Category: Work Status

Apart from ongoing support for Clorox web sites, the Fresh Step site launched a campaign called CatDance as a feline homage to the Sundance festival that included a film contest.  

In this last quarter of 2012, we launched a redesign of glad.com on the Expression Engine platform, the first in an effort to make all sites for Clorox use a content management system (CMS).

During the second quarter of 2012, we continued to supported Clorox with Web site maintenance for Hidden Valley Range, Glad, K.C. Masterpiece and Kingsford sites. The new Fresh Step site also demanded a lot of attention.

The first quarter of 2012 found us continuing technical leadership for Clorox in supporting sites for Hidden Valley Ranch, Kingsford and Pine-Sol. More significantly, we lead the team in launch an all-new site for Fresh Step cat litter that includes a loyalty program provided by 3rd party vendor ePrize. We wrote documentation and unit tests for a javascript library maintained by gaming social network Hi5. Tests were built in Jasmine.   We built a blog for Legacy Games  to keep fans informed about their new Jane Austen game. The platform is WordPress using a commercially available theme. Standing up these marketing sites is fast and cost effective for marketers with thrifty budgets. The build included integration with MailChimp.    

Welcome to the October 2011 18INT newsletter! Which browsers to support/test your site on? How do you decide which browsers to support or test on with your web sites? During the past year, global browser usage stats show Chrome doubling its share of the market, from just under 12% of users to just under 24%. Their gains seem to have come at the expense of Internet Explorer and Firefox, though each of those browsers are still used by more users than Chrome. Safari and Opera continue to hold steady with their small share of the market (under 6% and 2%, respectively.) Of course, there are current and older versions of each browser to consider, as users don't all upgrade versions right away. The gs.statcounter.com site is a good reference for…

Welcome to the July 2011 18INT newsletter! You can trust us to do the job for you Does the title of this section make you feel more positively about 18INT? The Neuromarketing blog recently reported that adding that phrase to the end of an ad for an automotive services company caused customer trust to jump significantly. Their positive take advises us simply to remind our customers that we can be trusted. And yet, I hear the dark side whispering to me about how these magic words will win more business, regardless of anything else that's done. The truth is authenticity wins. Tricks just eat up good will, and then they stop working. We have seen how a decade ago, SEO was all about tricking the search engines into showing your…

Welcome to the June 2011 18INT newsletter! Google, Microsoft and Yahoo present schema.org A couple months ago, I wrote about how Facebook's Open Graph tags improve links to your content in the news stream. Schema.org, a collaboration between Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, to does much the same thing--elaborate on the meaning of your HTML to improve user experience. Professional programmers know standards and best practices provide the best long-term strategy. Like design patterns and test-driven development, we know it makes life easier even if it's more work up front. This month, the major search engines agreed to a standard for adding more detail to HTML to aid search indexing. The technique annotates the information on the page without disturbing the display. This new tool is more detailed than Open Graph…

Welcome to the May 2011 edition of the 18INT newsletter! Facebook and SSL Facebook has been battling some bad press in the past month. They were caught hiring a PR agency to smear Google over privacy issues, perhaps to distract everyone from their ongoing security issues. Facebook app developers are a wild herd of cats, and facebook is finding they don't all follow along. The protocol used by Facebook and applications can make it easy to "leak" a session identifier, which is an opportunity for bad guy to take over your account. Part of Facebook's solution is to push all the apps into SSL. Another is to push all the apps into using OAuth 2.0 for authentication. Translated, this means if you're running an app on Facebook, you'll be upgrading your code…

Welcome to the April 2011 edition of the 18INT newsletter! Add Open Graph Tags Have you added Open Graph tags to all of your content? I haven't either, but it feels like it's time because Facebook is beginning to leverage the tags to enhance how the links appear in users' news streams. Despite a recent report from Forrester that content on Facebook is not not driving eCommerce sales, being present on Facebook remains imperative. We just haven't figured out the formula yet. I know this because I've seen Google ads drive people to a microsite that accomplished increasing offline sales. [caption id="attachment_279" align="aligncenter" width="455" caption="How a link to Rand-o-Matic appears in the Facebook news stream."][/caption] I'm sure we can agree that controlling how links to our content appear in the Facebook stream supports…