Article Ford’s Blogging Strategy: Win by Christopher Butler on April 27, 2009 AdAge has an article about an interesting blogging strategy taken by Ford Motor Company, who has lent 100 Fiesta's to bloggers who will post their experiences over six months of driving them. I liked this quote from Fiesta Product Manager Sam De La Garza... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design “You don’t find anything out until you start showing it to people.” by Christopher Butler on April 24, 2009 David Kelly, founder and CEO of IDEO Product Development and professor at Stanford, spoke at Stanford's Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Speaker Series about design as an iterative process. You can watch his entire talk at the link I provided, but I pulled one quote that I thought was relevant to the thinking behind our grayscreen prototyping philosophy... Read Now About
Article More on Twitter by Christopher Butler on April 23, 2009 Twitter talk is going nuts since celebrities like Oprah and Ashton Kutcher have started using it. In fact, did you know that Twitter traffic has jumped 43% since Oprah's 1st tweet and more than 1 million new users joined since then? That's huge. Accordingly, there's plenty of Twitter coverage in big media outlets like the New York Times. Here are some opinions... Read Now About
Article AdAge in a Recession by Christopher Butler on April 22, 2009 I smiled when I saw this graphic on the cover page of AdAge from earlier this month (of course, I only received it in the mail today, along with last week's and this week's issues). But I appreciate their honesty, saying that ultimately, less ads doesn't necessarily mean less quality. Advertising Age isn't the only magazine out there losing advertisers, and therefore, getting thinner. In fact, did you know that only 42 magazines saw ad page increases in 2008? 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 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 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 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 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
