Blog

April 28th, 2011

Internet Strategy, Marketing, Social Networking

The way I see it, there are primarily three types of people using online dating sites today: the curious, the aggressive, and the desperate. 

The curious are consumed with appearing aloof.  Slightly embarrassed to have created a profile in the first place, even more ashamed to have devoted hours to picture selection and perfectly constructed sentence fragments, they marvel at the esoteric starkness of their profiles and artful allusions to Kafka and Descartes.  They don’t NEED online dating, but why scoff at such a wonderfully facile generational gift?  All of this is of course intended to mask their fervent desire to meet new people.  With this demographic, that’s just the thing: they are not concerned with the one, but with the many, and as such prefer sites like OKCupid and PlentyofFish, the distant, noncommittal cousins of eHarmony.

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Hayley Wilson

April 22nd, 2011

Internet Strategy, Visual Design

Editorial design on the web is nothing new. Trends in print design have always, in some form or another, found their way to the web through inspired visual designers. After all, a book with an index is a navigable piece, so any print layout can inspire a grid and the overall look, feel, and navigation of a website. Newspaper sites are especially brilliant at accurately translating real editorial design from print publications to the web. The UK Times, Guardian UK, and NY Times stand out as examples of newspapers that understand how to display content in a clean and engaging way. Recently, though, magazines have been catching up to this movement. Inspired by the possibilities that the iPad and smart phones bring to the table, magazines are taking a cue from their news counterparts and developing some truly innovative sites.

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Cindy Vazquez

April 20th, 2011

Information Architecture

Information Architects from around the world flocked to Denver this past month for the IA Summit 2011.  Every presentation I attended – from content strategy, to usability testing, to an incredible keynote by statistics guru Nate Silver – was top-notch, and I came away with countless ideas for my own IA client work.

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Heather Hogue

April 14th, 2011

Insight Article, Web Content Management

 “Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.”

 -  Linus’ Law[1]

Drupal has arrived. The enterprise level open-source content management system is powering an estimated 7.2 million sites as of July 2010.  With well over 3,000 attendees from around the world at last month’s Drupal Conference in Chicago, Drupal is everywhere.   For some, the question remains if Drupal is truly secure enough for enterprise.  The U.S. Government believes Drupal is secure enough to run Whitehouse.gov and after our experiences, we fully concur that Drupal provides state of the art security.  

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Franz Hartl

April 11th, 2011

Application Development, Technology, User Experience Design

You can’t go anywhere these days without hearing about how the cloud is changing the face of computing.  This is having a huge impact on our business, as more and more of our work is focused on designing functionally rich  applications for delivery over the web.  I think looking at how networks and applications have evolved over time can be instructive to understanding how to get value out of the current computing metaphor.

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Pete Rose

April 7th, 2011

Information Architecture, Internet Strategy, Technology, Web Content Management

Google’s increasing emphasis this year on its “Rich Snippets” program (an observation obtained directly from one of their Client Account Managers) should encourage businesses, and especially local vendors and eCommerce merchants, to start using additional “semantic markup” for their HTML. “Semantic markup” is additional tagging (or labels) using structured data that are added to help parsers and programs that read your webpage to understand truly what specific content areas or fragments are about. Google currently supports labels about reviews, people profiles, products, business listings, recipes, and events. The labels are invisible to users, but not to search engines.

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Ted McLaughlan

April 6th, 2011

Internet Strategy, Social Networking, Webinar

The evolving digital landscape is constantly changing the way we consume and process information. NavigationArts’ Senior Consultant, Mark Davenport, helps us understand how we can move sales and marketing efforts into the digital age, leveraging websites, social media, SEO and much more to attract and convert prospects into valued customers online.  In this webinar you will learn about: (more…)

Mark Davenport

April 5th, 2011

Application Development, Technology, User Experience Design

I debated borrowing from Dr. Strangelove’s full title and subtitling this post, “or how I learned to stop worrying about the iPad and love Android tablets.” Why? Because I now see how the Android tablet could push the iPad off its throne.

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Kevin Doyle

April 4th, 2011

Internet Strategy, Marketing, Social Networking

Like most young people living in a city, I opt to receive emails from GroupOn and LivingSocial. In a world in which receiving and checking emails is a borderline hassle, it means a lot when someone willingly participates in these offerings, particularly if they arrive daily.  Over the past 6 months of my membership, I’ve been pretty unexcited by the deals.  50% off Botox injections.  2 for 1 movie tickets. $20 for $40 at Thai Place.  65% off Kertain treatments.  And the list goes on.   

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Hayley Wilson