Recently, the Internet Explorer development team over at Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 8 passed the Acid2 test.

One of the most requested CSS features that has been implemented in IE8 (and is proven by the Acid2 test) is the implementation of the table values of the CSS ‘display’ property. These allow developers to specify via CSS that any given element should behave like a table, or a table row, or a table cell, thus allowing the creation of CSS-based tables without the use of tabular markup.

Obviously, tabular markup would be better in situations where it is semantically appropriate. The display of tabular data should probably be done with tabular markup unless there is an overriding factor. But for layouts, tabular markup is a bad idea because it is non-semantic; tables are for the organization and display of tabular data. There’s nothing wrong with conceptually mapping a layout to a table, it’s just a bad idea to implement that concept using non-semantic markup. So for years web developers have been handling CSS-based layouts using a variety of techniques ranging from legitimate to outright hacks. CSS-based tables give us yet another technique, one that has all of the strengths of table-based layouts while maintaining semantics.

So this is a significant milestone, and congratulations are due for the Internet Explorer development team. But let’s not forget that the standard governing CSS tables is the CSS2 Visual Formatting standard…which was published back in 1998. So it basically took Microsoft ten years–a whole decade-to implement it properly.

It’s true that standards are something of a moving target and are hard to implement because of that, and we all know how large corporations can move with the speed of a snail on Valium. But none of these excuse a decade of lagging behind both industry standards and your competition. It’s no wonder Firefox is rapidly catching up with Internet Explorer in market share in spite of the fact the Internet Explorer comes bundled with Windows.

We don’t want to turn this into a Microsoft bashing party, but we do want to call on Microsoft to be more proactive. Their record so far hasn’t exactly been inspiring. Maybe Internet Explorer 8 is a step in the right direction.

Jonathan Reid, Technology

http://www.everywheremag.com/
http://www.jpgmag.com/

(1) Document your travels or pics
(2) Upload your pics, your stories, your thoughts
(3) The community votes
(4) The editors curate
(5) Selected items get published and contributors get paid

Great model in an age when the printed word is dying to keep up…

Paige Kobert, Creative

Many of our clients come to us with requests to build a social network that will serve a new audience or need that has yet to be touched by the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, or any of the many social networks out there. In our experience, tackling something as robust as a social networks is as much about strategic planning as it is about execution. While it is often tempting to begin building the site out of the gate, I’d recommend taking a step back and doing an assessment that asks questions in the following areas:

• Know Your Audience(s): What primary audience groups will you be serving? Research (with the assistance of an interactive agency) these core audience groups and understand how they utilize technology, how they view social networks, and what their potential barriers to adoption might be.

• Understand Your Audience’s Needs: Whether your audience groups are coming to a social community through an emotional connection (sense of belonging) or through a utilitarian function (looking for information), make certain that your site directly addresses these “hooks” so that users will visit your site again and again. Map these hooks to the functionality and design inherent in the site. The great equalizer here that should be explored here is the concept of efficiency. Take an existing task or need in someone’s life and make it easier and you’ll hook them immediately. Great examples of efficiency are present in Plaxo’s Pulse, tripit.com’s “no brainer” planning tool, and Facebook’s Friend Finder. In short, all three of these examples make my life easier my taking disparate information (photos, contact information, events, updates, etc) and aggregating it in a central place. The addition of open source APIs only supports this concept and Google is looking to standardize (via Open Social) the implementation of these APIs.

• Distill Your Message: A critical factor in user adoption is whether or not users “get” your specific angle on social community. Tell me, quickly and succinctly, what you offer me, how it works, what benefits it will bring, and why I should invest my time in it.

• Phase Your Approach: Trying to launch a social community in its entirety is incredibly ambitious. In addition to all of the moving technical pieces, you want to focus your efforts on iterative improvements based on community feedback rather than a “big bang” approach which may or may not resonate with users. Plus, you’ll feel more sane tackling small digestible pieces rather than trying to solve the “big idea” all at once.

• Make User Feedback Part of Your Process: Understanding user’s needs at the outset is one thing. Implementing a social community that accurately fulfills those needs is another. The way you envision a user using the site may be entirely different than what they’d expect when they interact with it. Open up small Beta releases to a trusted user group that will provide you with honest feedback. Take that feedback and improve your site before releasing it to a larger audience.

• Harness the Power of Existing Technologies: This one may seem obvious, but often, the tendency is be be so unique, so different, that it seems borrowing an existing technology is cheating. My belief is that borrowing existing technology is not cheating at all, especially when you come up with ne and creative ways to implement it. In other words, let someone else’s great technological work do the heavy lifting so that you can focus on the business of marketing and creating a great site that will resonate with users. TechCrunch has posted a list of “out of the box” social communities that have pros and cons. Before going down a path of building a completely custom platform, look into the idea of mixing and matching existing platforms to create potential cost savings and efficiencies.

Finally, don’t be rigid in your thinking. You may have a great vision for a social community that you believe will resonate with users. At times, what you think will resonate versus what actually resonates will vary greatly. Don’t be afraid to listen to your end users and change course if necessary.

Peyton Lindley, Interaction Design

Maybe it’s just my network, but I’ve been seeing more relevant propaganda out of Obama’s campaign than anyone else in recent elections, and certainly anyone else that is currently running against him. It doesn’t hurt when you have propaganda king, and fine artist Shepard Fairey creating some beautiful posters for you, or a viral video full of celebrities, edited well enough to put a little hope in anyone.

A friend sent me this link, which breaks down the various campaign efforts, and actually refers to Shepard Fairey’s posters as creepy, claiming that “candidates with cool posters never win”. They reference Matt Gonzalez’ campaign posters as an example, which I find to be a stretch. However, they then move on to get into the subtleties of typography and political success, which is really fun to breakdown. Take a look, make your own decision. As Charles Eames said, “the details are not the details. They make the design”.

David Schell, Creative

Part II: SEO Strategy

see: part i: SEO in a nutshell

Now that we better understand how search engines work, and what SEO is, we can talk in more detail about optimizing your website. The first thing to do is an SEO audit of the website to determine strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. The specific strategies and tactics that are best for any given site are identified through this audit.

While there are literally hundreds of SEO tactics, there are only three primary SEO concepts:

• Code your site so that search engines can fully index your content
• Create good content with targeted keywords and phrases
• Get other sites to link to your site

Let’s look at these in more detail:

Create search engine friendly code. This ensures that your full site is available to search engine spiders. SEO best practices for coding include appropriate page titles and descriptions, use of text hyperlinks within site navigation and page content, use of a plain text sitemap (especially when using dynamic navigation), deep linking strategies for Flash, XML sitemaps, and more.

Create text content that identifies the purpose of the site and key web pages. Break content down into web pages with unique themes for clarity. Create unique/original content. Repurposing content may even have negative consequences. Incorporate targeted key words and phrases specific to your products, services, and individual page theme.

Once your site has text content and search engine friendly code, the number one thing you can do is to find (reputable) ways to get other sites to link to your site. Search engine awareness tactics build and entice these types of links. This can include developing business relationships, posting to blogs and forums, link baiting, releasing optimized PR with links to your site, submitting to vertically targeted directories, creating a blog that talks about your industry, products, and services, encourage other bloggers to comment and/or link to your blog, etc., etc.

How Do I Get Started SEO For My Site?

First, answer these four questions:

• What is the purpose of your website?
• What is the purpose of each page of your website?
• What words and phrases are used in the website content that are relevant to these purposes?
• Why should the engines rank your site higher than everyone else for your topic?

Second, consider these three key concepts:

• Code your site so that search engines can fully index your content
• Create good content with targeted keywords and phrases
• Get other sites to link to your site

With these tools you’re ready to get your hands dirty. Everything you need to know is on the Internet. How do you find it? Use a search engine of course. There are a number of easy, quick hit wins where you can begin SEO work for your site.

As a small business owner you probably don’t have the time or inclination to do this work yourself, or even to bring it in-house. If so, it’s time to hire a professional. Depending on the size of your website you might find an reasonably priced independent contractor, or you may need a powerhouse SEO agency.

Regardless of who does the SEO work, the important thing is to get started today. Over the long term SEO is a solid marketing and branding investment that will pay dividends. Put in the effort. Follow best practices, and reap the rewards. Does your competition outrank your site? Time to get to work. Better yet, get a leg up on your competition and build your rankings now.

Jason Rogers, eMarketing

Online customers are the new inventors. As Interactive folks, we support their methods of invention through testing, creating, experimenting, and listening. Sometimes, we attempt to put the customer inventions inside easy-to-understand campaigns, emails, functionalities, or interfaces i.e. visit this very useful Microsite, try this new tool, join a vertical community, and share your data if you are 34, tall, blond, wealthy, have kids, and enjoy outdoor sports.

Interactive-active customers and their friends create their own online reality. They appreciate the power of invention and also value utility, price, ease-of-use, simplicity, socialization, and accessibility. If we acknowledge that inventive power has shifted (from marketer/advertiser to customer), our focus is properly aligned.

For example, BMW just launched their new site, www.bmwusa.com, allowing customers to build their own BMW - more than 130,000,000 possible configurations are available. BMW gets it. Their customers are the new inventors. Question: is the customer or marketer responsible for the 198% traffic increase and 10 minute average time spent on the site, or did the marketer simply support the customer-as-inventor understanding? Ever heard of BMW films, started way back in 2001? BMW focused on branded and distributed content before it was popular or even remotely understood.

One item they missed on the new site? After building my $32,500 128i Coupe, I couldn’t share it. Hey BMW, let me share my invention! Or, even better, allow me and my significant other to collaborate as inventors online simultaneously (think Google Docs). Now that will get me to the dealership.

Allison Kent, Business Development

The December BusinessWeek cover article is about Google and their Cloud computing project that will make Google the worlds largest universally accessible supercomputer.

What does this mean for us marketers and the next version of the web? Access to the Google Could is being limited to universities and research needs. Ring any bells? ARPANET anyone? This approach is earily similar to the work of ARPA (which later became DARPA) and the origin of the Internet. Of course, the Internet quickly moved beyond universities and was explored as a business/commerce channel and over time became the bubble of web 1.0.

Every day we are becoming a more digital and data-driven society. The new bubble of web 2.0 is accelerating the pace via emails, digital photos, text messaging, social communities, Internet enabled mobile devices, blogs, etc. And those are just our personal data footprints. The corporate footprint is massive, storing financial systems, CRM systems, procurement systems all the way down to product RFID tagging. The amount of data that is generated on any given day is staggering.

Will the Google Cloud provide corporations a previously inaccessible level of computing power to find deeper meaning in all that data they’ve been collecting on us over the years? Can the current method of strategic thinking (human intuition, knowledge and judgment) be replaced with data and algorithms? Have we reached a point where important decisions are not based on our best judgment but instead on how an algorithm renders answers from massive amounts of data, yours and others?

To me it’s a fascinating question that will help define the next evolution of online marketing, design and development. Rather than relying on brand reviews, heuristics or typical market research and assessments, marketers will one day look to your personal data footprint to determine strategies and tactics with the horsepower and and numbers to back it up.

I’ve obviously asked way more questions than I’ve answered. Someone smarter than me will need to provide those. As I was writing this post one example keeps coming back to me. In Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Blink, he details how doctors currently determine if a patient is having a heart attack. With severe episodes it’s obvious, but in certain cases the patient may be in the very early stages and have only a subtle set of symptoms that are hard to diagnosis.

One emergency room doctor wanted to find a better way to diagnose these cases and used a data driven approach to the problem. Based on his analytical assessments of previous cases he crunched all the numbers and narrowed the symptoms down to four facts within a decision tree. Needless to say doctors were not happy with the notion of having such an important decision that relies on their experience and training being taken away from them and replaced by a simple formula. But, the results from the small amount of hospitals where he was able to test his formula where shockingly clear. The new decision tree method was more accurate by a considerable margin.

Chalk one up for the power of data.

Andy Sackmann, Client Services

Part I: How do Search Engines Work?

see: part ii: seo in a nutshell

As an Emarketing Manager at texturemedia I field a lot of questions about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The importance of search engines is well known, but there remains a great deal of confusion about how search engines work. Below are key concepts outlining the primary characteristics of search engines.

Search engines…

• Use robots/spiders to “read” web pages and website.
• Attempt to determine what each web page and website is “about”. Identifies keywords and phrases. Ranks the site based on the content, the number of links pointed to it, as well as the value of those links, in relation to other websites and for the same query.
• Can only read text content.
• Can’t “read” or “see” images.
• Navigate the Internet by following hyperlinks. Plain text links best. This includes internal linking of content within a website as well as links to other websites.
• Are unable to follow certain protocols and technologies such as JavaScript and Flash
• Look for web pages and websites that “contribute to the conversation” and are popular with other websites. Duplicated and/or stale content does not add anything new.
• Are popularity contests. Links to a site are “votes” for the site. The more relevant and/or popular the site linking to your site, the greater the value of that “vote”. Thus both the quantity and the quality of links to your site impact search engine performance.

“How do I get my site ‘on top of Google’?”

This is the most common SEO question I am asked, and it belies a basic misunderstanding of how search engines work. There is no such thing as a website being “on top of Google”. Search engines return a list of websites based on the specific word(s) or phrase entered buy the searcher. There is no “rank” for a given website, only the website in relation to specific search terms.

To clarify this common question, one should ask, “how can I get my site in the top Google results for my keywords?”. This question acknowledges that any given website will appear in search engine results only for queries with words and phrases directly relevant to the purpose and content of the website. In asking this question we identified four critically important concepts:

• What is the purpose of your website?
• What is the purpose of each page of your website?
• What words and phrases are used in the website content that are relevant to these purposes?
• Why should the engines rank your site higher than everyone else for your topic?

Only by answering these questions can we accomplish the goal of achieving higher rankings on the search engines.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

As a business owner you want to know how to leverage search engines to promote products and services, and to drive searchers to your website. The term “Search Engine Optimization” encompasses strategies and tactics that can raise the rankings for a website for the key words and phrases relevant to the purpose of the website. Below are some key concepts outlining the primary characteristics of search engine optimization:

• SEO changes can take days, weeks, or months to take effect
• SEO is a long term strategy
• Poor SEO practices, “black hat” tactics, or otherwise manipulating the search results outside of established tactics can result in lower rankings or even being blacklisted by search engines
• Many studies indicate that SEO provides a better long term return on investment (ROI) that online media (banners) and paid search advertising

Now that we better understand how search engines work, and what SEO is, be sure to read SEO In a Nutshell Part II: SEO Strategy.

Jason Rogers, eMarketing