‘Twas the day before Christmas, when all through the halls
All our sites were generating leads and qualified calls
Tracy’s team of eCommerce engineers coded with care,
In the hopes to avoid sneaky hackers’ malware;
John had our servers nestled all snug on their shelves,
While Barracuda spam filters blocked visions of naked elves;
And Brad with his backlinks, and Mark with his web apps,
Had just increased rankings with an SEO-friendly sitemap,
When out in Cascade Server there arose such a flurry,
As Justin typed CMS data definitions in a terrific hurry;
With a company like this, so lively and quick
I knew in a moment it must be Beacon Tech.

Have a wonderful holiday and please enjoy our card designed by Beacon’s own Wendy Honeycutt.

Your website looks great.  You have a spectacular graphic design, you spent weeks planning and building, and you’ve gotten tons of positive feedback from your colleagues.  One question:  have you looked at your Web site in all of those other Web browsers?  If you haven’t, you may want to.  And you may be shocked by what you find.

“I looked at my Web site in Internet Explorer, and it looks perfect.  Internet Explorer’s the only browser I ever use.  What other browsers could their be?  It can’t look different on another operating system, can it?  What are you talking about?”

Believe it or not, there are a ton of Web browsers out there…more than what comes installed with Windows.  And they all read and display a Web site differently.  Believe me, they do…I’ve fought with all of them for almost 10 years.  As a Web Designer, I’ve seen a Web site that I’ve built look perfect in Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), but be completely broken in Internet Explorer 6 (IE6).  Even though they’re made by the same company (Microsoft), they act completely different.  Or it may look great in FF3 on a PC, but look terrible in FF3 on a Mac.  Even the exact same browser version can look different on different operating systems.

So how many browsers are we talking about?  Beacon Technologies supports nine different browsers spread across both PCs and Macs.  We code for all of them, and it’s challenging…just ask anybody on my team.  They’ll tell you how much easier our professional lives would be if we just coded Web sites for one browser.  But there is such a diverse user base out there, using all sorts of browsers.  Why should a Safari user on a Mac get short-changed when they visit your site?  We don’t believe they should.

How do we know what browsers are being used out there?  We closely monitor the W3Schools Browser Statistics site, which lists all current browsers in use and what percentage of Web surfers use them, updated monthly.  For example, you’ll notice that a total of 47.1% of users use IE, but within that, 26.9% use IE7 and 20.2% user IE6.  44% of users surf with Firefox (Fx).  Chrome, Safari (S) and Opera (O) have a small market share, but they still exist, and Chrome is coming on strong.

So what does this all mean?  At Beacon, we firmly believe in equal opportunity Web browsing:  you should have a perfect browsing experience on sites that we build, no matter what browser or operating system you’re using.  The technical term for it is “cross-browser compliance”.  So we strive to make your Web site look great in all current browsers.  We have servers dedicated to just testing Web sites in all of the browsers.  Our developers and testers can log into these servers, and they have all of the browsers installed on them.  If something doesn’t look right, we’ll fix it.  Yes, it takes extra time, but it’s worth it to Beacon to produce a quality product.

If you have any questions about cross-browser compliance, feel free to leave a comment for me below.

Just another way that Beacon goes the extra mile!

I promised I’d let you know how the 2008 Cascade Server User’s Conference went, and I’m a man true to my word.  Maybe late, but true.

John Scaramuzzo (Senior VP), Louisa Nicholson (Web Designer) and I traveled to Atlanta, GA to attend the conference, which was held at the Georgia Tech Hotel & Conference Center, September 22-23.  Despite a scavenger hunt for gasoline in the Atlanta area before our tank ran dry (there was a shortage due to Hurricane Ike), the trip went really well.

The conference consisted of two tracks of sessions:  Technical and Business tracks.  The Technical Track was geared towards developers, whereas the Business Track focused more on what Cascade Server can do for your organization and where Hannon Hill is taking Cascade Server in the future.  Louisa stayed in the Technical Track to learn as many Cascade coding tricks as she could, John stayed in the Business Track to keep up with Cascade from a business owner standpoint, and I jumped from track to track to try and get a flavor for everything.

Both tracks offered a lot of great information.  Presenters included employees of Hannon Hill, as well as Cascade Server customers.  I did a presentation in the Business Track entitled “Tips & Tricks for End Users”, where I presented several different ways to use Cascade Server effectively for your organization, including:

• Smart implementations for large sites
• Content re-use
• Using structured content (Data Definitions)
• Integrate Cascade Server with eCommerce and other database applications (scripting languages)
• Manage Search Engine Marketing efforts
• Control full Flash websites and Flash applications
• Integration of advanced JavaScript applications
• Tips on training end users and providing documentation

Against every fiber in my being, I’m going to provide a link to the video of my presentation.  I know plenty of my colleagues have been waiting for this moment.  So you can view the video here.  Just reserve judgment, please!

I’m not going to grade myself on my own presentation, but I’ll say that it went well, and I had several people tell me afterward that it was very helpful.  I’ll consider that “mission accomplished”.  My goal was to let other Cascade Server users know how Beacon Technologies creatively uses Cascade Server to give all types of organizations the ability to manage their own Web site using content management.

So why did I do a presentation?  Simply put, Hannon Hill’s call for speakers really got me thinking.  They asked a simple question:  “Are you proud of your Cascade Server implementation?  As I wrote in my last post, I immediately thought, “YES”.  We’re always looking for ways to tailor Cascade to meet the needs of any type of organization, from a “mom & pop shop” to large corporations and universities.

All three of us met a lot of great people at the conference:  Hannon Hill employees and other Cascade Server owners and users.  As partners of Hannon Hill, we spent a good amount of time talking with employees, and networked with several Cascade Server users, several of whom we’re still in touch with today.

Already, Hannon Hill has sent out a notice about the 2009 conference, and I can assure you that we’ll be back!  Many thanks to all of the Hannon Hill employees for putting on a great conference.

In the background, John Scaramuzzo (left) and I (with the glowing eyes) talk with a Cascade Server user.  If you look closely, behind the head of Bradley Wagner (foreground, right, Director of Engineering at Hannon Hill), you can see Louisa’s nose as she networks with another user.  :)