Web Development Live

It did not take long before they recognized limitations in their existing Website. Allianz’s original site had to service clients from all sectors. Every effort was made to make all services available in one place, but things were just not working. Many customers were not able to find what they were looking for. Unfortunately, later attempts to organize the information only made matters worse: Every section of the Web site ended up with its own unique ‘look and feel’, and with inconsistent branding.

The key challenges, therefore, were not just to re-design & develop the website, but also to mirror Bajaj Allianz’s strong offline brand imagery on the Web along with all the ingredients of a Web 2.0 online Insurance Web presence for customers & sales channels alike. So that customers could renew their policies online along with paying their premiums, prospects could search, compare & find the best policy/plan for their families & agents could drive account management all under one interactive roof. eDynamic immediately identified these problems, proposing, designing and implementing a comprehensive solution.

Subir Singh, VP, Sales, eDynamic, credits the success of eDynamic’s efforts to the company’s established expertise in the Insurance industry. “Our deep understanding in insurance..and strategic approach to business help us maintain a strong and comfortable relationship….” eDynamic brought to the table additional experience in financial services, such as lending and loans, credit cards, real estate, and financial services.

By creating a generic, easily customizable template to provide a framework for the design, the information architecture is kept simple, easy to understand and navigate. Simplicity is also key to its versatility –remaining consistent when customized for each service segment. The design has proven so adaptable that, as the online services of Bajaj Allianz have continued to expand, the same recognizable branding and navigational controls have remained.

Says Vishal Karki, Head of Marketing for Bajaj Allianz Insurance, India, “It has been a pleasure to do business with eDynamic. The team at eDynamic holds its customer’s satisfaction as highest priority. They understood our business requirements and have delivered high-quality results on time.”

About eDynamic: eDynamic is a Global IT services, Interactive Marketing Services, Website Design & Development and Consulting Firm focused on delivering integrated business solutions. eDynamic is a rapidly growing, privately held company that delivers on the technology, creativity & marketing needs of enterprises. Through its offices in New York, Portland, Toronto, London, Dubai, and New Delhi, eDynamic is serving customers such as Suncor Energy, UPS, PepsiCo, New York Life, General Electric, Advance America, Preferred Commerce, Intercontinental Hotels, Jet Airways, Samsung, Sony, among many others.

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As an avid Apple afficianado and advocate of all things open source, my stance on Microsoft is usually clear-cut: I don’t care for it.  Everything about Microsoft’s business practices rubs me wrong.  With that said, I was surprised to learn that Microsoft has been toying with its own little pet social network since the beginning of the year.

Well “social” might not be quite the right term for Microsoft’s baby network, which is called TownSquare.  Consider it a more elite community of Microsoft nerds.  Perhaps a better term would be the anti-social network.  Townsquare is an intranet-based social network currently open to all Microsoft employees, and shares many similarities with Facebook.

All the normal social goodies - pictures, bios, updates, feed are included on TownSquare for each user and shared with the Microsoft community.  Additionally, Microsoft employees can see when documents and files on the intranet have been updated  or modified.  The whole thing is designed on enterprise newsfeeds to compile various public information about employees on the network.

Microsoft is also sharing TownSquare with a group of select consumers who are responsible for testing Townsquare.  All the testing and restructuring can’t possibly be for Microsoft’s own good time, though; it wouldn’t surprise me if Microsoft did a revision or two and marketed the intranetwork social structure to businesses.  As one of the main features is updating users on document and data revision on the intranet, many businesses could, no doubt, benefit from such advances.

Which brings me back to my original issue with Microsoft.  What could be a fantastic tool developed by some no-name third party developer will undoubtedly be marketed for sale by Microsoft to small business owners who will buy into the product simply because it has Microsoft’s stamp of approval.  If anything, I would be delighted to see a third party developer replicate the social structure for viewing profiles and updating intranet-public documents as open-source freeware, available to all.

The entire reason I believe that Microsoft will continue to spiral downward is because the who’s who in Microsoft’s management will never be able to adapt to the new, very open style of program sharing and development, and leave behind the monopoly mindset. In the end, Microsoft will have to buy into a little Darwinian theory and adapt and evolve, or go the way of the dinosaurs.

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Rosemary Lawlor, originally from Leighlinbridge, has been appointed as a Sales Executive by local web development and IT solutions company, t2.

A past pupil of Presentation Secondary School in Askea and graduate of DIT Aungier Street, Rosemary will head up the company’s regional and national sales effort, supporting its development of new markets.

Previous to joining t2, Rosemary travelled extensively and worked in recruitment sales with a Naas based company so her appointment is a welcome return to working in her home county.

Rosemary is the third person to join the t2 team this year, following the company’s recruitment of a web master to service a large national contract and a website developer earlier this year.

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The descriptive line of text is extraneous information for most web shoppers. But for an increasingly vocal group of web users, the text tag means the difference between comprehending what is shown in that image and being left in the dark.

Screen readers, purchased and owned by individual users, transform visual information into audio information. They also assist blind web users, who use keyboard commands instead of a mouse to navigate web pages, to move around a site, by recognizing and reading headings on a web page. The user can then respond with keyboard commands that move the cursor from element to element.

It further charges that because the site requires the use of a mouse to complete a transaction, blind Target customers also are unable to make purchases on Target.com independently.

In October, a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted class action status to a lawsuit against Target. The judge also ruled that e-commerce sites are required by California law to be accessible to blind shoppers.

National Federation of the Blind president Marc Maurer called the granting of class action status to the suit a tremendous step forward for blind people throughout the country.

With the outcome of the Target case pending, it remains to be seen just how motivating a ruling in favor of the National Federation of the Blind would be to retailers whose sites are not now accessible.

One retailer not waiting for that outcome to take action is Amazon.com. Though it provides text tags with images on its home page, it has more work to do in achieving full accessibility.

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The browser, that porthole onto the broad horizon of the Web, is about to get some fancy new window dressing.

Next month, after three years of development and six months of public testing, Mozilla, the insurgent browser developer that rose from the ashes of Netscape, will release Firefox 3.0. It will feature a few tricks that could change the way people organize and find the sites they visit most frequently.

Not to be outdone, Microsoft recently took the wraps off the first public test version of the latest edition of Internet Explorer, which is used by about 75 percent of all computer owners, according to Net Applications, a market share tracking firm. The finished version of Internet Explorer 8 could be released by the end of the year and is expected to have additional features.

Even Apple, which once politely kept its Safari browser within the confines of its own devices, is making a somewhat controversial push to get it onto the computers of people who use Windows PCs.

In other words, the browser war the skirmish that landed Microsoft in antitrust trouble in the ’90s is heating up again.

“The typical browser for today’s consumer doesn’t look all that different than it did 10 years ago,” said Larry Cheng, a partner at Fidelity Ventures, one of the firms that invested in Flock, a browser start-up. “That is an unsustainable trend that is the launching point for the second browser war, which will not be won by monopolistic muscle but by innovation.”

America Online, which acquired Netscape, spun off the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation in 2003. Its Firefox browser soon inspired an open-source movement backed by computer enthusiasts. Early versions of Firefox introduced features like a built-in pop-up blocker to kill ads, and tabbed browsing, which lets users toggle between Web windows.

Firefox now has 170 million users around the world and an 18 percent share of the browser market, according to Net Applications. That is especially impressive given that most of its users have made the active choice to download the software, while Internet Explorer is installed on most PCs at the factory.

In addition to giving Microsoft a kick in its competitive pants, Firefox has also reinforced for the high-tech industry the financial and strategic value of the browser. In 2004, Google struck a deal with Mozilla to include a Google search box tucked into a corner of the Firefox browser. According to Mozilla’s most recent tax documents, in 2006 Google paid Mozilla $65 million for the resulting traffic to its search listings.

“People in the industry foresee a time in which for many people, the only thing they’ll need on a computer is a browser,” said Mitch Kapor, the software pioneer who now sits on the board of the Mozilla Foundation and has created a start-up, FoxMarks, that is developing a tool to synchronize bookmarks between computers. “The browser is just extraordinarily strategic.”

That notion has helped to rekindle the browser wars and has resulted in the latest wave of innovation. Firefox 3.0, for example, runs more than twice as fast as the previous version while using less memory, Mozilla says.

The browser is also smarter and maintains three months of a user’s browsing history to try to predict what site he or she may want to visit. Typing the word “football” into the browser, for example, quickly generates a list of all the sites visited with “football” in the name or description.

Firefox has named this new tool the “awesome bar” and says it could replace the need for people to maintain long and messy lists of bookmarks. It will also personalize the browser for an individual user.

“Sitting at somebody else’s computer and using their browser is going to become a very awkward experience,” said Mitchell Baker, chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation.

Internet Explorer 8, from Microsoft, promises its own set of tricks. One new tool, Web slices, allows a user to bookmark a dynamic piece of a Web site, like an online auction or a sports score, and save it in the margin of the browser, where the user can watch as it changes.

Another new feature, called activities, allows users to highlight text on a page, click on it, then instantly send it to another site, like a mapping, e-mail or blogging service.

Asked whether Firefox’s increasing popularity had motivated these and other improvements, Mr. Hachamovitch of Microsoft said only, “We love to compete.” But he did say that amid the new competitive pressures, “the quality and quantity of my team has gone up significantly.”

His group will have one other company besides Mozilla to keep its eye on: Apple’s Safari Web browser has a little over 5 percent of the market, according to Net Applications, and subsists mostly on the loyalty of devoted Mac and iPhone owners.

But in March, deploying the kind of strategic jujitsu more commonly associated with Microsoft in the past, Apple began using the automatic update software that is packaged with its iTunes music player to deliver Safari onto the computers of people who use Windows. (Users had to specifically decline the Safari offer if they didn’t want the browser to be downloaded to their computers.)

The tactic irked even Apple fans in the blogosphere, along with Apple’s browser rivals. But it was at least partly successful: Net Applications reported that Apple’s market share on Windows computers had tripled since March.

In a statement released last month addressing the comments about the maneuver, Apple said it had made it easier for customers to distinguish minor updates from new programs delivered through the update software.

Apple’s boldness underscores the new importance of the Web browser in a world that is increasingly shifting online.

Shawn Hardin, chief executive of Flock, which is developing a browser that helps users share photos, videos and blog entries more easily, said consumers would ultimately benefit from the new browser battle.

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Speaking at the annual Thinking Digital IT conference in Gateshead, representatives from handset manufacturers and mobile operators argued that flat rate tariffs, greater interoperability and new technologies like GPS have accelerated usage and spurred the a new dawn for the mobile web

“This is the second chance for everyone to deliver on the promise of the late 90s,” said mobile strategist and ex-O2 executive, Bradley de Souza.

“Then, it was premature from a technology perspective, the marketing didn’t line up with what was being delivered and although there was collaboration from the developer community, the stars didn’t align.”

Mark Selby, vice president of sales and industry collaboration at Nokia, argued that the operators’ walled garden approach to browsing is also collapsing, leading to greater take-up of the mobile web. Some Nokia figures point to data usage on smart phones nearing 90 percent of total usage, he added.

“Our research shows that the amount of time people are browsing, accessing and uploading content is incredible,” said Selby.

Others commented that good content holds the key to the success of the mobile web. Vikesh Patel, European general manager for products at Motorola, said that uptake will rocket “if you get the content right and people want it”.

“There are a lot of people [in the industry] with different opinions,” he added. “The network operators don’t want to be just bit pipes but it really needs developers to feed the ecosystem to grow it.”

De Souza argued that mobile platform providers and other stakeholders need to be more open in order to facilitate and encourage the developer community.

“On the Symbian platform the developers can’t even get their test apps onto users’ phones to gauge their usability,” he added. “Microsoft has done well to [encourage openness] but it’s not well structured.”

Gerhard Grech, director of strategy and business development at Orange, agreed that content is king on the mobile, but argued that simplifying the presentation and accessibility to that content will be key to its popularity.

“You need to do something completely different in the way you present that content,” he explained. “Widgets are a good hybrid [technology] to catch people’s imagination – it’s where the interface, browser and service all comes together in a very compelling way.”

Motorola’s Patel added that widgets are a “great way to cut through the layers of menu” and open up the mobile web to users.

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With more than $100 million in assets, Texell wanted to drive the growth of its online channel, strengthen its Internet presence and reinforce its brand, while providing a secure forum to protect confidential data and comply with Federal regulations. According to Tony Hale, chief executive officer of Texell, what began as a simple evaluation of Web hosting providers evolved into a much more comprehensive endeavor, ultimately enabling the credit union to reap significant benefits from an extensive program that tied together multiple initiatives.

In addition to Web design and maintenance, Texell’s program incorporates Goldleaf’s marketing services, which ties the global campaign together to ensure cohesive and consistent messaging. Goldleaf’s marketing services include detailed market segmentation so the credit union can tailor specific marketing objectives to a particular audience.

“Goldleaf’s value proposition was unique, as it presented a solution that truly went beyond our initial needs,” Hale said. “Deploying Goldleaf’s technology demonstrates our commitment to our members through the creation of an easy-to-navigate, intuitive Web site, fully equipped with security features to protect our members’ confidential information. The site is customized, compliant, secure, and we were immediately impressed by the scope and depth of Goldleaf’s offering. The marketing services piece was especially attractive, as it pulls together the look and feel of the new site and couples it with marketing initiatives designed to drive more business to our institution.”

Texell is also leveraging Goldleaf’s distinct security features, including secure sockets layer (SSL) encryption, SAS-70 audit reporting and the Company’s Pharming Shield solution. Credit union executives also cited the flexibility of Goldleaf’s solution as a factor in their selection process. Texell has the capability to edit and manage content internally, which maximizes the speed and accuracy at which online information can be updated and maintained.

The site has multi-tiered authority to preserve the integrity of the data, as well as the ability for Texell to pre-create site changes that can be implemented on a timed rollout. Additionally, the solution has an automated system that archives changes to Web site content and images that will be tracked throughout the life cycle of Texell’s relationship, ensuring compliance with Regulation DD in the Truth and Savings Act.

Todd Shiver, executive vice president of Goldleaf Financial Solutions, said, “Our mission is to help our clients succeed and leverage technology to improve efficiencies, increase profitability, be more competitive, and provide the best products and services in their market. Our entire company is dedicated to the development of innovative solutions that have a positive and direct impact on an institution’s asset and customer base. Texell understands its members’ needs and has a very strategic approach to Web and marketing services, which we believe enables them to stand apart from the competition.”

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They are also offering No-cost tools to assist webmasters and domain developers. Their most recent offering - Stomper Site Seer - is a web-based tool that you don’t have to pay for. It generates a lot of information about your site in one report.

Even if you don’t sign-up for Stompernet (and most people won’t) their free educational offerings are amazing. This is stuff that you’d pay a lot for elsewhere. By giving away some of their material they hope to get people to sign-up. I plan to stay a member.

One major component of Stompernet is SEO. They provide unsurpassed training to help you rank in Google. Using these techniques I have been able to consistently rank on the first page of Google for the term “Domain Parking.” There is also a lot of training on building Online storefronts using affiliate links or drop-shipping.

Some stompers have built multi-million dollar businesses from the techniques they learned (and others have struggled because of the sheer volume of information available). Faculty members include Jerry West, Howie Schwartz, Andy Jenkins, Andy Edmonds, Dan Thies, Brad Fallan, Dave Taylor, David Bullock, Don Crowther, Leslie Rhodie, Sherman Hu, Mike Stewart, Paul Colligan, and Ed Dale.

Stompernet includes professional coaching and face-to-face conferences several times a year (at no extra charge). The conferences usually last for three days on a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

The last few have been in Atlanta. I attended the last two and found them to be at least as valuable as T.R.A.F.F.I.C. or Domain Roundtable, but with a different emphasis. Many of the attendees are small business owners with mediocre domains. They learn from people like Brad Fallon, who makes millions every year with the site MyWeddingFavors.com.

The video that you view at the site has a playlist button that will allow you to view all other free videos, such as their Going Natural 3 - Video 1. This video will teach you how to design an AdWords campaign, using a real-world example that occurred when Google dropped an ecommerce site from their rankings.

When you finish reading this, go check out the video and try their tool on one of your developed or semi-developed domains. Stompernet will probably be closed again by the time the June NameMonetizer newsletter comes out, so I want DomainNameWire readers to at least have a chance at this training.

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The average worker over 35 will job hunt every five to eight years Though most would agree that interviewing well is critical to securing a good job, a surprising number of job hunters are poorly prepared for the interviewing process with predictable results.

These general claims are no longer good enough to land a good job.

Job seekers today need to provide proof of their ability to do the job successfully.

Prospective employers know there is no greater predictor of potential future performance than past performance; they want solid examples beyond your resume of your past performance.

Eighty percent of companies today are using “behavioral” interviewing, which may be new to anyone who hasn’t been on a job interview recently.

Using this technique, interviewers ask potential employees open-ended questions designed to elicit specific examples of how you performed in the past.

Typically, employers identify a laundry list of specific qualities, skills and competencies that applicants must have to succeed in the open position. Examples might include displaying good judgment under stress, being a team player, demonstrating initiative and creativity or being able to resolve interpersonal conflict effectively.

The interviewer then asks questions to determine if the candidate can prove their proficiency with past work examples of the desired skills and qualities.

The “deer in the headlights” look to just about any question posed during a job interview typically won’t land you a good job. Preparation is key. Give some thought to how you will answer these kinds of questions in advance. Better yet, invest in yourself with a career coach to help you prepare.

Results and your ability to communicate your past achievements will positively impress prospective employers. Quantify your achievements when possible. Bringing samples of your work into an interview can help you stand out as a doer and achiever. Many job hunters use memory discs as a “leave behind” with work samples.

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Local web design company Webflo Studios has announced that its most recent project is a customized website for Verbraken and Sons Arizona Paint Company, which is based in Mesa.

The owners of the company wanted a professional website that would bring their specialty painting services to the forefront. As most of their clients are either involved in commercial work or own a large home, the owners’ goal is for their website to emphasize the company’s ability to take on projects industrial and elegant alike. Their overall objective with the website, like most clients, is to raise awareness about Verbraken and Sons Arizona Paint Company.

The website will be considered a full content management system. According to Webflo’s Senior Web Designer Travis Simpson, “The owners of Verbraken and Sons Arizona Paint Company will be able to update the site by themselves, allowing more control over their website than many other web design companies offer.” The website will also feature a Flash banner on each page, detailing services that the company offers.

Verbraken and Sons Arizona Paint Company purchased a full package deal, so aside from the website, they will also receive an informative business CD to distribute and two advertising brochures, each one focusing on the different services that they offer.

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