For the past month and a half I have been working on development of the Plantronics Lifestyle Selector. I worked with SolutionSet to built a prototype that would allow Plantronics users to answer a series of questions to find the headset that would fit their needs. I did the XHTML/CSS work as well as JavaScript for animation, AJAX, etc. The design was created by Cindy Lee of SolutionSet and the JavaScript algorithm for the quiz was designed by Michael Judkins of Plantronics. The project turned out well and I was pretty happy with the result. If you are looking for a Bluetooth headset, give the quiz a try.

Viddler a new video service looking to take on video services like YouTube has launched today. The service allows you to store pretty large videos up to 500MB. Also there are timed tags and time comments which allow you to create bookmarks within a video to share at a certain point within a clip. Another nice feature is the ability to record through a webcam. Read the rest of this entry »

Before you begin a web project it’s important to research marketing and advertising strategies in the market you are looking to build your web application. Different market sectors have very different competitors and this will make a difference when you first start out. A lot of the time if there’s heavy competition you will have to market your product much better and most of the time pay more for advertising so your product is seen. It’s the typical supply and demand market. Read the rest of this entry »

Search engine optimization is an important step in creating a web application. High ranking organic or natural listings in Google, Yahoo, MSN will drive traffic to a website. By researching keywords and implementing them into your site a little effort can go a long way. If you have the time do the research. The two biggest points of search engine optimization are content and links. If you search for search engine optimization in your favorite search engine, I can bet that the majority of the articles will say that content is the most important part of search engine optimization followed by good linking development. Read the rest of this entry »

I can’t stress enough the importance of clean code. It may take more time initially to carefully plan a web architecture, document, and comment code, but it’s always worth the initial planning in order to save a huge headache later. I don’t know how many projects that I have acquired that were so poorly coded that I had to start the project from scratch to work on it. Now I’m definitely not the best coder in the world, but I like to use best practices if I or someone else needs to come back to the project later for updates or changes. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve decided to create multiple parts on my tips for creating a successful web application. This is the first part of the series: design. I think this part of the project is often overlooked and it is probably one of the most important parts of a project. Read the rest of this entry »

With the popularity of sites like MySpace and YouTube, I can easily say that the popular web is moving more towards user generated content. The popularity has already begun and according to a post on LinuxElectrons, they expect it to grow rapidly through 2010. Read the rest of this entry »

After three years, analysts believe that MySpace is worth $15 billion as reported by CNET News.com. It was acquired for $580 million less than a year ago. MySpace has made some moves regarding advertising so much that they have sold out in some segments such as video. Read the rest of this entry »

Ars Technica posted an article today regarding Web 2.0 funding and making it a successful business model. There is a huge discrepancy between investments and those that turn into Web 2.0 companies. Read the rest of this entry »

According to CNET News.com corporations are still slow adopters of Web 2.0 as compared to consumers. Most of the companies are using technologies in small scale projects. It used to be that consumers were behind corporations in the form of cutting edge technologies in the computer industry. Read the rest of this entry »