tools on the web, I was amazed at how many exist.

Kudo's to Slideshare, this is a really great tool!

Content is part of design to!

It seems so many websites really don't get it when it comes to content. I can't even count how many websites I’ve viewed where they have a killer header graphic, nice navigation and overall good looking page template and then when you look at the content it’s sad. There is no consideration given to how it flows, or make it enticing enough for the user to actually read it. There are just paragraphs stacked on top of paragraphs, generally at 8 point making it impossible to read!

In this era of everything being on demand and with the popularity of services like Youtube with its rich media, chances are if you haven’t made you content engaging users won't read it.
It’s easy to dress up page content to make it more appealing.

Here are some ideas:

• For one break up your content, no one will read a big blog of text! See BBC website for a good example
• Use call outs – Use CSS or graphical items to show excerpts of quotes from text
• Use underline, and background color to jazz up content, 37signals have perfected this technique
• Have a linking strategy, it helps people to deep dive and view other content on your site
• Provide content intelligence – Show a list of related content (see my taxonomy blog)
• Embed stuff… take a look at any blog: video, flash, images, audio are all ways to keep people interested and enhance the content
• De-centralized your content by providing a feed in RSS, getting people to read it in any form is still good!
• Add tools like text size, search, email, embed (digg etc) and print so people can interactive with it

So there you have it, hopefully some of these idea’s are helpful. I’ll leave you with some recent sites I visited that have done this well:

• http://www.articulate.com/
• http://meetmenow.webex.com/
• http://adage.com/