White House website is open for all
Posted on Apr 30, 2010 by Peter Ellis in IT, News, Web Design
I am not sure how much of this is going to be exciting for consumers out there, but this is pretty awesome for web developers. The White House official website (www.whitehouse.gov) is built on an open source platform called Drupal.
Drupal, amoung other open source (another words, “free” code base platforms) such as WordPress and Joomla, is often used for a large-content websites to offer an administrator of that website a user-friendly way to edit/update/create content without any web programing knowledge.
These Content Management Systems (CMS) have years and years of development, along with thousands of developers world wide adding to them to make them better. Like with anything in life there are pros and cons about using an open source CMS, but this is not the time to open up that can of warms.
Anyway, representatives of White House official website made an announcement to release modules of Drupal code they have developed and customized as open source, i.e. are giving them away free.
Imagine your best website developer, the most expansive budget then multiply it times 10 (at least). This is how much time and money the White House has invested into their website, after all the do have to represent the nation on the internet. Now they are making all those custom changes available to other, this is amazing!
Constant Contact vs. VerticalResponse vs. MailChimp
Posted on Mar 29, 2010 by Peter Ellis in Advertising, IT, Social Media
Email marketing is a very affordable way to promote your business online. There are many online companies that provide this type a service. I had run-ins with many of the but the following 3 really stood out:
As an owner of a small business myself, I understand that there are many important factors which play a big role in making the right decision in selecting one of these email marketing providers.
Here are some pros and cons that I’ve personally find out by using the listed 3 services:
Contact Contact (CC)
CC is definitely the well-know solution out of many. Most users default to this solution. CC offers many more options for export/import then other competitors. The pricing can be more competitive. It offers WYSIWIG email editor as most of the email marketing services out there.
To sum up: Trustworthy service, great functionality, good customer service, ok pricing.
VerticalResponse (VR)
VR is the underdog. It has similar user-interface to Constant Contact. VR is an obvious choice for non-profit organizations (501 c 3) because of its offer of 10,000 free emails each month for qualified orgs. We’ve worked with over a dozen local and national non-profits that are now using VR’s services for free – you can’t beat that!
To sum up: Trustworthy service, great functionality, awesome customer service, great pricing (amazing pricing if you are a non-profit – IT’S FREE).
MailChimp (MC)
MC is a newer solution on the block. Its the most stylish one as well, offering amazing flexibility when it comes to customization of email templates. It offers great integrations with social media and social marketing, but lacks in some simple tasks such as more options for pre-created email templates (only 4, I believe) and their customer support sucks. You can look on the bright side, you can host up to 500 contacts in your list and email up to 3,000 emails per month for FREE. So, if you are a designer/developer and know what you are doing (most likely you are using your own HTML email template as well), you don’t really need the customer support. Just get those 3,ooo emails out because they are free.
To sum up: Trustworthy service, ok functionality (good functionality when you know what’s you’re doing), no phone customer service, good pricing (500 contacts and 3,000 emails per month for FREE).
If you are looking for a more technical and in-depth review, view this link.
Internet Explorer 9
Posted on Mar 22, 2010 by Dennis Driscoll in IT, News
As we all know, Microsoft released their “new” operating system in November 2009, called Windows 7. Well, Microsoft has also been working very hard on trying to enrich not only the desktop experience, but also the online experience of their users. Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) browser took the back burner spot with the release of Windows 7, but it has been hitting some amazing mile stones lately.
It has been successful enough in testing mode for Microsoft to make the results public.
Internet Explorer 9 will be fully compatible with HTML5 and CSS3, which makes for a faster browsing experience for an end-user, plus makes the developer’s job much easier (I’m a bit selfish). It also has a new JavaScript engine allowing for browsing speeds faster then Firefox 3.6.
To find out more information or to view the test-drive demos of IE9 platform, click here.
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