Gets the best of us.

Hey folks,

I came a cross this image in a study i was doing on application development. Thought i would share, gave me a chuckle.

Web Property Listing Page

Hey Everyone,

I'd like to suggest we add a private page to our current web property that lists our current clients and all of the sites in development. I think this would improve productivity by having all of our websites listed on one page.

Could XML/XSL replace HTML in the future

When I was in college eight years ago the college offered an elective night class in the use of xml and xsl, which allows you to define styles and layouts to present the xml data. I remember thinking to myself "That would be interesting. I mean XML is gonna be the wave of the future". So, I took the class.

Though the class covered the basics of the topic only and did nothing overly fancy or advanced I could see the potential of integrating/using these formats to broaden the users html experience. Unfortunately, to my knowledge it never really took off. This could be that at this time Flash was becoming the fad for doing amazing websites.

I had pushed xml/xsl to the back of my mind because it seemed that it was not going to go anywhere. However, now it seems that it may have the potential I thought it was capable of. Being an avid World of Warcraft player, I often visit their site at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com and noticed that there pages are almost exclusively XML pages and recently the launched a new online version of the WOW online newsletter, as can be seen at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/gadgetzan/mainindex.xml.

It might just be my taste, but I find the styling, layout, and presentation of the WOW site to be quite amazing. So, I finally took a look at some of the code behind the pages and notice how the XSL sheets made almost exclusive use of DIVs for content containers. DIVs have been a topic of dispute between programmers and designers as of late, but perhaps the use of XML/XSL could become the new web someday.

Another intersting example, again on WOW, is the armory at http://www.wowarmory.com/index.xml. Notice the custom styling of there drop-down boxes.

I think I'm going to spend some time looking into developing sites with XML/XSL styling and presentation. It could be the tool for taking our web development to the next level.

webtech testing and debugging procedure

Hey folks,

I am currently in the mist of developing us procedures and steps that need to be accomplished once a developer has, what they believes is "pretty much" done.

This document can be found on our server in Maintenance Clients\W\Webtech\Testing Pro\

If everybody could have a review of what i have put in there and add to it at the bottom like Keith has already done that would be wonderful.

The idea that i have for the final draft is all the information that is in the document will be created into an online form that the tester will fill out and will generate a report that they print off.

Give me any type of information that you would find helpful.

thanks

Persona Power

If you've ever gone to a website and thought, "wow... it seems as though this site is speaking directly to me" it probably is. At least some fictional version of you. Does that seem a bit freaky? Not to worry. You (probably) haven't been stalked. More likely, this particular site has likely been crafted using a persona-based methodolgy.

Persona-based design is one-part fictional characterization and one-part smart business analysis. It involves constructing a fictional customer and then using that character as the touchstone for design decisions. At Webtech, we do it by finding out everything we can about the “typical” person that will be visiting a web property and then creating a three-dimensional portrayal of that person. We use this portrayal to get “inside their headspace", breathe life into them and consider them in every step, from strategy to copy, functionality to graphical design.

As an online marketing team, persona-based design helps us help our clients by creating a vivid, tangible picture of their typical (or ideal) customers and then sculpting a message that resonates with them (relate), makes them “smarter” than they were before they got there (educate) and then moves them to inquire and/or buy (translate).

Bill Bernbach, a legendary figure in the history of American advertising, summed it pretty eloquently when he wrote:

“Nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature, what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action, even though his language so often camouflages what really motivates him. For if you know these things about a man you can touch him at the core of his being.”

Updating fields of a table with values from another table in MSSQL

Being quite adept with queries in MS Access, I was aware that you could join tables and update one table's fields with the values from an other table. However, I didn't know how, or if it was possible to do this in MSSQL. So, I did some research and found a solution.

The general structure of this type of update query in MSSQL follows a specific pattern.

1. Start with the traditional structure of an update table in MSSQL.
2. Put in the SET statements.
3. Use the table being updated as the FROM table.
4. Join the other tables you wish to pull values from.
5. Make you WHERE statements to control which records are update and selected.

Here is a simple sample that updates fields of one table with values from two other tables:

UPDATE tblOne SET tblOne.clientName=tblTwo.firstName+' '+tblTwo.lastName,
tblOne.clientAddress=tblThree.streetAddress+' '+tblThree.city+', '+tblThree.prov+' '+tblThree.postal
FROM tblOne
INNER JOIN tblTwo ON tblOne.clientID=tblTwo.id
INNER JOIN tblThree ON tblTwo.id=tblThree.userID
WHERE tblOne.clientID=1

Easy Peasy, and it saved me a lot of programming code in cfml to transfer information from one table to an existing record of an other table.

1st Choice and beyond

Here is an email I sent out that I believe we all need to see in respect to stepping up our game! This is what we will be doing for 1st Choice from this day forward!

Hi Gang,

1. Creative meetings 1 month minimum in advance of go-live
a. Define campaigns with Chad
b. Develop creative position
i. Print, lcd, stuffers, emailers, web, atm
ii. Contest, other collateral
c. Develop campaign objectives which are tied into conversion rates
d. Develop KCI/KPI – Key Conversion Indicator/Kep Performance Indicators
i. Jeff has the list of conversion
ii. Weekly review of targets

Contact Ron to move over to new graphics on ATMs – go through the maintenance budget for these to get done.
Look at the newsletter component has can we evolve.
Review personification, and addition of the new target group 17-24 years.
Quarterly meetings to review and set objectives upcoming.

Thoughts. I will put this on the blog.

Regards,