Just before the holiday we received my oldest son’s current school progress report. (Thankfully he is a good student and always does well.) This reminded me of a useful tool I’ve found to help measure websites with regard to best practices for search engine optimization (SEO) and web marketing. The tool is the Website Grader. More
When I was a creative director at HomePC magazine back in the early ’90s, there were lots of articles making predictions about the convergence of PCs, TV, and telecom. Along came WebTV in ’96, a big box with a wired keyboard that made your TV into a monitor for accessing the Internet. Microsoft bought WebTV, but it never took off; it was very clumsy, with a bad browser among other shortcomings (not surprising). Now here we are in 2010, and you can plug your ethernet cable or wi-fi into your TV. Presto, you’re on the Web—sort of. More
Black Friday & Cyber Monday may have come and gone but the spending season has just begun and if you have an iPhone, as nightmarish as it may seem, every minute of every day can be Cyber WhateverDay. More
Earlier this month I attended the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) conference in New York. The mission of SoDA is to advance the profession of digital marketing through education, discussions of best practices, and advocacy. The conference was billed as an “un”conference, which made the event conversational, collaborative—and at times a little too “un”structured. Still, it was a good experience. More
I’ve worked at Loewy Design for five years, and over time I’ve noticed a growing trend in requests for content management systems (CMS). After building out a handful, I noticed another trend that struck me as odd. Some of the clients wanted me to make edits to their sites post-launch, even though I had just handed them a fully functional, easy-to-use CMS. More
The relentless commercials for remote backup almost had me convinced to retire my arcane system of external usb drives and cases of DVDs on my bookshelf. Then a couple of weeks ago that little bit of doubt I was feeling became a reality for users of the T-Mobile Sidekick when a server failure at Microsoft’s Danger division left them holding a dataless hunk of plastic. Sidekicks rely on the servers at Danger to store things like contacts, photographs, notes, to-do-lists and other important user data. Sidekick users could do little but wait for Microsoft to restore the data. The interruption was so bad that T-Mobile temporarily stopped selling Sidekicks.
In a previous post, I talked about trimming the fat from content. But let’s face it: trimming the fat assumes you had good meat to start with. In a world where people have precious little time, if you’re thinking site redesign, content strategy has to be a main priority. More
I recently gave a lecture to the advanced web design class at Farmingdale College. When I met up with professor Jack Harris, he informed me that the kids, mostly juniors and seniors, saw Loewy Design’s page in the Flash/Dreamweaver Genius Guide, and they were looking forward to meeting with me. A bit embarrassed and very flattered, I asked Jack what book was he talking about and where could I get one. More
Recently a client asked us for our opinion on a Digimag (or whatever-you-call-it) service called Ceros. I’ve seen this technology grow in popularity over the years, and I have to admit Ceros has taken it to a higher plane. Their product and experience is rich with video, animation and interactivity – but so what. More
Everyone knows the economy is bad. I was talking to a friend in the home construction business the other day. His business has dropped nearly 60 percent, and he’s doing better than most in his field. He thinks that a tide of rising inflation over the next six to twelve months will make the economic situation even worse. We’ve all been told that we have to weather the storm. I see it a little differently. I’m a surfer. When a storm comes, I don’t just weather it, I relish it. More
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