Here we are talking about the best web trends, ideas, best practices and general thoughts of our team.

Web Industry

  • Keep Clients Happy and They will Bring You New Ones

    .net Magazine

    NOTE: This article was written by Mike, featured on .Net Magazine on August 5, 2011.

    Any project manager or business executive would say, “Mike, going continually outside of scope and working for free is no way to manage a project.” And to an extent they’re right--going out of scope is a major project management faux-pas. Everyone in the industry has been trained to keep the project on-time, within budget, and within scope. But maybe that’s why taking the road less traveled isn’t such bad advice. Know your clients. Know their likes. Know their dislikes. Know everything they are and everything they can be. Know them like your one true love, and you’ll know their needs before they even know them. Do whatever you can for them (within reason) and worry about money later. They’ll be your biggest fans. Connections will be made, deals will be closed and money will be made. In the end, the sum of your relationship will be more than its individual parts (or costs).

    Mike
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  • Facebook Promises Awesome Launch on July 6

    Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced that the world’s biggest social networking service will “launch something awesome” tomorrow. As a consequence, the web is buzzing with speculation about the exact nature of the launch.

    Some think it could be a platform designed to rival Apple’s App Store, while a recent report in The New York Times said that Facebook was preparing an app for the iPad. Others have cited the recently leaked Facebook photo sharing app for the iPhone, or maybe an integration with Netflix.

    Mike
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  • Jing and Skitch – The Best Things in Life Really Can Be Free

    JING

    Jing and Skitch. It may be the first time you’ve come across these words, and if your first impulse is to reach for a dictionary you may be puzzled to learn that one is a Scottish exclamation of surprise, while the other is a portmanteau word formed from “skate” and “hitch” describing the act of grabbing a tow from the back fender of a passing car while riding on a skateboard or roller skates. All quite amusing, but “Jing” and “Skitch” are two brilliant web tools that have become indispensable since we discovered them.

    Mike
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  • ExpressionEngine Structure Module

    ExpressionEngine Structure Screenshot

    I’ve mentioned before my esteem for ExpressionEngine, a robust CMS that we use a lot. My admiration for this product also extends to one of its add-ons, the powerful ExpressionEngine Structure, which is well worth a few words in its own right. It enables us to create pages, generate navigation, and manage content via a simple interface which lets us build sturdy sites that our clients really like.

    Mike
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  • Cloud Computing – Net Future or Pie in the Sky?

    Cloud Computing is the term which has been attached to what is now generally regarded as the next stage in the Internet’s development: the renting or borrowing of software online by users rather than buying and installing it on their computers. As a business model it is pretty much the same as, say, Yahoo mail services, but takes the concept a lot further. The Internet “Cloud” would enable whole businesses to access a centralized hub to run their software tools, processing and storage, as online rented facilities. The way technology is used to service customers, suppliers, and partners would be totally different and already some companies like Amazon and Google have substantial IT resources in the cloud. They report that many of the constraining issues of, for example, cost, capacity, time and power, associated with the present Internet environment have been either substantially reduced, or eliminated.

    Mike
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  • EZineArticles Toughens Its Quality Requirements

    An electronic magazine or ezine is one published online rather than in print and tends to focus on quite specific subject areas with a targeted readership. EzineArticles.com describes itself as a matching service that brings ezine publishers together with expert authors and writers. Submitted original articles are posted on the site and made available to publishers of email newsletters for inclusion in their offerings.
    EZineArticles has just issued a list of five quality improvement changes for submitting authors to take on board with immediate effect. This follows in the wake of Google’s recent offensive against content farms although any perceived causal linkage may be fallacious. Here is a summary of the changes:

    Mike
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