Blog

January 31st, 2012

Internet Strategy, Marketing

My mom gets a big kick out of my clothes. “I used to wear those when I was your age,” she says. Or, “I remember when those were popular!” What does she mean by that? I think incredulously. It’s even more unsettling when she muses over the things I do. “Oh, I used to go there all the time with my friends. It was very popular when I was your age.”

Her comments have waxed as I’ve gotten older and discovered – through some clandestine sifting through cardboard boxes – that not only did she have cool clothes I can wear now, she listened to music I’m into, and read books whose titles have floated around in recent conversations amongst friends. After I swallowed the whole idea that nothing I do will ever be original, I took a step back and started thinking about trends and fads. What’s classic? What’s destined to come back? What should never come back? And where does the relatively new genre of internet memes fit in?

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Hayley Wilson

January 26th, 2012

Usability, User Research

“Advance, and never halt, for advancing is perfection.”
~Khalil Gibran

Time, budget, and competing business priorities make it challenging to factor usability testing into project plans. Sometimes getting a product to market quickly is the “right” business priority for the client. With agile development projects, we add another obstacle to usability testing: release quick and release often. How does a user advocate fit into rapid release cycles that often focus on complex technical fixes?

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Sarah Tricha

January 25th, 2012

Web Content Management, Web Development

HTML Caching

Sitecore employs a number of caches to improve base performance in the system.  Some contain database items, others contain access information.  One of the most important from a development perspective is the HTML Cache, which (unless explicitly turned off) exists independently.

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Alan Gallauresi

January 20th, 2012

Marketing, User Experience Design

When considering your company’s content strategy, take into account all the options for deploying your branded content—not just on your own site and digital platforms—but also third-party sites, particularly in advertorial content on journalism sites. The advertorial blog can give your content exposure to new prospects and develop customers into brand advocates.

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Elizabeth Gibbens

January 16th, 2012

Internet Strategy, Marketing, Social Networking, User Experience Design

How do you make your site enticing for happiness seekers? On the way back from a super-collaborative session provided by the J. Boye CMS Experts group, I found some time to read this month’s Harvard Business Review.  It has some interesting takes on the notion of measuring happiness (and by extension managing it).  I wondered how that would affect the online world we now found ourselves inhabiting, and how you would begin to manage that world to meet your standard of happiness.  Of course, you have to define happiness, but let’s concede that doing so is like measuring pain – individual and highly subjective.  Perhaps we can tie it to another metric that is also struggling to be measured – engagement – and see how the two may be interlinked.  The notion of engagement in the online world is less ambiguous, but still difficult (though not impossible) to measure.  In this case, engagement is an ongoing involvement between a business’s online presence and its customer.

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Dustin Collis

January 13th, 2012

Technology, Web Content Management

In making the case for an expensive software integration, short term vision is rarely going to bare out the costs. But midterm expenditures show, from a variety of viewpoints, the value and utility of an integration with the Adobe CQ5 platform. The coming updates (CQ5.5) on the venerable Adobe WCM/CMS will make an even more intuitive authoring environment that behaves more and more like the applications users utilize on a daily basis.

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Ross Raphael

January 10th, 2012

Technology, Web Content Management, Web Development

The following blog post is part of a series on Sitecore optimization from the forthcoming NavigationArts’ whitepaper entitled “Advanced Sitecore Performance Optimization”.  View more posts in this series here http://blog.navigationarts.com/tag/sitecore-optimization/.

Load testing is a necessary and often overlooked tool in the optimizer’s arsenal, often relegated to a step after optimization has taken place.  Indeed, at first blush, load testing might seem less of an analysis tool than pure validation.  Ideally, if you have optimized well, then your Sitecore site will perform well under load, and vice-versa.  If you haven’t, then a load test might tell you which of your components is the bottleneck – hardware (CPU, memory), networking (bandwidth, location), code, etc – but not necessarily why.  Depending on circumstances, however, a load test can provide valuable insight into why a site is performing poorly.

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Alan Gallauresi

January 3rd, 2012

Technology, Web Content Management, Web Development

The Sitecore CMS is nothing if not completely flexible.  I’ve been working with Sitecore for almost 4 years now, and have yet to encounter something I can’t customize if I really want to. Recently, a project that I was working on had special requirements for the Sitecore Workbox.  The Workbox is sort of like the To-Do list for content authors and editors.  It shows all of the content items that are in the various states of workflow, and CMS users look in the Workbox to see what they must review or approve.  The project that I was working on was a multi-site implementation and there was a requirement that the Workbox should display the name of the site next to each content item in the Workbox.  This would help the CMS users figure out which content items they needed to work on.

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Corey Burnett