eBusiness Analysis

Browser Plugins and Accessibility

I recently completed a great gig (more on gigs at Chris Penn's 12/13/2006 Financial Aid Podcast). This particular assignment took several topics I am acquainted for and allowed me the opportunity to delve in deep and learn!

A NYC firm specializing in accessibility and educational software development recently contacted me about a partner's plugin creation and contracted me to access it in terms of usability. I scoped, analyzed, wrote, reviewed, re-scoped, and finalized a great little evaluation. In addition to the obvious benefits of learning about the plugin, more about accessibility, and doing some web evaluation work, I also reaped the reward of hearing that they may want to publish my evaluation because so little has been published to date on it. Even if nothing comes of that, it was a litle pat on the back moment when I realized that I too might step up to being published in my field.

Online Education & Distance Learning

Online Medium

Internet Learning Systems will no more replace human interaction than the telephone will. However, an online education is much more than a glorified self-study. the internet is an additional channel for human interaction. Discussions, knowledge sharing, and even text books are enhanced by the online environment.

Hyperlinks are in deed still the best thing since sliced bread! Why? If you take the electronic version of your favorite text books and teaching manuals, re-create them in platform-independent document format(Linux? Mac? Microsoft? No problem.), and add links to all your references and related material. Want your student to be able to research a particular topic in more depth? Provide a link to the related website right in your text book. When the student clicks the link up pops their favorite browser and opens up the material you, as educator, recommended.

With today's world of Gen-X and Gen-Y, kid-in-a-candy-shop ADD mis-types, students will still want and need your guidance as an educator. Words are only part of the picture. Words can be ambiguous, or misinterpreted. Pictures help, but our teachers guide!

eBusiness - Marketing

Web Channel Marketing

Content Delivery

The web is a beautiful thing! With a click of a link, or a cookie identifying that you told us you were interested in a, b, or c, the evolving technology of cascading stylesheets will leverage the simple hyperlinks to deliver the right content to the right people. Our content development efforts help you deliver based on the channel marketing strategies you have identified.

Web Analytics

Web Analytics: You have a web site. You have expanded it beyond the glorified brochure. Your teams are monitoring user behavior, and surveying customers and business partners for online satisfaction. Using tools like Webtrends or the web statistics package of tools that came with your web hosting suite, you see how people are getting to which parts of your site, and how often. You see how long they stay there and from which sections they leave. You monitor what people search on to find you and from what sites they came to yours. It's time to take it to the next step.

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing addresses topics such as:

• Search Engine Optimization
• Pay-Per-Click
• Affiliate Marketing
• Google Marketing

You need to know what's important now and how it will help you or your web clients

Mine and Refine

The information highway is littered with left overs. Now is the time to mine and refine. Simplify your information. find what you need, when you need it. Make sure others find your information, but only that which puts your best foot forward. the first place I ever go to look up a phone number or address of a known business or colleague is infospace.com, but if I don't know what's available or am looking for new places, business, marketing companies, web design firms, or anything else, I search Google.com. Don't you?

Online Communities

One of the great services of the web is enabling your customers return visits. Sure the web provides entertainment and education, and if you are not careful, a horrific waste of time. You want to keep your customers close. Is your business worthy of baring it's soul? Bring your customers closer!

Website Management

Understanding your user, gathering requirements, proposing options, selecting changes, creating expanded site structures, writing web copy, executing the changes, planning the release, migrating to production, and monitoring responses by the web community are all part of a days work in the life of a website content manager. As a project coordinator and business analyst, I determine which expansion options exist, communicate those to Product Marketing Management

On Web Design

Author Jennifer Niederst discusses several of the disciplines of "web design" in her book, Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to HtML, Graphics, and Beyond (O'Reilly 2001-2003).

Understand that people who build and maintain websites come from a number of disciplines. Some were marketers or graphic artists for the print world, some were business analysts in the information technology world. In fact, as accessible to the general public as web site creation is, people come from all discplines - engineers, doctors, horticulturists, and more.

Ms. Niederst addresses two disciplines that are the closest to my experience - information design and interface design. My early days were maintaining existing tables-based code complete with JavaScript rollovers, and no matter how well I could build my own tables from scratch, it was just dull without more than average PhotoShop experience. Despite my graphic design theory class in college, without the in-depth Photoshop tool experience, I was just another klutz! CSS changed all that. Or at least it CAN. ;-)

In fact, moving beyond the tiny bits of CSS I have done since the early 2000s, understanding the DOM structure, Applying DOM concepts for DHML , JavaScript, or AJAX, validation of stylesheets and XHtML structure, I've learned this is a significant niche.