Beacon returned from ASPDotNetStorefront‘s user conference with a ton of great takeaways, new friendships, stregnthened partnerships and awesome experiences.  Ashland, Oregon’s amazing scenery, great restaurants, friendly people and downtown park rival the eTail West conference in Palm Dessert for the best eCommerce conference destination.

The conference kicked off with a welcome reception and continued full steam ahead through two full days of sessions.  Between Mike Wood (Sr. Engineer), Tracy Dirks (Dir. of Software Development) and I, Beacon had all tracks and the exhibit hall covered.  It was a great conference, we had the opportunity to get the inside scoop on the product roadmap, hear first hand insights from the consumer panel, pick the brains of APDNSF’s talented developers, discuss innovative uses of the platform with merchants and fellow partners.  It was action packed and a whole lot of fun.  Between the full days and long travels, I think I am just now recovered.

As an aside, I stayed an extra day to check out the awesome sites of southern Oregon and was lucky enough to catch Crater Lake on such a picture perfect afternoon.

Keep an eye out for Beacon as we prepare for two conferences during the month of April: The Bronto Summit and NCTA’s State of Technology.

Just a quick shout out about a cool new feature that Beacon recently implemented on the University of Hartford site at http://www.hartford.edu. Hartford has been a long time client and we do updates for them on a regular basis, but we wanted to spotlight this particular item.  It’s a randomized home page banner image (jQuery) that links to a YouTube video player on an interior page. Our client was very pleased, “Most people in my office are looking at the stories, and are saying very positive things. Really great work!”

We would like to say a special thank you to our team members, Tiffany and Annette, who worked on this project. Great job Girls!

Within the mobile phone landscape, there are at least ten operating systems (OSs) and fifteen browsers that require consideration when testing. Web developers should concentrate their testing efforts on smartphones. All good mobile browsers run on one smartphone platform or another. To get stats of popular browsers in your country there’s only one source of mobile browser market share information: StatCounter.

Apple, Google, Samsung, and RIM default browsers are among the top browsers because they support touch events and are all based on the WebKit rendering engine. The next level of mobile browsers include Opera Mobile, Palm WebKit for webOS, and MicroB, the Gecko-based default browser for Nokia’s Maemo OS. These browsers do not support touch events, and zooming varies in each implementation. From a pure CSS and JavaScript point of view however, you’ll encounter few problems. Of the three, Opera Mobile is the most important, because it serves as a default browser for many Windows Mobile devices where the vendor decided IE wasn’t good enough. Currently, it’s an alternative for Nokia WebKit on Symbian, the largest mobile OS.

Below is a list of all the current mobile browsers, there special features, operating systems, and devices they can be found on. Some of the browsers do not come default on phones but are among the top browsers used today.

• Opera Mobile
  • Key Features: Multiple tabs, Zoom-in
  • Operating System: Windows Mobile, Symbian
  • Devices pre-installed with Opera:
    • Nokia N90
    • Sony Ericsson P1
    • Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1
    • HTC Touch Viva
    • HTC Touch Diamond
    • HTC Touch Diamond2
    • HTC Touch Pro
    • HTC Touch Pro 2
    • HTC Touch HD
    • HTC HD2
    • Meizu M8
    • Creative Zii
    • Samsung i900 Omnia
    • Samsung i8000 Omnia II
    • Sendo X
    • Motorola ROKR E6
• Opera Mini
  • Key Features: Compressed downloads for fast browsing, Zoom-in
  • Operating System: Java
  • Devices pre-installed with Opera Mini:
    • Motorola V980, E2, L7, i1
    • Nokia 2610,3120c, 2700 Classic, 2730 Classic, 3500c, 3600, 3600 slide, 3710 fold, 3720, 6085, 5130, 5230, 5500, 5310, 5610, 3110, 7373, 6131, 6233, 6600 slide, 5070, E65, N95, N71, N73, 5000, 3110c, 6288, 6103, 6080, 6303, 6300and 8800 Arte
    • Sony Ericsson K310i, K530i, K550, W200i, W760i, Z530i, Z550i, Z780i, W910i
    • Samsung X160, E570, E420, F480, X510, X650, E900, E250, U700, ZV60, D900i
    • LG K880, KU250, KE970, and KU311
    • SAGEM My411x and P9521
    • BenQ-Siemens EL71 and EF81
    • BenQ EZ1 fight
    • Orange Rio (ZTE-G X991)
• Skyfire
  • Key Features: Display rich websites with Flash or widgets like YouTube, customizable zoom feature
  • Operating System: Android, iPhone, Symbian, Windows Mobile
  • Devices compatible with Skyfire:
    • Android 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2
    • iOS 3.1.3, 4.0, 4.1
• Safari
  • Key Features: Display rich websites like YouTube, zoom feature, excellent touch-based user interface
  • Safari accounted for 62.17 percent of mobile web browsing traffic in October 2011
  • Operating System: iPhone
  • Devices:
    • iPhone
    • iPod touch
    • iPad
• Google Android
  • Key Features: Display rich websites, zoom feature, touch screen interface
  • Operating System: Google Android
  • Devices:
    • Android powered phones
• Microsoft IE for Mobile
  • Key Features: Standard browser features
  • Operating System: Windows Mobile
  • Devices:
    • IE Mobile comes loaded by default with Windows Phone and Windows CE.
• Firefox Mobile
  • Key Features: Mutiple tabs, Awesomebar, password manager, Add-on support, PC-syncing
  • Operating System: Nokia Maemo, Windows Mobile 6.0 (alpha)
  • Devices:
    • Android 2.1 and above devices with an ARMv7 CPU
• Dolphin HD
  • Key Features: Gesture browsing, Webzine, tabbed browsing
  • Operating System:  Android, iOS
  • Devices:
    • Android
    • iPad
    • iPhone
• Blackberry Browser
  • Key Features: Standard browser features
  • Operating System: BlackBerry OS
  • Devices:
    • Blackberry devices
• S60 Web Browser
  • Key Features: Standard browser features
  • Operating System: S60
  • Devices:
    • S60
    • Symbian Mobile Phones
    • Nokia N8
    • Nokia E6
    • Nokia E7
    • Nokia C6-01
    • Nokia C7
    • Nokia X7
    • Nokia 603
    • Nokia 700
    • Nokia 701

Recently we developed a custom WordPress site for a client that has an integrated lightbox image gallery. It was an easy plugin installation and activation process. The next step was to add in the images to the media library and then call the shortcode inside the code dialog in the specified page. Everything looked great on thumbnail preview, but when clicking on one to view a larger version the lightbox would not show up. The larger image would preview in a separate window.

First, is to check to see if the lightbox version works together with the WordPress installation and custom theme. WordPress notifies of any updates. Second, check to see if any of the plugins are not compatible with the lightbox plugin, by checking one at a time. If any of them are not compatible, it’s good practice to notify the plugin developer, so they can try to work out a solution for future versions. Third, is to check against any custom codes to see if anything is conflicting. In this particular case it happened to be a jQuery conflict on a particular plugin. By updating these conflicting files it allowed the lightbox to work properly.

(Homepage)

We are happy to announce that the Beacon Mobile site is now officially live.  It’s been in the pipline for quite some time but now it’s finally available. Justin Klingman, Beacon’s Software Development Manager,  had this to say about the release.

“More and more people every day are using their mobile devices to access all Web content, and a functional, easy-to-use mobile version of our site was a necessity for us in today’s world.  Using Cascade Server, we are able to maintain our site’s content in a single source, and publish out both a desktop and mobile version of our site with a single click, without having to manage two completely separate Web sites.”

On your smartphone, you’ll just need to go to beacontechnologies.com (or beacontec.com for you shorthanders), and you’ll be automatically directed to the new mobile site.  (Note that we are not redirecting tablets to the mobile site.)

(Web Development Category)

Many Beacon team members had a hand in the development, testing, and optimization of this site:

• Keana did an awesome graphical design based on our main site, as well as did the initial template development and implementation.  She really spearheaded this project from the beginning.
• Zed stepped in and made many changes and fixes, including rounding out the mobile version of the Design Portfolio.
• Miral got our Client Map to be mobile-friendly, which is an important marketing piece of the site.  He also stepped in and helped with the mobile detection script to determine which devices should be sent to the mobile site, and which should not.
• Tiffany provided a lot of guidance, as well as thorough testing of the site.
• Eric did the web marketing for the site, and survived many rounds of getting canonical tags in place.

So pull out your smartphone and take a look! Let us know what you think of our new mobile site!

Here’s an interesting Infograph I came across and wanted to share! What do you think of these stats? Is it what you thought or are they completely opposite of what you were thinking?

(Infograph Courtesy of: Online MBA Resource)

It doesn’t matter what products you sell on your website because regardless of their age, gender, or demographics your customer group is already highly engaging within social media networks and sharing site.  The latest stats show that males and females have an almost equal share of activity.  Don’t miss out on the opportunity of social media networks to increase your website conversions.  Listed below are some basic recommendations to help you optimize your profiles.

• Survey- Implement a survey to determine where you customers are congregating.  By sending a formal survey or launching a pop-up survey on your website you will be able to gather a wealth of demographic information.  UserReports or SurveyMonkey are two great companies to check out.  They are inexpensive and provide great analytics.
• Promote Exclusive Offers- By offering an exclusive item to social media followers or fans, such as a weekly coupon or 2 day delivery you leave these users feeling special which will increase conversion and customer loyalty.
• Proper Content Mix – Don’t only push promotions and products throughout your social mediums.  Expand you content to contain industry information or general information about your products and why they are important.  The primary goal of your eCommerce site may be to sell products, but your social media marketing strategy should encompass a wider range of tactics that simply promoting offerings. With too much product pushing and not enough engagement, you’re unlikely to experience optimal success.
• Sell products with the Social Mediums – By creating a simple shopping feed, you can actually sell products within Facebook through a Shopping tab listed within your category sections.  This will help to increase conversions and create awareness of this easy option to purchase.  If you are not ready to take that leap, you can always highlight new products or best-sellers and provide a link to the order page on your website. It may not be quite as simple as purchasing directly from facebook, but it can be just as effective.
• Learn from Your Competitors- Competitive intelligence can be very useful. We should be spending some time conducting competitive audits for your top 3 competitors on the social web and learn from their strengths and weaknesses.  Look at the social sites they are currently active on, the type of content they are pushing out, the number of followers they have, and the types of specifics offers, programs, or events they offer.
• Leverage Your Current Customers – If you haven’t already, send an email out to your current customers telling them the benefit (specific SM promotions and offers) of joining your social networks.  Also make sure to include links to your accounts in the footer of all email blasts you send.

It’s often common to put majority of the emphasis on the functionality of a site. While this is important, the value of good design needs to be recognized. It is possible to overlook the design and the value of content above and beyond what is strictly needed. We see that this type of extraneous content can be very important when we look at how human beings engage with the websites they use.

source

In psychology, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a food pyramid of human needs. The base of this pyramid is “physiological” needs. Before any other needs can be met, physiological needs have to be taken care of. The next level is “safety”, then “love/belonging”, and “esteem”. Only when all these more basic needs are met can we being to attend to the highest need, “self-actualization”.

source

A similar hierarchy of needs can be applied to web interface design. The base of the pyramid and most fundamental need is that a site be “functional”. It has to enable a user to complete a specific task. The next element is “reliability”. The site has to be online and working whenever a user attempts to access it. After this we have “usability”. Things have to make sense and the user should be able to figure out the site without to much learning. Up until recently, this was a high as the pyramid went. But now we have learned that the actual “pleasure” that is derived from a site contributes very much to how effective the site is.

Looking at some basic info about how brains process information, we can see how the pleasure factor when viewing a site can be very important. Emotionally charged events last much longer in our memories. They are also recalled with greater accuracy than neutral memories. Part of this is due to the fact that when we experience something that speaks to us more emotionally, the brain releases dopamine. Dopamine actually acts as a type of marker, signifying that what we are experiencing is important and this allows the information to be more robustly processed with more detail and a greater ability for recall. You can see how this would be incredibly useful to engaging your users and enabling the content of your site to be stored in their memories with greater strength and accuracy.

Another aspect of how good emotional design can contribute to the user experience is emotional stimuli is disarming and engaging. It makes us comfortable and signifies that this is something we should be interacting with on a deeper level. Molecular Biologist and author, John Medina states that using emotional stimuli to build positive memory is actually a very effective brain hack and a great way to engage the users ability to learn.

Our perceptions are critical. Usability is absolutely necessary but not everything, and the value of pleasure in a design should not be disregarded.

Ever wonder how to find out what images have been “pinned” from your website onto Pinterest? Well I’ve got just what you need.  I’m going to use a well known Furniture company called Bassett Furniture for my example.

Here is the url you need and for it to work for your site just replace bassettfurniture.com with your domain.

http://pinterest.com/source/bassettfurniture.com/

The image above is an example of some of the images that are pinned from bassettfurniture.com and you can see who has pinned them. I recommend that every company be checking to see what’s been pinned and what people are saying about the products. Not only can you get great marketing ideas from what people are saying but you also can comment on any negative posts so that people know you are aware of a problem and are trying to fix it.

Do you have a Pinterest account? What are somethings you love about Pinterest?

Ever been mystified by the numerous acronyms involved in DNS and/or what the heck DNS is anyway?  This fun six-minute video is well worth the time and does a really good job of explaining the mysterious world of the Domain Name System.  Of course, our Web Hosting experts can also assist with any questions you have, so be sure to contact us!