Thinking: Our Blog
Museums in the Park, a website we developed in collaboration with our brilliant creative partners at the watsons, has been featured on the WordPress Showcase. Museums in the Park markets ten popular metropolitan museums in Chicago, and features a password protected member area where staff and board members access important documents and updates.
Mobile-optimized websites have been on our radar for a couple of years, and while we’ve devoted some time for research and prototyping, until now, clients rarely considered mobile an important part of their overall web strategy. But since our e-calendars virtually flipped to 2009, we’ve had several clients revisit the mobile web question, and have already queued up a couple of exciting projects.
Some of our partners have been hard at work making their systems mobile friendly. Salesforce.com has a fabulous native iPhone application. Ning recently released an iPhone optimized version for their social networks. WordPress, one of our most popular content management platforms, has released an iPhone application for managing posts and offers several plug-ins for basic mobile blog views.
In a blog post about the progress of the mobile web this morning, Jakob Nielsen says that the Mobile Web of 2009 = the Desktop Web of 1998. Think about that for a minute. In 1998 there was no YouTube. Google didn’t exist yet, nor did Salesforce.com.
Seems to us, there’s work to be done.
Over the last year we’ve helped several clients deploy social networks on the Ning platform. Our early Ning deployments were elegant, but traditional: we helped member organizations create rich, dynamic online member communities. Recently, we’ve been breaking out of that box.
Earlier this year, we customized an instance of Ning for FIRST Credit Union in British Columbia, creating a social network that enables their staff to meet up and share ideas online. The project included a custom design (implemented via CSS), custom home page components (via the Ning API), and some creative hiding and renaming of core features (using CSS and JavaScript).
We often receive web project inquiries that look something like this: “Please give us a quote for how much it would cost to get XYZ”. “XYZ” is usually a nice bulleted list consisting of requirements such as a content management system, online event registration, a member-only web community, a blog, a forum, integration with a Salesforce database, and so on.
We do these things really well. By leveraging existing systems and adding some custom code, we are able to deliver a great set of tools with great Salesforce integration. Just what they wanted, right?
Here’s the problem: Too often those lists of requirements are based entirely on what a CEO loosely articulated, what a competitor did last month, some blog reading, or a lot of friends with opinions. A recent post on Smashing Magazine – 7 Essential Guidelines for Functional Design – is a good read for those considering the “XYZ” approach.
At C. Murray Consulting Oomph, our best success stories consistently come from projects where we’ve had the opportunity to engage with clients at the requirements level – to put everything on the table and leave no question unasked. When we understand our clients’ needs at least as well as they do (maybe even better), we’re able to leverage our Web expertise to tell them what they really need, why they need it, and the best way to get there.
As a professional web shop, our HTML / CSS developers are frequently taking a professional graphic artist’s vision of a website’s look and feel and converting it to work with this unique canvas we call a website. The graphic artists’ digital toolbox is full of powerful applications like Adobe Photoshop, that provide near total control over the final presentation, on a fixed sized canvas, down to the pixel.
There’s one big problem: the web developer’s canvas just isn’t that controlled or robust. And it’s not just that the unique characteristics of web layout or the code that defines how a web page should look lacks a good way to pull off a design element (which it does, often enough). There’s a bigger problem: several kinds of interpreters trying to understand the canvas, each with its own quirks and limitations. Welcome to to the world wide web canvas.
Happy New Year!!!
We’re starting the new year with a new category of posts – CitySoft Tips. In here we will post answers to the questions we get most frequently from clients. The most popular question this holiday season – by far – has been “How do I link directly to a document?” Here’s how:
March 2009 Update: This method is for public documents only. Do not use for password protected documents.
- First you will need to get the document on the server. You will do that in the Content Tab, then the Documents section. Click “Add New Document.
- On the first screen, enter the title and other meta data about the document and click next.
- On the next screen is where you actually upload the file. Click the “Add format” link at the bottom of the screen and follow the directions to upload the file.
- Now the document is on the server and it can be accessed via a web link. To determine what the web link is, you will need to click on the document name in the document list and in the “Formats” section at the bottom you will see the name of the file you uploaded. That is PART of the web link, let’s pretend it is “mydoc.pdf”.
- The other component of the web link will be the path to the file which is a little tricky. For your main site, the path is /_data/n_0001/resources/live/. For any subsites you have, the path will be a little different. For instance the path for your first subsite will be /_data/n_0002/resources/live/. So, if you are trying to link to the “mydoc.pdf” file on the MAIN site, your web link will be “/_data/n_0001/resources/live/mydoc.pdf”
- Now, if you want to create a link to this document from a page on your website, you will go to the editor for that page, enter some text on the page (i.e., “Click here to download”), highlight that text, right click, and choose “add link”.
- In the URL area in the popup window, you will paste “/_data/n_0001/resources/live/mydoc.pdf”, the path to your file.
- Save the page and your link should be working properly.
We’re very excited to start working with a few great new clients. A big welcome to the Ford Foundation (http://www.grantcraft.org), Fairfield Farm Kitchens (http://www.fairfieldfarmkitchens.com), the New England Law Library Consortium (http://www.nellco.org), and the Social Venture Network (http://www.svn.org).