Ultimately, the organization’s instinct is to protect the ground that’s already been taken rather than take new ground. Every organization begins as an advance force and ends up as an occupying force.
An Occupying Force
1 Jun 2012
A mobile-specific solution or responsive?
30 May 2012
Bryson Meunier has posted an article that outlines some rationale for why some businesses, such as restaurants, are better off with a mobile-specific version of their site instead of a responsive one.
Take the Ruby on Rails Hosting In 2012 Survey
30 May 2012
In January 2009 we invited the community to participate in a survey about the state of hosting Ruby on Rails applications. We wanted to get a better understanding of how people are currently managing their deployment and hosting process, and what they’d like to see going forward. Our goal was to use the information provided to help us continue to evolve our hosting-related products and deployment services (this actually helped us decide to accept Bluebox’s acquisition of our hosting business later that year). Additionally, we wanted to provide this information back to the community so that our colleagues in the industry could also use this information in their decision making processes.
Given that it’s been over three years since we ran this survey, we felt that it would be interesting to see just how much the landscape has changed by running another one.
We’ve modified a few of the old questions and added some new ones for good measure. Responses will be collected through the month of June and the results will then be shared with everyone (similar to 2009).
If you have a few minutes to spare, take our survey and help us how Ruby on Rails applications are being deployed in 2012.
Rails Hosting Survey 2012
30 May 2012
Participate in our 2012 Rails Hosting survey!
Melissa Matross on replacing ad revenue
29 May 2012
via Adaptive Path’s blog post, Better Revenue Through UX
People are the web
29 May 2012
Beyond the baseline demographic data of age, race, sex, location etc, we should ponder some questions: Who are they? How are they? How well do they sleep? Are they anxious? Are they extroverts displaying their digital peacock feathers? Are they introverts who can socialize but head home early because their feet hurt and they’d rather read a book? Are 52% of them introverts who live voyeuristically through the safety of glowing screens? What is it that they want? Can we provide for them? Do we have to?
It sounds like Dave had a lovely weekend down in Palm Springs and busted out this thought-provoking post about Facebook's recent IPO and what they are likely going to need to focus on as a business... while raising a lot of good questions for us all to ponder.
White Paper - Responsive Design vs Mobile Site
29 May 2012
Our team is currently working on a series of white papers and have just finished our first one, which introduces businesses to two strategies for designing and developing a site that targets mobile traffic.
Given that we've approached several projects from both angles, we felt that it would be worthwhile to share our experiences of each with you.
You can now get our white paper, "Responsive Design vs Mobile Site" on "our new white papers page":http://planetargon.com/white-papers/responsive-design-vs-mobile-site.
Google+ Fuss
24 May 2012
Guy Kawasaki releases What the Plus!, in which he explains what “makes Google+ as special as Macintosh”.
I was a little surprised when I first read about this, as my experience of Google+ so far has been like walking down a deserted street, complete with tumbleweed and whistling wind. In all honesty, I’ve probably not been fair with it and wrote it off quite quickly. However, when somebody as well-respected as Guy Kawasaki makes such a bold comparison it did make me want to go take another look at it.
One of the points he makes is the clean interface, with plenty of white space. Google’s interfaces are not for everybody – often being described as utilitarian, but my feeble brain tends to prefer this style. The most important aspect though is whether or not there is any activity, and several months on (with admittedly small circles) I’m still seeing barely any activity. Going there makes you feel like you chose the wrong party. The few people there are standing at the edge of the room, and its all disturbingly quiet.
My prediction? The next Wave.
Creating Contiki's Mobile Site, Part 3: Visual Design
24 May 2012
At this point, we’ve gone through the early stages of our design strategy by researching, sketching ideas, and making a paper prototype. We then extended that strategy phase into a development of a mobile prototype to help explain how each page would function on the site. It was now time to complete the user’s experience by adding visuals to complement that functionality. Thanks to the extra work we did in the beginning, we knew what we wanted to see, so the transition from our quick and dirty prototype to a finished user experience adding visual design elements was practically seamless.
14 Things I Learned at WebVisions - Day 2
24 May 2012
Welcome back! I hope you enjoyed 14 Things I learned at WebVisions – Day 1. How was dinner? Did you sleep well? OK, enough chit chat- it’s time for the epic conclusion of this 2-part series. Without further ado, I present the remaining 7 things I learned while attending WebVisions Portland 2012:
