Article Prospect Experience Design Elements of a Successful Home Page by Justin Kerr on April 21, 2009 Your website's home page is the first impression some* visitors have of your organization, so careful thought should be given to which elements will live on the home page. The more focused your home page is, the more likely a visitor will quickly understand who you are and what you do. Read Now About
Article I Can’t Keep Up! Why It’s OK to Let Some Stuff Pass You By by Christopher Butler on April 21, 2009 In a recent post about learning how to rapidly process information, I wrote how both I and my coworkers have found the increase of information and media stimulus that comes at us at work (but probably not just at work) to be overwhelming. I know for a fact that many of our clients feel this way as well. In fact, much of our consultation tends to elicit, at least initially, responses of frustration- "All this can't possibly be necessary!" and "I don't have the time." Not only can I understand and appreciate those responses, but I also think they're totally reasonable. After all, we're talking about adopting new behaviors in light of new methods of communication and technology, in general. When it comes down to it, those new behaviors are a choice, which requires you to ask how you want your life to be, indeed, how you want to be... Read Now About
Article How to create a link in html published on April 20, 2009 To create a link within your website This is the code you need if you are trying to link to a page that is on your site. <a href="page2.html">This is a link</a> Example: This is a link to "newfangled_employee_blogs" Linking to an external site. To make a link that that redirects to an external site, the href must begin with http:// <a href="http://cnn.com" >Link to CNN</a> Example: This is a link to an external site Link that opens up in either a new window or new tab. This is the code you need to make a link open up in a new window or a new tab depending on what browser you are using. <a href="page2.html" target="_blank">This is a link that opens up in either a new window or new tab</a> Example: This is a link that opens up in a new window / tab How to make a link that opens up in a new window (popup). To make a link open up in a new window (popup), here is the code. <a target="_blank" onclick="window.open ('page2.html','_blank', 'status=1, toolbar=0, location=0, menubar=0, resizable=1, left=20, top=50, width=90, height=90'); return false;" href="#">Test Popup 3</a> Example: This is a popup link Here is some of the optional stuff that one can specify for the new window by either specifying 0 or 1. Please note: In programming, "0" means false, "1" means true. toolbar=0hide/show the toolbar status=1hide / show the status bar location=0hide/show the address/location bar menubar=1hide/show the menu bar resizable=0is the popup window resizeable left=200position the popup 200 pixels from the left top=250position the popup 250 pixels from the top width=300width of the popup height=400height of the popup If you are specifying more than one item, you must separate each item by a comma (as shown in the example above). Read Now About
Article Is Twitter a Trap? or are We Simply Still in Progress? by Christopher Butler on April 20, 2009 I've been pretty clear about my ambivalence toward Twitter (and other social media, though my opinion has shifted back and forth in the past couple of years- see an old post for example), but evidently not so ambivalent as New York Times columnist Virginia Heffernan, who, in her latest piece titled Let Them Eat Tweets - Why Twitter is a Trap, writes... Read Now About
Article Firefox Without Tabs? published on April 17, 2009 I read an interesting article about possible upcoming changes to Firefox that might include... (gasp) No tabs! Read Now About
Article Protect the Future! by Christopher Butler on April 16, 2009 In some recent posts, I've been exploring the idea that the aggregate of our decisions regarding technology and how we use it could create a scenario that is, in the long run, one we don't want. (See Your Profile is Not Private, and other Seemingly Obvious Things and Cloud Computing and Privacy, specifically.) I was thinking about this a bit more yesterday, in light of the Three Necessary Disciplines, presentation I gave at our annual winter retreat in February. As a reminder, the three necessary disciplines were Be a Human Synthesizer, Try to Visualize Catastrophe, and Think Like a Time Traveler... Read Now About
Article Don’t Put the Cart Before the Horse! by Christopher Butler on April 14, 2009 I've been finding myself having the same conversations repeatedly in the past few months, usually prompted by a client wondering why some service they're using doesn't recognize a particular element of their site. In most cases its usually a matter of a third-party SEO-related service (like grader.com) not "seeing" their blog, H1/2/3 tags, inbound links, etc. Of course, the simple answer, as it would be with any third-party tool, is that we cannot guarantee the performance of a tool we didn't build, nor can we guarantee that what we did build will perform according to that third-party tool's standards. (This is the same kind problem we see when new browsers are released and sites build before break when viewed in them.) But I think there is a more nuanced answer to these kinds of issues that can be summarized by that old maxim, "don't put the cart before the horse..." Read Now About
Article Newfangled Workplace Culture: A Day in the Life published on April 14, 2009 Since coming to Newfangled from a big, corporate TV news station, one of the biggest changes for me has been the company culture-- mostly the schedule, the pace, and the general attitude toward employees. Read Now About
Article Your Profile is Not Private, and other Seemingly Obvious Things… by Christopher Butler on April 13, 2009 It seems obvious, but it apparently took a California court to rule that you can't cry "invasion of privacy" when people circulate what you've posted to your MySpace page. When I see things like this, I think, why on Earth would you think that what you post on your profile is private? It's a social network profile- people are supposed to see that content! But, in fairness, issues of privacy are not so cut and dry are they? I've been exploring this issue in some recent posts... Read Now About
Article Tim O’Reilly on Twitter, Yahoo and the Coming Sensor Web by Christopher Butler on April 13, 2009 Read Now About
