Got a special service or demographic you want to target on your website? This happens frequently in business – a change in direction, a new partnership, even a special event you want your online visitors to focus on. Usually it’s something big enough to need more functionality than just a new page or posting, but not big enough to wipe out all of the SEO, design, content and other work you’ve done on your site by starting from scratch.

The answer to your quandary might be to build yourself a Microsite. A Microsite is a smaller, more simple website – a subset of your main website – that’s extremely focused for a specific reason. Usually Microsites are heavily optimized for a small set of specific keywords and phrases, are geo-targeted and meant for a particular demographic or to achieve a particular goal.

Think of Microsites as another channel in your digital marketing toolbox, somewhere between email marketing and SEO of your main site. Like email, a Microsite is targeted for a certain subset of your audience, complete with targeting and specific calls-to-action. And, like your main site, it’s a live website with a full complement of keywords and SEO, designed to attract a certain segment of online search for a specific purpose. (more…)

Photo by BasicGov; Creative Commons share-alike license

The differences are far simpler, and way more important, than you probably think.

Sometimes the best laid marketing plans end up biting back, and in some truly surprising ways. While most cases of this sort of slip up – either positive or negative – can be chalked up to a failure to get the right message across, not many can be attributed to getting a message across a little too well.

Such is the case for the apparent confusion about the differences between “Cloud Computing” and “Software as a Service” (SaaS). As the digital marketing world is clamoring to get you to “move everything to the cloud” before the next guy, it’s become critical to offer clarification to help you make sure you know what you’re signing up for. Put simply, and in strictly logical terms, while all SaaS environments are by default denizens of the cloud, not all cloud environments are necessarily SaaS.

Cloud environments deliver the use of common applications that are served from the internet and are designed to deliver computing and interaction as a utility – Facebook, Salesforce.com and Google Docs are popular examples. SaaS, by comparison, uses specific software and customized architecture to provide services – primarily to enterprise customers (but certainly not exclusively) – based on specific needs. Bridgeline’s iAPPS Product Suite, for instance, is designed specifically to run as optimally in SaaS as it does in a dedicated server environment using a perpetual license. (more…)

According to some new figures reported recently, mobility is still on the path to becoming king of the interactive hill. For the first time, use of mobile apps has overtaken time spent on the web by just about 8 minutes per day. With an ever increasing number of devices in your customers’ hands, that trend means more – and changing – opportunities for success in marketing.

It also means that now more than ever it’s imperative that you’re well represented in the mobile space. There’s no question that your business will benefit from a mobile presence – and the smarter, more relevant and beneficial platform you use to broadcast it, the better. But which platform is best for your needs? Should you develop a mobile app, or a mobile version of your website? (more…)

Mr. Owl and a Tootsie Pop

I recently came across this discussion thread on the LinkedIn Group Content Management Professionals (CMPros) – How Long Should a CMS Implementation Take? It reminded me of the old Tootsie Pop commercial from when I was a kid – How Many Licks Does it Take to Get to the Tootsie Roll Center of a Tootsie Pop (click here for a walk down memory lane). As the little boy goes from animal to animal asking the question, they all keep pushing him to the wise Mr. Owl. Mr. Owl attempts to illustrate the answer but his own impatience causes him to bite after three licks and thus declares the answer to be three.

A CMS implementation can be like that sometimes. Maybe it’s not impatience that dictates how long the project should take – but there are certainly many factors that play into this. What is for sure is that there is no one answer – except that it all depends. Certainly there are right ways and wrong ways to implement a CMS, but within the context of “right ways” (we’ll assume for the sake of this post that we’re only dealing with the “right way”), it’s really a matter of what’s right for your organization, business needs, and yes, budget.

So, as there are such a wide range of factors that can play a role – from the research/discovery phase, where we learn exactly how the CMS needs to fit and function in your environment, all the way to the final product launch – there are some core elements that can play a huge role in project timing (whether you’re deploying a licensed or open source solution): (more…)

More sites are lining up in their support of Google’s first move to drop Internet Explorer 6 from the internet. This past week saw notices from Salesforce.com, Atlassian, and even Facebook. Whether we credit Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 Campaign, or more savvy users, IE8 is currently the market share leader within the IE family. That being said, IE6 still equates to about 15% of global browser use (average of sources @ Wikipedia).

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Continued lack of Flash support on the iPhone OS means it's time for web creators to adjust.

The recent unveiling of the iPad brought one glaring truth to the attention to the web community: Apple does not like Adobe. That might be a bit simplistic, but the fact of the matter is that the iPhone OS has never supported Flash and in the public unveiling of their new “magical” uber internet device, still no Flash support. Of course, Apple is the leader in controlled computing experiences, so it makes sense they would avoid Adobe’s technology, especially since it compromises the security and stability of their devices.

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