The day is finally upon us: Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 7 to the world. To put this in perspective, this is the first major browser update from Microsoft since August of 2001. In Internet time, that’s like a billion years. Currently available only via download, IE7 will be installed on all PCs running Windows as an automatic update on November 1.
The good news
Microsoft has added lots of new features including tabbed browsing, RSS detection, Shrink-to-Fit printing (finally) and some others which you can read about here. More importantly, IE7 does a much better job supporting web standards. Kudos to the IE7 team for working hard to improve a notoriously buggy browser.
The not-so-good news
Despite progress, IE’s support for standards has a ways to go. The rendering engine – that’s the bit that displays web sites in all their glory – is still lacking. In short, aspects of some sites across the Internet will appear ‘broken’ in IE7 until the new kinks have been worked out of the system.
At Duo, we’ve built standards-based sites since 2002, and have been following the development of IE 7 for some time. Since the final spec of what would and wouldn’t be fixed changed many times throughout the development of IE’s new browser, we took the approach of blocking our IE specific layout “hacks” from IE 7. We are now able to test against the public version of the browser, and will quickly find the issues that will require further “hacking.”
The better news
Most of the problems we’ve seen so far are fairly easily remedied. However, every site is a little different, which means we have a lot of testing to do.
Initial impressions: thumbs (cautiously) up
New browsers (most notably Firefox) have raised the level of standards support to new heights. IE is catching up, but as we’ve mentioned, they’ve still got ground to cover. Fortunately, they’re moving down the right path. We’re looking forward to coding fewer IE-specific styles, and to more uniform browser support for standards.
Our next seminar in our Content Matters series, Building Functional
Websites, is October
17 at the Catalyst Ranch in Chicago, and you need to register by October 6 to get the discount rate.
In this full-day seminar, you will learn how to build, optimize and
maintain great websites that drive the business results. The morning
session reviews the fundamentals, followed by an afternoon of
interactive breakouts covering our most popular and highly-requested
topics: Information Architecture and Online Marketing.
This is a working day - expect to come away from this workshop with a
plan that will assist you and your company in launching your online
marketing project. Breakouts will be led by our team of experts, but
case studies will be provided by you. This is your opportunity to ask
questions, get feedback specific to your unique situation, and break
through the barriers that may be keeping you from taking that first
step to getting your online project off the ground.
I’ve just
returned from Virginia
where I attended The New New Internet conference. I flew out because of it’s focus on “Web 2.0
for the Enterprise”
a subject that I will be covering at our next Content Matters seminar on
October 17 and at the Technology Executives Club IT Trends Forecast on December
13.
Web 2.0 has
lead the buzz parade for the last couple of years, ever since Tim O’Reilly
coined the term, and we are familiar with the poster boys of this new
order. What is different about Web
2.0? How about 225 Million Internet
users in the US
alone. This has created the opportunity
for The Long Tail and the rise of social networking in sites such as Digg,
YouTube, and Flickr.
What are
the key tenants of Web 2.0 according to Google?
- Simplicity for end users
- Better tools for efficient development
- Elimination of barriers to
information
- The power of the cloud
I will
cover these in more detail in a later post.
But what about the enterprise? Is
there anything more to Web 2.0 then blogging or wiki’s behind a firewall?
There were
a number of good talks including Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, (fully
covered by Jason Goldberg of Jobster). I
was most impressed by talks from Rajen Sheth of Google, and Andrew McAfee from
Harvard who provided some answers to the question such as -
- Web 2.0 is NOT about technology, it
is a way of interacting with customers.
The technology doesn’t matter; it’s what you do with the technology that
matters. For instance, Ajax is an approach that lets you re-center
around the user.
- Web 2.0 is about involving your
customers and for the enterprise, involving the employees.
- Web 2.0 is about information (you
can’t have too much) and transparency (make it accessible to the user).
- Web 2.0 is about keeping things
simple with a focus on the average user.
- Web 2.0 is about hosted services
that allow you to focus on your business rather than your infrastructure.
But what does this mean for the
enterprise? McAfee said that because
knowledge work is essentially unstructured work (with structured data), they can truly benefit from Web
2.0 approaches. He felt that something
will bridge the gap between emergent technologies we use on the web and the
structured data of enterprise content.
(We all know there has to be a better way to manage corporate knowledge
than giant email boxes on everybody’s desktop.)
McAfee said “The enterprise has
always been about central control and structured content, while Web 2.0 is about
unstructured content, so there are bound to be collisions…This is not a
revolution, but a transformation”.
I was a panelist at the Crain’s Chicago Business “Doing the
Web Smartly” seminar earlier this week and enjoyed it very much. Expertly moderated by Thomas Mucha, co-panelists were William
Furlong of Search Channel, Bill McCarthy from ShopLocal
and Melissa Giovagnoli of Networlding.
We started out talking about the marketing value of blogs – and
when I asked how many people in the audience regularly read blogs, less than
10% of the hands went up. I was frankly
amazed by this – and it helped to ground me for the rest of the session. There is so much information available on the
web, much of it for free, and so much of it nowadays comes from bloggers
focused on their particular niche. It is
a perfect tool for a small business to establish their brand, and drive
business opportunities as well (as perfectly described by Jim Coudal in his
Crain’s interview).
We covered email marketing, which still has a lot of life
left as long as the message is RELEVANT to the audience. We talked about
websites, and the importance of CONTENT over design. We answered questions about search marketing
and PPC.
But what stuck with me as I left the room was Nike’s slogan “Just
Do It”. Getting an inexpensive $50/month
site up is better than nothing at all.
Download an eBook and set up a Blog.
Create an Adwords account and buy a couple of keywords. Get into the game – because it is only then
that you will begin to learn about the new ways of marketing on the web.
Duo will present
the next seminar in our Content Matters series, Building Functional
Websites, on October
17 at the Catalyst Ranch in Chicago. This time, we’re changing things to include
an afternoon of interactive breakouts covering our most popular and highly-requested topics:
Information Architecture and Online Marketing. The
breakouts will be lead by our team of experts consulting on your specific issues. This is your opportunity to ask those questions that have been
lingering in your mind, and possibly hindering you from taking that first step to getting your online project off the
ground. You will walk away with a plan that you can start to implement immediately.
We’re offering the full-day for $250 ($295 after
October 6). A great deal if you consider the fact that you’re getting specific
assistance and feedback with your specific issues! We have limited space available
for these sessions - so please register today.
A legal marketing director in her
pre-Duo days, Amy Westerling knows firsthand how difficult it can be to convince
members of a law firm that the company website needs some love and attention. In
her latest whitepaper, "Selling That Website Project to Your Lawyers," Amy
outlines the winning strategies she developed to engage partners and other key
stakeholders in the process.
The internet provides an invaluable
opportunity for a firm to cross-sell their services, attract prospects and reach
potential clients. According to a survey by Alyn-Weiss & Associates, Inc.,
"82 percent of businesses and transactional firms have received work from their
website." Failing to prepare your website for the right visitors can lead to
missed business opportunities.
Full of sound tips straight from the
trenches, this whitepaper can help any legal professional build a case for a
website redesign. Let us know if it works for you!
This morning at 9:00 AM thousands
of Chicagoans logged on to the Chicago Park District’s website to register for
their much coveted programs for the fall season.
This season continued an upward trend with a significant increase (over 5,000 users) vs. the previous year. As a matter of fact, as of noon today over 10,000 programs
were purchased using the updated AJAX-based Program Browser
Application. The hottest sellers were Learn to Swim, Moms, Pops & Tots
Interaction and Park Kids. The top fastest program to sellout was Yoga, followed
by Dance, Aquatics and After School Programs.
Reaction to the Program Browser was
favorable. Calls to CPD on registration day seem less and less frequent as
people’s comfort with the new tool increases.
More than 2,400 programs have
already sold out, but thousands more are still available at http://programs.chicagoparkdistrict.com/programBrowser/.
Take a look and sign up for one of the great programs offered by the Chicago Park District!
I’ll be presenting with a panel of experts for Crain’s Small
Business Forum on Wed., Sept. 6. The topic, Doing the Web Smartly: Online Marketing, is obviously close to my
heart, as is the audience: small businesses. It’s important for all businesses,
big and small, to be proactive about their online marketing strategy. If you
are a small business and are interested in creating a site or incorporating
some new innovations into your online toolkit, this would be a great session to
attend.The panel also includes small business owners William Furlong of Search Channel, Brian Hand or ShopLocal and Melissa Giovagnoli of Networlding.
Topics include:
- Email best practices
- Lead generation
- Web-based marketing
- Timely, effective search engine keywords
- Webinars, blogs, e-newsletters – what works?
For more information or to register online, visit Crain’s website: http://www.ChicagoBusiness.com/Events.
Hope to see you there!
We are pleased to announce our relocation to the UBS Tower
at One Wacker Drive.
Although we will miss our current space, which quaintly overlooks the Chicago
River, we’re happy to be staying in the Loop
with easy access to many of our wonderful clients.
It’s a great thing to have grown in esteem and now in size.
Our team has added six full-time employees in the last four months and we
continue to grow. This is all thanks to our clients and their continued
support. Thanks for making what we do so rewarding!
To accommodate the move, we will be closed all day on August
15 and 16. You can continue to reach us at our existing email and phone/fax
numbers. Our new address is: One
North Wacker, Suite
950, Chicago,
IL 60606.
Duo has just launched a refreshed design for the Chicago Park District that is as functional as it is attractive. The original
design, built in 2001, while state-of-the-art in its time, proved to be
difficult to manage and out-of-date. CPD had content that wasn’t getting to their patrons and
they needed a way to better communicate through their website. They wanted the ability to display more
information on the homepage (like a portal) to link to content housed both on
and off their site.
Because Duo had built the previous site using CSS (Cascading
Style Sheets) we were able to and efficiently integrate the new site design into
the existing content management system.
Building websites in a modular fashion allows us to make incremental
improvements to adapt to changing requirements.
The updated homepage includes scrolling pods of
information, a plethora of pictures and images, and RSS feeds allowing site visitors
to subscribe for updates to some of the park’s most valuable information. The
design refresh was a both a creative and technical challenge for the Duo team
and allowed us to use Web 2.0 coding methodologies that we plan to use for other clients.
Check out the new Chicago Park District website or read more in our case
study.
