10/10/2011
Search Engine Optimization is the ever-changing and never-changing practice of organic (or free) Search Engine Marketing that appears pretty simple yet remains full of mystery. While we’ll probably never know exactly which tactics we’ll need to execute to absolutely positively reach the prized first SERP (Search Engine Result’s Page) slot, there are a few things every Search Engine Marketing and SEO professional will need to do for baseline optimization of their website.
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Tags: SEO, Social, Websites
6/7/2010
I get a LOT of emails from a variety of industry sites that I opted into, but I admit that many go unopened. Well, this morning from Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, I received one with the title "Does SharePoint Destroy Intranet Design?"
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Tags: Collaboration, Portals, SharePoint, UX
5/4/2010
Well, some disclosures are in order... Northridge is a Microsoft partner and we use a lot of their technology. We also do a good bit of Flash development.
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Tags: General, Mobile
11/20/2009
In a previous post we introduced the Northridge SharePoint Site Governance Lifecycle, which we identified as having five stages. In this post we will focus on the second of these stages: standing up new SharePoint sites, one of the most common activities to take place in a SharePoint intranet, but also a key governance topic.
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Tags: Portals, SharePoint
11/13/2009
As Northridge has developed various SharePoint-based business solutions for clients, and assisted clients in a consulting capacity with SharePoint strategy and governance, we have developed a model that we call the SharePoint Site Governance Lifecycle.
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Tags: Collaboration, Portals, SharePoint, UX
9/30/2009
2009 and 2010 will be remembered as the time when the words "search" and "Microsoft" became closely associated in the minds of enterprise technology customers, vendors, and developers.
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Tags: Portals, SharePoint, UX
9/19/2009
On September 1, 2009 Microsoft announced the availability of a preview release of Windows Embedded Standard 2011, the latest in Microsoft's line of embedded/compact editions of the Windows operating system.
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Tags: Mobile, UX
8/24/2009
The world of analytics continues to evolve from basic traffic stats to more behavioral indicators. Well, enter the newest of analytics...Sentiment Analysis.
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Tags: General
8/19/2009
A paradigm shift is underway for how .NET solution developers work with identity and authentication. The shift is not only in the tools and recommended design patterns for validating user identity (authentication) and managing role-based permissions for what a user is allowed to do (authorization).
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Tags: Portals, UX
7/27/2009
Seems that the dance will never end, but there is a real strong possibility this time that Microsoft and Yahoo will finally work out a deal. With the dollars Microsoft is putting behind Bing, it may have been enough to get the attention of Yahoo! execs.
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Tags: SEO
7/8/2009
When organizations adopt the Microsoft SharePoint platform, there are often at least a few people in the group who are very excited about the prospect of using the SharePoint wiki feature.
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Tags: Collaboration, Portals, SharePoint
7/1/2009
My website is page one on Google and Yahoo for my chosen keywords, yet I am not getting much traffic, why?
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Tags: SEO
6/23/2009
Good news: WCF programmers no longer need to suffer REST envy in relation to their brethren in the wider development world. .NET developers will now be able to easily achieve both RPC and REST type services in WCF.
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Tags: UX, Websites
6/15/2009
Digg is looking to take its approach currently used for stories to how it displays ads. Users will be able to vote ads up and down just as it does stories.
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Tags: UX
6/12/2009
...but you HAVE to touch! With the release of Windows 7 later this year, Microsoft is introducing Windows Touch, a platform designed to provide an enriched multi-touch experience, bringing Windows to the Surface.
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Tags: General, UX
6/12/2009
In this series of blog posts I will be dusting off long forgotten software development and computer science tomes to uncover gems of wisdom that apply to the software work we are doing today.
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Tags: General
6/8/2009
Okay, so this is a bit off topic, but as Microsoft partners, we get a lot of news from them without even needing to look and most recently got hit with some of the new Xbox stuff.
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Tags: General
6/5/2009
We often get asked by clients about what percentage of the market various browsers have when we start to develop cross-browser test plans.
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Tags: General
6/2/2009
Our 14th Fortune 500 to be headquartered here bringing with it 2,100 jobs. The metro Atlanta area continues to attract top talent and companies which is good for the overall business community and Georgia economy.
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Tags: General
6/1/2009
So I digress, the start of this post was to be about Bing. I just figured it appropriate to search for something Microsoft related.
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Tags: General, SEO
5/27/2009
As the Twitter hype continues…One of the stars of Twitter Ashton Kutcher is threatening to stop posting if Twitter moves forward on its plans for a TV show.
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Tags: General, Social
5/21/2009
As our design team works closely with our SharePoint development team with the MOSS 2007 platform, we continue to push further into interesting realms.
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Tags: SharePoint, UX
5/20/2009
As software architect and developers, we try to adhere to some core principles and standards. I was working with one of our new architects the other day and shared the following piece with him concerning the principle of Separation of Concerns.
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Tags: General
5/1/2009
Northridge edged out some heavy hitters to take home “Most Effective Online Brand Experience Through Social Media” from the Atlanta Interactive Marketing Association for our MoveOn.org CNNBC customizable election video.
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Tags: General, Social
3/19/2009
The Web Marketing Association awarded the site a “Best of” in this competitive category for the Interactive Advertising Competition.
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Tags: General
2/8/2009
My favorite study ever done was the eyetracking survey done several years ago. I still refer to it often when explaining to clients and even new designers how to approach information design of a specific screen.
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Tags: General, UX
1/9/2009
Whenever I begin to dig into a new client’s analytics, I often start with the Bounce Rate. This is the percentage of single-page visits to your site.
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Tags: SEO, Websites
10/28/2008
With the release of Version 2.0, it seems as though Silverlight is definitely headed in the right direction.
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Tags: UX
7/18/2008
Historically, SharePoint has been a strong collaboration tool used heavily for corporate intranets, but with the new version it has become much more of a community building tool with robust content management features added.
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Tags: Collaboration, Portals, SharePoint
4/8/2008
I was recently asked by a client what resources exist to dig into the whole world of user experience. I am the worst at adding and maintaining bookmarks, so most of my top sites reside in my brain.
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Tags: UX
3/8/2008
There is a whole lot of information and misinformation out there in terms of what are the real characteristics of Web 2.0 (I have seen early articles on Web 3.0 but that is another topic entirely!).
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Tags: UX
12/18/2007
High level summary is that Ajax, rich internet user interface design, mashups, and user-generated content can create a lot more complexity to the overall user experience than they are worth.
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Tags: UX
4/7/2007
Any project whether building a new website or planning a campaign starts with a basic question. We can talk about goals and audiences, but simply put, What is Success?
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Tags: UX
8/22/2006
Unattended software systems—almost any business with some kind of IT operations has at least one, if not several.
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Tags: General
7/1/2006
The concept of "correctness," as it relates to software, is usually discussed in relation to the known requirements for building or using a particular piece of software.
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Tags: UX