A good example on how you can use analytics is when planning a redesign for your website. Right now, Tridea is closely monitoring our stats to see the what the average screen resolution is on the monitors of our visitors.

From that data, we will be able to decide on what the width of our new website will be, based on the what the average is. That is just one of the many examples that you can get from watching over your site analytics.

One of the plus sides of having analytics on your website, is that there are many cheap, if not free, services available to add to your site with ease. We are currently using Clicky, however, other good ones include Google Analytics (free), Mint ($30/license), and Stat Counter (free version available), just to name a few.

So if you aren’t currently using any analytics on your website, I would highly recommend doing so. The information that you gain from learning how visitors use your site is invaluable. It also helps that they are dead simple to setup as well.

I admit it, I’m resisting Twitter solely because I’m afraid of what people will think if I really tweeted what my up-to-the-moment thoughts and musings were.

JP and Saulter have been pretty insistent on me getting on Twitter, and more than once, JP’s told me about how awesome Tweetups have been. It’s possible I may have fallen victim to the variety of knee-jerk reactions from the initial wave of users who tweeted…well, crap. Since then, though, the community has exploded in numbers and there are lots more mature and professional people tweeting things pertinent to their business and career. Tridea has somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 or 90 people following us, and I’d venture to say almost all of them have some interest in web design, which makes for some really interesting tweeted conversations.

Still not convinced, I went ahead and Googled for benefits of joining twitter, and sure enough, I found some pretty convincing blog posts. Twitips spoke about the ways in which the networks of people that can be tapped into can be to promote your company and also find clients! Problogger espoused on the positive networking aspects along with the ability to keep up to date with your friends and coworkers in a non-intrusive way. Blogger Douglas Cootey wrote about how it helped him with depression and ADHD by finding others with his conditions and helping each other maintain positive attitudes on a daily basis. On the same note, I even found a post on a site called Fat Man Unleashed that also said the ability to reach out to networks of people with similar problems and receive almost instantaneous advice on things like diet and workouts was really helpful.

So with all these positive endorsements, I’ve decided to join Twitter and see what it’s like! Join up with Tridea and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Tridea!

Previously, I used the free RSS reader service from Bloglines.com. After disliking the fact that Google Reader didn’t pull in images from the sites I liked, I switched to Bloglines and was a faithful user of their site for over 2 years. With Bloglines, I would log in to my account on their site and there were all my feeds. Nice and neat. I was living the good life.

Then I got an iPhone. And I wanted my RSS feeds on it! All of a sudden logging in to Bloglines seemed like too much. At that time, on a mobile browser, Bloglines isn’t that great (Note: they’ve since created a mobile version that is better). So I went looking for an RSS iPhone app.

Thanks to the magic of Twitter, I got some good recommendations and came across NetNewsWire. It is a RSS Reader application. Instead of logging in, I load the application and-BOOM-my feeds are there and begin updating. I loved it. Clean, organized, iPhone-tastic! But there’s more!

NetNewsWire is also a Mac application! So I get news to my phone, read it, and when I get home my feeds are updated to reflect the content I’ve already checked out. It’s great. And it’s free. So, take my advice and get some RSS in your life! Starting with our blog!

In their article, “U.S. at risk of cyberattacks, experts say,” it describes how a highly-organized effort by Russian hackers preceeded the land invasion with a crippling cyber-attack (though the Russian government denies involvement). The move defaced the Georgian president’s website with images of Adolf Hitler, but other targets were much more damaging.

Hackers mounted coordinated assaults on Georgian government, media, banking and transportation sites in the weeks before Russian troops invaded. Known as distributed denial of service, the attacks employ multiple computers to flood networks with millions of simultaneous requests, overwhelming servers and crippling Web sites.

U.S. experts are saying that due to our particular reliance on the internet, we are at risk and are vulnerable to even more wide-spread effects than what Georgia has gone through. For all of us developers and designers, a shutdown of networks and server communication could be devastating. Even the downtime of a single day can wind up setting projects back several more, not to mention the potential for considerable data loss. While (hopefully) we all keep our backup servers and hard drives updated consistently, the setbacks of the loss of a week’s worth of mockups, wireframes, coding and other electronic documents and materials can be considerable.

The article mentions that this may be the first recorded instance of a cyber-attack coordinated with a land invasion. In this era of remote accessibility and dependency on the internet, I sincerely doubt it will be the last. For those of us whose careers are tied to the web, we now have a demonstrative example of why we need to be more aware of our workfiles and workflows, and how such an attack could grind our industry to a halt.

It is with this in mind that I wanted to post about the web hosts that we at Tridea recommend:

SiteGround:
Our site is hosted on SiteGround. Prior to starting Tridea, I had refered clients to Siteground. So when it came time for us to purchase hosting I made the pitch for Siteground. Key features:

• free domain
• 750gb hosting space
• 7500gb monthly traffic
• unlimited email accounts
• $5.95/month (w/ 2 year contract)

GoDaddy:
GoDaddy is one of the hosts we recommend most to folks who are not terribly web savvy. We do this because in our experience, over the past 4 years, we’ve had a great experience with their technical support specialist. They are very helpful and a pleasure to deal with over the phone.

They have numerous plans but we usually recommend their Deluxe plan:

• $25 Google AdWords, $50 Microsoft adCenter credits
• 150gb hosting space
• 1500gb monthly traffic
• 500 email accounts
• $6.29/month (w/ 2 year contract)

Compared to SiteGround they come up short on features and lack a free domain, but really, their phone support is outstanding.

We’ve also used BlueHost and MediaTemple before with good results, although MediaTemple is a little more expensive then SiteGround and GoDaddy, they invest heavily in their servers and up-time, so sticklers for technology might prefer that.

One final note, in reviewing hosting packages for this post, I came across a name I hadn’t heard of before:

HostMonster:

• $50 Google, $50 Yahoo credits
• Unlimited hosting space
• Unlimited monthly traffic
• Unlimited email accounts
• Free domain
• $4.95/month (w/ 2 year contract)

They are an unknown to Tridea and people we’ve worked with…but with those features and that price, maybe it’s worth a gamble?

Startup Weekend recruits a highly motivated group of developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more to a 54 hour event that builds communities, companies and projects.

It’s a community building endeavor in which all sorts of web and business folk come together to use their talents, work together, and make something cool.

They happen all around the country. In the past there has been one in New York, Atlanta, Boulder, Portland, Houston, Austin, London, and Los Angeles, to name a few. This weekend it will be in Ann Arbor!

John, myself, and the other attendees use our precious weekend hours to bust our tails and come up with fresh new ideas for the web and bring them to reality. It’ll also be a great opportunity to meet other like-minded web folks from around the area.

From a Tridea perspective, it will give us a chance to scout people we might partner up with down the road as well as size up competitors…although, the web is such a big place we rarely think about “competition” with other companies.

Should be a lot of fun, check back here for a recap when it’s over!

Well, my Tridea partner and avid Twitter user, John, recently had an interesting interaction that is relevant to that discussion. Yesterday afternoon John posted this: “I think threadless tee’s designs are going down in quality”.

Threadless is an apparel company that mainly produces T-shirts that are designed and voted on by people who are not part of their company. They offer incentives for participation like a cut in sales and some credit toward merchandise, as well as a coolness factor of having a design successfully chosen. And it works; there is a large community of designers and a strong and loyal customer base. In any case, it’s a company who’s product, at least design-wise, is made by customers/people-not-on-salary.

So minutes after John openly complained that he thought their quality was declining, their CTO direct messaged him to ask him what he thought they could do to improve their product. And that right there is why business usage of Twitter is increasing. People in all areas of a company, all the way up to the CTO/CIO/CEO positions are using Twitter to monitor their brand perception. Twitter allows them to plug in to the pulse of their customers in an unobtrusive way.

In this case, asking John for feedback on what could improve was not terribly intrusive to him. They exchanged some thoughts. The CTO walked away with some direct feedback from a loyal customer. John walked away knowing that his voice was being heard and that Threadless was actively seeking to improve their company by soliciting direct feedback via Twitter.

I think Twitter usage is evolving and will continue to do so bringing value to it’s diverse users. Stay tuned and I will keep posting on new and interesting developments!

I use it to keep up on the lives of friends I made at SXSW, industry folks, associates/coworkers, and people who I generally enjoy hearing about. It’s a nice tool to keep up with casual and close friends alike while not requiring me to engage in an actual phone conversation (I’m not a phone person.)

However, companies are starting to use Twitter. I’ve been “followed” (when someone subscribes to your twitter feed) by a few Zappos.com employees recently and though I thought it was odd, it didn’t prompt me to lock down my Twitter feed. You see, I’m a fan of Zappos…their mantra is to have the best customer service of any website, and when customer service is your #1 priority, you rarely tick people off.

Comcast, on the other hand, has started using Twitter as a way to try and control damage to their brand. Michael Arrington posted a few weeks ago about an unpleasant experience with Comcast and how they picked up on his anger via Twitter and stepped up to solve his issue. Arrington astutely points out that while they were able to solve his problem shortly after he made his complaints public, consumers who don’t use Twitter still have to deal with their crappy customer service hotlines.

I think business usage of Twitter will continue to evolve. Companies with poor customer service will use it to try and put out bad brand-experience fires while smarter companies will use it to monitor how their brand is perceived and what kind of trends they can capitalize on. Used wisely, companies can really hone in to a casual-yet-public display of the likes/dislikes/wishes/wants of trend setting customers.

If Tridea ever decides to launch a business twitter account it will be not to extinguish bad-experience fires, but to connect more directly with our clients and to further build on the communication principle that we hold as one of our tenets!

John sent me a post by Scott Karp entitled The Evolution From Linear Thought to Networked Thought. Scott, a former Lit major, reflects on how he was formally a voracious book reader and nowadays finds himself reading mostly from online sources. One of the reasons he cites is that with online reading, the process is non-linear: when something of interest pops up in his reading, he can follow a link, or go search out more information from Google.

It is this ability to tap into the networked-thought of the Internet that makes reading books less and less a part of my day to day life. Of course, print materials still have tremendous value and it’s not as if the invention of the internet has destroyed the necessity for books. I presently have a few web skills related books on my shelf (Javascript and AJAX) and these technical-skills related print materials still have quite a bit of market share.
Benefits include:

• Being written by renowned authorities rather than random bloggers
• Increasing the complexity of the material from chapter to chapter
• Rounding up solid examples of concepts in one place, without having to scour the interwebs

Of course, if I had the time and the motivation, I could probably round up quite a few in-depth blog posts and articles about the topics these books cover, but that would take time…not only to find the articles, but to verify the expertise of the sources. Yet, as convenient as technical publications can be in our industry, their shelf-life can be short lived as technology improves and material becomes out dated!

I guess I need to learn to step away from my computer for a bit each day and crack open a book!