Well here it is--the new Newfangled website. Check out our new digs. As you can see we've upgraded the design. Hope you like it! You may notice that at the bottom of all these newsletter pages we've added commenting and blogging features. So feel free to leave us a note with your thoughts on the new design!


We've renamed this newsletter from Agency Alliance Newsletter to Web Smart. It's always been our goal to help design and marketing folks stay up-to-date with the latest and greatest in the world of web development. We leave out the technical jargon and just give the essentials. We're trying to help you stay Web Smart.

Since you're here in the newsletter section, let me start by pointing out the changes we've made to the newsletters. First of all we went through all five years worth of monthly newsletters and undated the content. We pulled a few old ones that were no longer relevant, but the rest are now 2006 compatible.

I've already mentioned the new commenting feature, but we've also added digg and del.icio.us links. If your not sure what those are check out our previous newsletter Wikis and Swikis and Blogs, Part 2. If you do know what these are, please do us the favor of digging our site and adding some del.icio.us links and tags.

We've also added trackback capability so bloggers can add links using the trackback URL (at the bottom of the right column) and our site will automatically create a link back to the blog. This is a mutually beneficial practice creating cross links and enabling readers to easily find related content. Oh, and speaking of blogs we added employee blogs to the site--they're linked off the People page.

Our rather lengthy newsletters have been broken into smaller chunks. This make our newsletters more digestible and helps with content optimization for search engines. All of our lengthy newsletters actually cover several sub-topics as we address each month's main subject. By breaking up the newsletters into smaller sections we create multiple pages, each of which is focused and optimized for search engines. An added benefit to this new structure is that specific sub-topics can be bookmarked or linked to directly, rather than linking to one long newsletter. To print a newsletter we dropped in a print icon in the blue bar for a printer friendly version of the full newsletter.

We've also upgraded the main Web Smart newsletter list page. We created a newsletter index which filters the list by topic. There is also a Web Smart search widget to search for content within the Web Smart newsletters.

One final thing on the newsletters--we replaced the old clunky sign-up form with a fancy sliding sign-up form. Go ahead and click on any of the Web Smart logo "sign up" buttons. See--pretty slick!   next >