The Savvy CIO

Check out this great story about how open source crisis-mapping software has saved lives in Haiti, Chile and elsewhere. Two people wrote the program in a few days during the 2008 Kenyan post-election violence. The result?

The Ushahidi program provides a way for volunteers to collect information from sources like text messages, blog posts, videos, phone calls, and pictures, which are then mapped in near real time. It can be used to plot everything from disasters to wars. And unlike older forms of crisis-mapping software, Ushahidi is advanced enough to paint an accurate portrait of events while remaining incredibly user friendly and easy to build on.

This is open-source software at it’s best: fast, powerful, extensible, user-friendly and leveraging existing platforms instead of reinventing every wheel.

Kudos to the folks at Ushahidi. What great work.

The Ushahidi site and a photo of the software are after the jump. read more »

Darren Rowse over a ProBlogger has some good thoughts about website and blog content for click-happy browsers. It’s a short and funny read.

Darren experimented with a video chat site called ChatRoulette. The site randomly paired him with another person, and either person can click away to a new partner whenever they want. Darren couldn’t even get others to acknowledge him before donning a clown wig.

Applying his experience to the people browsing his blog (and your website), he offers this summary of visitor behavior:

• They don’t stay till long - they’re always clicking
• They are always looking for the next best thing
• They only pause if they see something that is interesting, intriguing or completely relevant to them
• They are ruthless
• They are impulsive
• They will judge what they see within a split second of arriving on a site
• They rely upon instinct and first impressions

He has some take home lessons for interacting with this type of person on a blog or site, but it’s important to note that not every site or blog (especially business ones) should plan their web strategy around this type of visitor. read more »

Deez provides high performing auto racing parts and specialized racing fuels. Recently, the company was looking to take their online marketing and e-commerce presence to a higher performing level.

Highland delivered an e-commerce site to help Deez stand out in a competitive automotive market. The site layout allows customers to browse multiple channels whether by brand, category, or through digital copies of Deez’s catalogs. Catalogs are still big in the auto parts world, so Deez included them as a digital link between catalog browsers and online purchases.

The home page highlights current specials and featured brands along with new and best-selling products. Our extensive experience with auto parts e-commerce sites coupled with marketing research done by Winsby, Inc. informed the layout, matching customer expectations and targeting buying trends.

read more »

Bad website design comes in several forms.

There’s bad design. In it’s extreme form (now more rarely seen in the wild), this is garish fonts and graphics, scrolling banners, and a home page that is about 15 screens long. I’m gone from these sites in under 5 seconds.

There’s bad layout, where you can’t find what you want, get lost quickly, and can’t see how to get back. If the site looks nice, I can put up with this for 4 to 5 clicks, and then I’m gone.

These mistakes are easy to see and, with the right skills, easy to fix. But there is another type of bad design that is more difficult to recognize and much more difficult to fix.

read more »

We recently programmed a client’s business-to-business e-commerce site to display competitor pricing alongside their own pricing.

Sound crazy?

We don’t think showing your competitor’s pricing is smart for everyone. But the idea behind it is embracing the truth that you can’t hide information from shoppers. Most visitors already know the lowest prices for the items they’re buying, or can double-check in under 10 seconds. There’s no hiding anymore.

Last week I found myself at an enormous, local mall hunting for a pair of shoes. Like most shoppers, I had a set of assumptions in my mind about what was important to me in my purchasing decision. In my case my criteria were, in order:

read more »

Google has released a handy gadget for web site design last week. It’s called Browser Size, and it shows what most people see when they look at your web site. The results may surprise you.

Web sites are made by techie people (like us), and techie people spend a lot of time in front of big monitors with high resolutions. Sometimes, the result is a web site that looks great for people with big monitors but looks different for the majority of your web site visitors. Look at Google’s example: read more »

We develop, customize, build, integrate and host web applications and web sites, and we do it almost exclusively on open source software.

Why open source?

There are several reasons, but here’s a big one:

Open source saves you money.

That’s you, the client. Open source saves you money. read more »

How can you get the most from a content management system?

To start, be aware that content management can mean two very different things:

A content management system is software that allows non-technical users to update a website.

-OR-

A content management system is software that stores, organizes and controls access to company documents, files and information.

To my knowledge, no single piece of software does both of these things. At least not well. These are two different pieces of software solving different problems that (unfortunately) share the same name.

A document-focused CMS will be covered in the next post. Today we’ll focus on CMS for a company website. So to ask our question more specifically,

How can you get the most from a website content management system?

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