Welcome to 2009 and give thanks if you made it through 2008. Now that the 2009 year is here, it is time to think about some New Year’s Resolutions. centre{source} thought about how we might help you with the difficult task of beginning and sticking to your new resolutions, so, with that in mind, as we are a web design firm, we have provided helpful websites for the most common New Year’s Resolutions.

Get Organized: Who would not want to clear the clutter? Organization saves time, adds productivity, and, most of all, makes life easier. What happens, though, when you have a full-time job at a web design firm, diminishing social life, and a family to help manage? www.Cozi.com might have a solution. It’s a free organizer for your entire family to use. Started by veterans from Microsoft, Expedia, and Amazon, the helpful features include tracking appointments and lists, coordinating home and work schedules, and sharing favorite memories along the way. It’s a very popular application, and you can view this Adobe Flash movie to learn more.

Lose Weight: If you’re like many of us, after the holidays losing a few pounds gained from all the extra eating sounds great. But, losing weight is sometimes as difficult as nailing a perfect 36 on the ACT or getting reliable technical support. But, here are two sites packed with many features offered for free. Create an account on sparkpeople.com and begin the process. These sites have many effective features, and if you can afford to take the time to become involved and track your diet, they can turn into an interactive resource. I won’t lie, as a web design firm, fitday.com could use an improved UI (user interface), but the tools, like pre-set calorie inputs for many foods are helpful. If you just want to track your habits online, www.joesgoals.com is also worth looking up. If you want to add nutritional supplements or need additional fitness advice to meet your goals, bodybuilding.com is hard to beat.

Quit Smoking: Being raised from a family of smokers in Nashville, I was drilled from a young age to never start smoking. However, a common resolution for many is to finally break the habit. Quitmeter.com helps provide a meter that is very simple to use. If you were ever curious about how much money you could save by quitting, this simple application is for you. All you do is input the date you quit smoking, how much you generally smoked, and see the results. Let’s say you quit January 1st 2009, and usually smoked eight cigarettes a day; by December 1st you would have saved yourself $395.85 and 2,639 cigarettes!

Get your Finances in Order: If you need help in 2009 keeping your finances in order, mint.com offers free tools that can help. Their site proclaims their tools can help you lower your interest rate, show how much your spending, budget for the future, and even spend less eating out. There is even a nifty iPhone application that one can download for free. The site is also determined to stay free, stating, “The fees that banks pay us for introducing new customers allow us to keep the service free for our users. We’re committed to staying free for everyone, whether or not you ever act on one of our savings recommendations.”

Help others: I have been volunteering as a “big” brother with Big Brothers Big Sisters for over a year now. It’s been a wonderful experience, and if you ever though about helping others, check out volunteermatch.org.  It allows you to search for opportunities near to you. I searched for opportunities near our web design firm in Nashville, and found over 200 results. If you are interested in an opportunity, sign up for free and the site provides the information for you to reach out. Also, SHOUTAmerica, a community united to solve the America healthcare crisis, is well worth a visit. Remember, doing good by helping others comes full circle.

centre{source} wishes you the best with your 2009 New Year’s Resolutions and these helpful websites and applications will hopefully help you succeed.

How do I fix the red ring of death on my Xbox 360?

Can dogs eat pears?

Why doesn’t H&M sell clothes online?

Can you bring your own alcohol on a cruise ship?

I love Yahoo! Answers. If I have a question, someone there has already asked it… And more than likely, someone else has already answered.

I cannot imagine the number of minutes and hours I have saved customer service representatives by consulting with others on Yahoo! Answers to give my questions answers before sending an email or making a phone call. Sure, the answers are not always accurate, but knowledge is power and there is power in numbers.

It’s a two-way street. I’m saving customer service time and energy, and I’m getting sufficiently semi-accurate answers to my questions without having to listen to elevator music.

Now, the real question here is, “What does this have to do with building web sites for c{s} clients?” More than you would think! It’s becoming increasingly popular to recreate the Yahoo! Answers model within corporate web sites.

Real-world scenario: You have a question about how to import phone numbers from your iPhone to your Prius via Bluetooth. You decide to go to Apple.com to just schedule an appointment with the Genius Bar. Before scheduling, you hunt around the site for answers and discover not just an FAQ section, but an entire customer to customer help system! Chances are, you’re going to find the answer to your question here. If not, you’re free to go ahead and post the question. You will likely receive a few possible answers and make some new friends before your Genius Bar appointment on Saturday at 7am. You’re happy. Apple is happy that they just avoided you.

Apple is unique. Their lifestyle-permeating products cultivate customers who enjoy providing answers to others with no evident reward beyond the satisfaction of shared knowledge. Not many companies are blessed with such dedicated customers. Taking the Apple.com customer-to-customer model a few steps further in the Yahoo! Answers direction, a Q/A system can involve call and response credits. This inspires users to answer each other’s questions in order to earn the ability to ask a question. This is precisely how Yahoo! Answers built up such an active body of users sharing an incredible wealth of knowledge (and lack, thereof)!

Dunder Mifflin is not the best fit. Much like creating a social network, this is not suited for every company. Here are some key questions to ask when evaluating whether or not the Yahoo! Answers model would be a good fit for your company:

1. Do my customers consider my product or service to be a part of their lifestyle?

2. Do we get a high volume of customer service inquiries?

3. If we have a message board on our company site, is it very active?

4. Do my customers have more than just one or two questions about interacting with my products throughout the course of our relationship?

5. Do my customers have things in common with each other?

If you can answer “Yes” to all of these questions, your company would likely be a good fit for a Q/A system modeled after Yahoo! Answers.

AND you’d be a great fit for centre{source}… Call me, we’ll chat!

I was recently recommended Protoshare by some of the team here at c{s} and tasked with giving it a thorough look-through. I browsed the online docs, signed up for an account, and played around with it - here are the results of my digging:

Initial Thoughts:

Protoshare is tailor-made for what we do. I can’t ignore this - it seems almost too good to be true. Naturally, I was suspicious at first. My initial, gut reaction was “this is TOO simplistic. We’ve spent time refining our plans so they cop Drupal/slideshowpro/symfony to a T. This is a great idea, but one that probably lacks the finesse (extensibility, documentation, community) to be viable.” Well, I’m happy to announce that at least some of these fears have been assuaged (but not all).

Pros:

• It’s all online automatically, so client feedback/delivery is almost moot. This feature alone demands that we at least look at what protoshare is doing, and think hard about our current methodologies (which always have room for improvement).
• It provides for proofing of design comps - could be a huge process refinement opportunity, in terms of coordinating design/planning.
• It handles navigation and page wrapper templates beautifully. Clickable wireframes and auto-sitemapping are big plusses that aren’t really feasible/easy in our current, Omnigraffle-based scenario.
• It has generic enough components to allow the prototyping of nearly every kind of page (see note about components below)

Cons:

• I can’t figure out if it’s possible to duplicate/import projects. This would be a crushing limitation, because it makes each project essentially un-reusable. If this feature didn’t exist, I would be very surprised and disappointed. However, I’ve been through the app and the docs and haven’t seen any mention of it. How nice would it be to have a ‘basic template’ project that we duplicate at the outset of each project. In contrast, when you make a new project, it is EMPTY. All of the page wrappers need to be made by hand - not cool and, again, surprising.
• I can’t confirm that you can create custom ‘components’ - pieces of pre-built funcitonality that you drag onto a page/template. As mentioned before, the built-in component set includes a generic ‘box’ type that could be used for anything custom that you’d need to prototype. However, this is not a substitute for grabbing a slideshowpro and dropping it in.
• I can’t confirm that you can share ANYTHING across projects (assets, templates, components). This is a huge problem for me, because it makes the projects monolithic. I do a LOT of copying/pasting from existing plans. If there’s no comparable action in protoshare, I have a hard time investing much in it. Duplicating projects seems like a very reasonable feature to request, so perhaps a bit of pressure on the developers could get this implemented.

Conclusion:

Protoshare isn’t a silver bullet, but what is? The idea is awesome - perfect for what we do. The implementation is very good - but not perfect. The big Cons that I’ve listed are deal-breakers for the time being, but ones that might be resolved through additional testing/research or perhaps an updated of protoshare. We need to do planning as well as protoshare, with or without it!

We’re thrilled to announce that centre{source} was recently named as a 2008 Nashville Area Chamber Future 50 company by the Nashville Chamber of Commerce. The Future 50 is an annual recognition program celebrating the fifty fastest-growing, privately owned companies headquartered in Middle Tennessee. The last year has been a major growing period for our firm, and we’re honored to be listed for what, in retrospect, amounts to a whole lot of hard work.To be eligible, companies must be privately owned, headquartered in Middle Tennessee, have two or more employees or annual revenue of at least $500,000, and anticipate revenue and employment growth of 10 percent of more per year for the next three years.

And we’re in great company – we share the list with a number of our clients, including eMids Technologies and VACO. Congratulations to all the other 49 companies on the list, and thanks to the whole centre{source} team for making this honor possible.

Great news! The first version of the Doctrine 1.0 branch has been released as BETA1. The project is on schedule to release Doctrine 1.0 on September 1st 2008.

Today I am happy to announce the release of Doctrine 1.0-BETA1. This marks the true start for the 1st generation Doctrine stable lifecycle. As you may already know, Doctrine 1.0 has been slated to be released on September 1st 2008 for quite some time now. We still have a few more pre-1.0 releases to go until 1.0. The roadmap for now is BETA1, RC1, RC2 and then 1.0 STABLE. You can see the roadmap in trac if you’re interested in keeping up with the Doctrine schedule. More information on 1.0 and what other things to expect on September 1st will be given soon. Make some noise!

You can view the original blog post here.

Here’s a story that serves as proof that Interactive Strategy makes it easy (and valuable) to build closeness with your customers:Last week, we started using Adobe’s Acrobat.com Buzzwords service for document sharing. (Check it out if you haven’t yet – very cool, very useful free online tool that made collaboration on a new project very easy). I was so impressed with it, in fact, that I made a quick post at Twitter.com about how great I thought it was, and how I’ll be using it instead of Google Docs from now on out.

Why’d I make the post? Human nature. We have an inclination to share products and tools that we’re impressed with. I know most of the folks I communicate with on Twitter would likely be as interested as I am in this great service, so I shared with them.

So, a few hours later, I get a reply message from Ryan Stewart of Adobe, thanking me for “spreading the love” about Buzzwords.

Now, what’s the value of this little pat on the back (or “digital snuggle” as I joking called it to a co-worker)? Ryan just broke down that distance between the company and the customer. By replying, Ryan shows me that Adobe cares about it’s consumers and has an ear to the ground for their feedback. And even though Buzzwords is free, I’m all the more likely now to trust their products, try new services, and encourage others to do the same. A simple “Thank You” made Adobe more transparent, more accessible, more engaged with the customer.

But that’s not all. Now, I’m watching Ryan Stewart’s feed for more information about Adobe’s products. Boom – converted consumer. Adobe’s got my attention, and they know I’m a highly engaged trend-following consumer with an inclination for sharing information in my network of other first-movers. See the value now? Interactive Strategy leverages engaged online niches to make small actions snowball into bigger results.

Oh, and how’d Ryan know I had spread the love about Buzzwords? Check out search.twitter.com – see if the growing Twitterverse is talking about your company. (And if they are, what are you waiting for? Start snuggling.)

A few weeks ago on the symfony blog, Fabien announced that as of symfony 1.1, Doctrine is officially supported. The documentation will slowly be updated and converted from Propel to Doctrine. Right now, the My First Project tutorial and a new Getting started with Doctrine + symfony 1.1 tutorial have been published on the symfony-project website. More documentation coming soon and tutorials for using Doctrine with symfony coming soon.

You know what I am talking about - all those email lists you have signed up for but you never read them. You even have a separate email account just for that. You had to get those offers for that weekend trip to Las Vegas you will never have enough time to go to or for some reason you wanted to get alerts when a friend posts a survey on your Facebook page as it happens.

Bacn is aptly named as more web “pork” just like spam is…well What is spam made of? Anyway unlike spam mail bacn can be an effective marketing tool. The best “pieces” of bacn integrate dynamic relevant content with a direct call to action. This is easier said than done. Spam and non-spam mail are generally regarded as clearly defined categories. With bacn falling in between, the challenge of being recognized by the target audience can be daunting to marketers. Moving forward from here is going to involve much trial with little room for error. Failure can lead you to be labeled a spammer condemning your reputation.

I’ve seen this a few too many times now – a business starts talking about interactive strategy. They become convinced that they need to do more with the web to leverage the power of their brand and find new customers. (Yes!) They start to understand that people are starting to spend more of their free time on the web than in front of most other media. (Bingo!) They learn that people are more familiar with how to use a search engine than they ever were with setting a VCR clock. (Huzzah!)But then we start talking interactive: using social networking, integrating with social media, optimizing for universal search, utilizing web productivity tools. You know, the fun stuff. The homeruns. The exciting fresh kind of ideas. And we start seeing some eyes glaze over, and that hesitant “Now what is Twitter again?” question.

So here’s my best advice: if you’re ready to start thinking about interactive, take a few minutes and play with the best of the best tools out there. Just start with the greatest hits. Get a feel for how they work, and how powerful user-created data and content has made Web 2.0.

For quick reference, we just ran across this list of the 100 best Web 2.0 services. You’ll see things you’re probably already familiar with like Google (of course), Yahoo, MySpace. But then other tools that we still find ourselves introducing for the first time – great tools like StumbleUpon, Basecamp, Flickr, and more.

And, funny enough, they even left Twitter off the list. Guess we’ll keep explaining that one. (All kidding aside, though, we’re here to explain these things and show you the value in using them. And the geek in me really kind of likes explaining Twitter.)

Pay per click, cost per impression, return of investment(ROI), and conversion rates are some typical buzzwords you will hear while devising an online advertising strategy. Add Click-to-Donate to that list. This is not new but a reemerging trend from the late 1990s. Click-to-donate provide users the ability to give back to the cause of their choice.

Advertiser’s can reap the benefits from creating positively associated relationships. These relationships create and appease the social awareness that prospective consumer may be looking for. The hard part is what goes on in the boardroom where these advertising/marketing decisions are made. “How much are we spending and What is our ROI?” These questions arise from the lack of concrete returns.

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http://www.freerice.com