All Posts by Sean Madden

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Sean Madden

Practice Director

As a Practice Director with Northridge, Sean partners with clients to develop enterprise solutions focused on brand development and user experience design, increasing productivity, encouraging social collaboration and harnessing business intelligence for effective decision making within organizations. Solutions may take the form of corporate intranets, customer extranets, portals, and public websites, but it’s the strategy that defines their form and function. In addition, Sean and his team develop online marketing and social media plans, conduct focus group testing and prototyping, and provide assessments to formulate long-term roadmaps. Sean has been working in the interactive and technology industry for more than fourteen years and has had the great fortune to work with brands across many industries, such as Georgia Pacific, Lowe’s, MTV, Cartoon Network, Maxxis, Char-Broil, and Habitat for Humanity. Sean holds a BA from McDaniel College in English Literature and a BFA from Shepherd College in Graphic Design.

Sean Madden

Is Your Website SEO Friendly?

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.

Tags: SEO, Social, Websites

Sean Madden

Okay Jakob, You Got My Attention

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?"

Tags: Collaboration, Portals, SharePoint, UX

Sean Madden

Apple and Microsoft on a Flash Smackdown

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.

Tags: General, Mobile

Sean Madden

Standing Up New SharePoint Sites

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.

Tags: Portals, SharePoint

Sean Madden

The SharePoint Site Governance Lifecycle Stages

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.

Tags: Collaboration, Portals, SharePoint, UX

Sean Madden

The New Microsoft Search Landscape

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.

Tags: Portals, SharePoint, UX

Sean Madden

Windows Embedded Evolution Continues

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.

Tags: Mobile, UX

Sean Madden

Quantifying Sentiments... Making Sense of Feelings Online

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.

Tags: General

Sean Madden

A New .NET Identity and Authentication Paradigm

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).

Tags: Portals, UX

Sean Madden

Microsoft and Yahoo Back at the Table for Search

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.

Tags: SEO

Sean Madden

Balancing Forces for SharePoint Wiki Success

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.

Tags: Collaboration, Portals, SharePoint

Sean Madden

Page 1, No Traffic?

7/1/2009

My website is page one on Google and Yahoo for my chosen keywords, yet I am not getting much traffic, why?

Tags: SEO

Sean Madden

REST comes to WCF

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.

Tags: UX, Websites

Sean Madden

Will Users Digg Ads?!

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.

Tags: UX

Sean Madden

You Can Look...

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.

Tags: General, UX

Sean Madden

Gems from Old Software Books #1

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.

Tags: General

Sean Madden

Just Nifty, New Xbox

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.

Tags: General

Sean Madden

The Browser Wars... Where it Stands

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.

Tags: General

Sean Madden

Good News for Georgia

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.

Tags: General

Sean Madden

Where Do You Want to Go Today? Bing... Maybe?

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.

Tags: General, SEO

Sean Madden

Twitter for Stalking?!

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.

Tags: General, Social

Sean Madden

Well, You Can Swap Out the Logo…

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.

Tags: SharePoint, UX

Sean Madden

Architecture and Application Development Standards: Separation of Concerns

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.

Tags: General

Sean Madden

Give Me a Moment to Gloat...

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.

Tags: General, Social

Sean Madden

Hot off the presses... FreedomOpsNet wins Best of (Toy & Hobby) Industry Award!

3/19/2009

The Web Marketing Association awarded the site a “Best of” in this competitive category for the Interactive Advertising Competition.

Tags: General

Sean Madden

Okay, I Am Not Another Jakob Worshiper

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.

Tags: General, UX

Sean Madden

Look To Bounce Rate Metrics - Quick Way to See What's Working

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.

Tags: SEO, Websites

Sean Madden

Microsoft Silverlight Version 2.0

10/28/2008

With the release of Version 2.0, it seems as though Silverlight is definitely headed in the right direction.

Tags: UX

Sean Madden

Value of Online Communities for Your Enterprise? New Study from Deloitte

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.

Tags: Collaboration, Portals, SharePoint

Sean Madden

Just Sharing Some User Experience Bookmarks

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.

Tags: UX

Sean Madden

Oldie But Goodie – Web 2.0 Defined

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!).

Tags: UX

Sean Madden

From Jakob Nielsen: Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous

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.

Tags: UX

Sean Madden

What is Success?

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?

Tags: UX

Sean Madden

It’s 2:00am. Do You Know Where Your Unattended Systems Are?

8/22/2006

Unattended software systems—almost any business with some kind of IT operations has at least one, if not several.

Tags: General

Sean Madden

Consistency, Correctness, and Craftsmanship

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.

Tags: UX