Archive for August 2010
Monday, August 30th, 2010
It amazes me how simple communication can satisfy a customer and no communication can cause frustration and can cause customers to jump to conclusions. I recently took my boat into get repaired to a mechanic that we know quite well. I took it in on a Wednesday and they said they would look at it by Friday. Saturday, no call, so I called in to ask what the status was and the person there told me that they were waiting for a motor assessment tool and I left a message for the mechanic to call me. No word back, the next week I was going away so I did let them know there was no rush but I did want it the following weekend, got back in town and still no message. Finally I heard back the following week and the mechanic was very nice and said that the motor has been fixed and we could pick it up. Read more...
Posted in Business, Sales and Marketing | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010
We learn to treat the Google Docs software different than other software, when we don’t wait years for the next improvements to our applications. If you haven’t used a Google Docs application recently, you should find the interfaces much improved. I recently discovered how far the Google Docs presentations application has come — Ironically, Google Docs apps don’t seem to be named separately. Like the aspiration of other Google Docs applications, Google Presentations are Microsoft PowerPoint presentations on an attractive diet. Read more...
Posted in Business, Sales and Marketing, Tools, Tips and Tricks | 1 Comment »
Friday, August 13th, 2010
Unfortunately the title of this post is nonsensical. NoSQL isn’t any one thing, it’s a broad spectrum of emerging technologies. NoSQL could be used to describe just about any data store that isn’t a traditional database, and it turns out there are many flavours of databases.
I haven’t used any NoSQL product personally but I have the answers to some important questions:
Are these database systems proven and used in large scale productions?
They sure are.
Do they provide advantages over traditional RDBMS’s?
In some cases they are very interesting, in others there is debate as to whether they’re the right tool for the job. Read more...
Posted in Web Development | No Comments »
Thursday, August 5th, 2010
I wrote about Google Wave before and even asked people if they wanted invites. But yesterday, Google decided to stop its development. I’m not sure if I’d be sad or happy about it, I have mixed emotions.
Here’s the official statement from Google
We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication. The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code. Read more...
Posted in Random Musings | No Comments »
Thursday, August 5th, 2010
As your website grows and expands its content and user base outside the initial scope for the project, it often becomes necessary to consider a re-design or re-organization in order to keep navigation intuitive and get the most from your content, preventing it from getting lost in a hard-to-navigate-to location. Usually a content re-design starts with your sitemap and grows from there, but when you have too many pages sometimes it’s quite difficult to simply re-organize them in your head or even on paper. The Card-Sort method is a great way to fluidly alter sitemap organization on paper to achieve the most intuitive organization for your users when re-designing. It all starts with a stack of index cards, and a big black marker. Read more...
Tags: Canada's Web Shop, Card, Card-Sort, Chris, Chris Savoie, design, Organization, Re-Design, Re-Organization, Savoie, Sitemap, Sort, TheWebShop, Tips, Tricks
Posted in Tools, Tips and Tricks, Web Design, Web Development | No Comments »
