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.

Like the DVR did away with having to clear your schedule to make it home to watch your favorite show at 9PM, dedicated shopping apps can let you shop whenever you feel like it without having to rush home to your laptop or even worse – the store.

Amazon Mobile

With about a year on the competition, Amazon Mobile has had some time to refine what was an already great app last holiday season. Being able to see an item in a b&m store, look it up on Amazon, find a better price and purchase it before you even make it back to your car is a pretty cool experience.

Best Buy

Best Buy’s app provides great interaction with their physical stores by allowing you to search inventory and reserve an item at a location close to you. I did find that I had to jump through as many hoops as I would have to on the desktop to actually place an order, which is something that the Amazon app managed to avoid. But still, being able to browse the weekly ad and see what they have on sale saves you a little time digging through the newspaper and a bunch of time actually going to the store.

Target

The Target app has the most limited purchasing options of the three. You can browse anything in the store and like the Best Buy app, see the weekly ad deals, but if you want to purchase an item, you are kicked over to the full-flavor html site which really defeats the whole purpose of mobile shopping. The coolest thing the Target app does though is allow you to set your local store and not only will it tell you if an item is in stock – it will tell you what aisle you can find it in.

Mobile shopping is still in it’s infancy but the experience is really beginning to take shape. Already there are expectations forming of just how the experience should work and it’s interesting to see all the major players take a stab to see what works.

For b&m stores, location awareness, stock checking and item reservation are a must because they save customers time and pull customers into the store. For online-only stores, robust personalization options and one-click purchasing (or as close as you can get to it) are important to recreating the impulse purchase, press-a-button-and-get-it experience that has worked so well for Apple’s iTunes and AppStore.

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.

How could this be? Did I do something wrong? Was the training I gave them on the software not good enough? A lot of thoughts like these ran through my mind. Maybe, or perhaps…there’s more to this trend.

I’ve noted that the clients who end up not using their new CMS software have these traits in common:

1. They’re terrified of breaking something.
   Even though it’s been explained to them that it would be very hard, if not impossible, to truly “break” the site, they still show tremendous trepidation about hitting that save button.
2. They’ve underestimated the learning curve
   Everything new has a learning curve to it. Although we strive to use the simplest systems out there, everyone learns at his or her own pace, and some people pick up things faster than others. Either frustration sets in, or it’s too costly for them to spend all day playing with new software. And some people just don’t want to learn anything new.
3. They generally work for larger companies
   Strangely enough, the companies that have larger budgets are the ones that don’t tend to use the systems. Clients like the idea of being able to manage their own websites, but quickly realize that although a CMS is easy to use it’s another task they need to add to their busy schedules.

My third point brings me to a question: “How do you, as the client, know when a CMS is needed?”

There are lots of possible scenarios, but in general, if you have a little time to invest in learning the software and a good development team supporting you along the way, you can’t beat the value and independence a CMS provides.

The recent widespread rise in popularity enjoyed by content management systems such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and MODx has changed the way clients feel about their websites. No longer are they just hiring someone to build something. They are now really part of the process: able to affect their websites directly, without needing any programming knowledge or having to pick up the phone.

So are you ready to move to a CMS?

With the recent release of the iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre, the lure to take your site mobile will be stronger than ever—but should you?

Loading up your site on a mobile browser can be a real eye-opener. In a best-case scenario, what you’re greeted with is a smaller version of the site you are used to seeing on your desktop. Although devices like the iPhone are more than capable of viewing “full” HTML websites, all that double tapping and pinching can get pretty tiresome.

The reality is that not all sites are particularly suited to having a “to go” version. Of course, there are the obvious ones—news, weather, finance—but most of these areas are pretty well served by the built-in apps on mobile devices. It takes some creativity to figure out what makes your particular business work on the go. So when considering the mobile option there are some important questions to ask:

What part of my site would be the most valuable to somebody on the go?
This could be as simple as your contact information—a mobile business card of sorts. I know I’ve been in situations where I was looking for a phone number or directions and went to a company’s homepage to find them. Sometimes this works out, and sometimes not so much. Ideally, a site will have a properly formatted phone number that becomes clickable allowing one-touch dialing. Adding in a link to your location on Google Maps will make you that much more accessible.

Am I doing email marketing?
One of the most common uses of mobile devices is for checking email. If somebody decides to follow a link in your email creative, it’s definitely at least worth a look to see what he or she would be presented with. Creating a mobile-specific landing page for your email creative could be a nice, low-impact way to experiment with incorporating mobile into your online strategy.

Could I trim my site down to just the basics and be happy with it?
Is it even possible to distill your site into small bite-sized chunks? Sites that are more information heavy, requiring users to spend time flipping through each section, fill out forms or pore through material in large PDFs are obviously not places somebody wants to visit on the go.

Do I want to maintain multiple versions of my site?
And you thought the early days of the web with browser-specific versions of your site were over. With browser detection and alternate CSS files used to serve up a mobile version of your site while keeping your full site intact for desktop visitors, the process is more manageable now. Still, you will have to consider the implications of any architectural changes across multiple platforms—although the statistics seem to support targeting iPhone if you just want to get your feet wet with mobile. According to Net Applications, of all mobile browsing platforms, iPhone has the largest market share with almost 65% as of May 2009. Google’s Android is in a distant second with almost 8.5%. As of this post, data still isn’t available for WebOS – the operating system use on the Palm Pre.

So is now the time to fire up the grill and get started on a mobile presence? It would seem so. At the  least it’s definitely time to start thinking about it.

Does your website look bloated, out of shape, older than it really is, full of a lot of non-nutritious garbage thrown in by the marketing and technology directors who came before you? If your website were a person, would it feel good about itself? Like it or not, your website does have a personality. And if you’re reading this, it probably has one that you want to change. Your website wants to be healthy, look young, and run faster, and you can make that happen. In this series of blogs that will come out over the next few weeks and months, I’m going to talk about putting your website on a diet, trimming unnecessary content, giving it a more youthful glow, and optimizing it to run faster and rank higher in search engines.

Your website should not be a banquet table

How well do you know your website visitors? When thinking about marketing your products and services, do you really think those visitors will want to read everything you have to say—or even half of it? The answer is probably no. So my next question is, why put it all on your site? Many marketing directors think of their websites as a banquet table. They are not sure what their guests will want, so they supply everything: a little helping of this, a small sampling of that. In most cases this just demonstrates to your users that you really don’t know what they want.

The key to a leaner, meaner, and more ROI-centric website is to start with your users. Know who’s visiting your site, what they are looking for and why they are leaving. If you’re not using website tracking metrics—such as Webtrends or Google Analytics—you should, because you don’t know the least bit about your web audience. These are good starting points, but not the only things you can do.

If you are thinking about a redesign or added functionality, you can create a poll on your site to find out how meaningful the idea is. You should be engaging with your users through blogs that can be commented on, Twitter feeds, and other social media outlets such as Facebook pages. You can have a competent team help with research, do surveys, or conduct user interviews. The more you can find out, the better. For most web projects, this will be the first stage in a redesign. Understanding your users will be key to knowing who they are; what they want to accomplish while visiting your site; what content or tools they need to meet those goals; and how to set up the architecture of the site so users can get to that information quickly.