Date: 2007-03-04 00:00:00 | Posted by:

It was '96 when I made the first successful sale of a website. I admit that the customer was really interested in new technologies and ways to sells his products. We started around April and published the project on early September.  The product was acceptable by the public and the sales arrived almost immediately. The ROI was fast and the customer was pretty satisfied. Competitors where also interested to develop similar websites, and they started changing radically their marketing policy. The website survived two and half years. It still exists but the orders are 10% of the starting months. Why? It is still the same brand, the same products and the same marketing. Though, the last one misses an "e" in front.  

E-marketing extends the principles of the standard marketing (the well known marketing mix of the 4P's - Product, Price, Promotion, and Positioning) in the following points:

• Update: Keep your customers, always wanting to access your website. Provide them with new products but describe them briefly in a way not just to convince them, but to make then feel that your product is what they want. Websites that do not update their home page and do not allow customers interactions / feedback, in about two years maybe be found in Google archives, just because their managers assume that products are more important than existing or potential customers and how to establish relation with them.
• Design: Voice of the customer: "I want my website's elements to move... to drag them and drop... to listen to my favorite music... to have a large image as background with extremely good quality... plus I want it blue as my favorite color". Reactions:Developer/Designer: faint or over tired - Customers: watch for 45" a label telling them "Loading, Please wait..." (it will also move) and visit the competitor.
  Of course we want and need the best way to present our company and products but this doesn't exclude that simplicity is also nice. Customers need to access information fast, which they are presented accurately and nicely.
• Service - Support - Privacy: Write always a Disclaimer and always prove that you follow it. Relations between companies and customers (like eBay or Amazon) are successful due to the fact that those companies honored what they claimed.
•  Budget: Why are, most of the financial department head confused when they a digit with more than three zeros after it, with the "e" reason in front, ready to get a stroke? They should think that this budget will secure also their salary. Don't forget, we are living in a difficult era!

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Date: 2007-04-12 00:00:00 | Posted by:

David "liorean" Andersson writes in the Digital Web Magazine on HTML5, XHTML2, and the Future of the Web :

"HTML 4.01 was made a recommendation in 1999, XHTML 1.0—a formulation of HTML 4.01 in XML—became a recommendation in 2000, and was revised in 2002. In other words, at the base of all modern web development is an eight-year-old technology.

... The W3C has long had XHTML2 in the works, a technology that aims to fill the same role as HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0, an upgrade or replacement with many improvements and changes to the semantic elements available.

... HTML5 (also sometimes referred to as Web Applications 1.0) is a technology developed by the WHATWG, an open community started by three of the four major browser vendors: Mozilla, Opera, and Apple. HTML5 is not so much a replacement for HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0 as it is an upgrade or evolution."

Full article

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Date: 2007-11-21 00:00:00 | Posted by:

Can I have my data please?

We store more and more data on the net every day. Texts of any kind, photographs, personal data, telephone numbers, even thoughts (if you consider blog entries to be a product of the intelligence as opposed to mind garbagge ;))

But what happen to this data is that often they are tied with the service we have used. The things you can do with your data are thus limited to the features of the particular service. And what happens if (science forbid!) the service closes? Your data is gone with them.

Luckily, services running on the web are more and more providing your data back to... you. In research for this article I looked at the possibilities of Facebook and came up with a decent way to revive my personal site, giannopoulos.info. Facebook provides an RSS feed of my posted items. With the help of Feedburner and some css I am able to post this feed my site as if it was it's actual content. And my site is updated whenever I add something new on Facebook. Of course at the moment you need to be a Facebook user to comment on my posted items but I could script an Essence module to import the data as actual blog entries and allow commenting by everyone.

Still, there is a long road ahead of us. Facebook for example doesnt have an RSS feed for photographs and when I tried to import the feed of ilovehotchocolate.com in my Facebook notes it worked once but then new entries were ignored (as opposed to being automatically imported).So what can you export from your favorite service or site?

Flavor of the day: KitKat

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