Insight into BDO

Hey WWT (Webtech Team),

My father was a baker just like his father was. I remember back in Worchester (England), visiting the bakery when I was a wee imp. It was a large bakery, if fact it had its own flour mill atop of the floor where the bread and such was prepared. The smell of fresh bread takes me back to the old country...funny thing was that my father never baked at home. You would think that he could cook, when in fact he was a typical Brit and had limited culinary skills except for a Sunday roast. Yet, on one occasion I remember him baking a quiche for a friend at home. It was interesting to watch him tend to the dough as it rised, how he beat the eggs and added ingredients at random, a pinch here and there. With the final brush of the egg yolk on the uncooked pastry to make it a golden brown upon completion. And finally when it came out of the oven, it was a masterpiece, a single master piece that I was only allowed look at, yet the smell made me yearn to take a bite. No sooner was it out of the oven, was it out the door to my father's friend home.

Just like the cobbler's children, not unlike the baker's son, we go without shoes and without quiche. In those initial meetings the clients are getting wise to the fact that our clients have great tools and results, yet our website is not a web property! I challenge us all to think in terms of how our web can assist us. I like JR's post with recommendations on having a strong client portfolio, it extends to how can we use our website as a lead generation and as a sales tool?

As the BDO I can see our site as a tool where I can create a customized brochure, walk through a sales presentation in a video based format, demostrate our great CMS (believe me it has come a very very long way), and perhaps google a set of keywords that brings up our indexed page top, or perhaps have the top 5 rankings. My mindset is one of utility, again a gift of my father ("start at the right side and then sweep to the middle..."). I need each of you from the capacity of copy, graphics, IA, code, PM, HR, Client relations to own a piece of our WEB PROPERTY. I want to be able to show our clients creative work that combines each of your talents and skills into something that says to them "I need this company...I want this company to work with". What does this look like? What does this sound like?

What about....

• a creative story written from a fable perspective (Three Pigs, Little Red Hen) http://www.rickwalton.com/folktale/folktale.htm
• a supportive multi-media movie using stick-men or figurines (Robot Chicken - stop motion) http://www.adultswim.com/shows/robotchicken/
• stellar information architecture to wrap it into a product that makes sense to the persona and to Webtech - "How does it drive profit?"
• Indexing the the presentation on SE's, YouTube, Facebook
• Creating a dashboard that allows the BDO to drag and drop elements of a presentation with the client present to customize a presentation to their needs all within 5 mins...

So what do we need to do...

• determine what our brand is
• determine our personas
• determine our target markets

WTT, our goal is to build a web property that fits our needs, and the needs of our target personas. Why? This is how I, our BDO, move when in conversation with our prospects...and the bigger picture is that we meet our goals, stay gamefully employed in a cool environment where we all get the opportunity to spread our wings and really live.

Regards,

cc

Grouping Query Output

OK, so this post won't relate to all, however for the coders in the group, it's a useful piece of information.

ColdFusion has an attribute that you can add on to a cfoutput tag called "group=". What this does is allow you to group the query results by a particular field. I will put down a couple of examples, the first one being how I generally would code the page, and the second will use the group attribute.



SELECT *
FROM tblCourse c
ORDER BY courseName




SELECT *
FROM tblStudent
WHERE cID=#cID#

#get.courseName#

• #get2.studentName#

So, this will generate output something like this:

Course 1
Keith Ginter
Paul Plato

Course 2
Chris Clapton
Jeff Coomber

Now, this is the correct way to do it, using the group attribute of the cfoutput tag



SELECT c.*, s.studentName
FROM tblCourse c
INNER JOIN tblStudent s on c.id=s.cID
ORDER BY c.courseName


#get.courseName#

• #get.studentName#

This will generate the same output as before, however the code is alot slicker and you save trips to the database to pull the results of the student names as done in the first example.

I have a training video on the above, as well as a number of other CF tricks. I will make those available once they are all ready to go.

Finding Fonts

We recently had a client request a logo to be done with a specific font. He didn't have the name of the font or any other information other relating to the font other than a picture of it. Mike searched his Adobe Photoshop fonts and couldn't find it. This left us with the propect of searching through online listings of fonts hoping to find a match.

Fortunately I came across www.identifont.com which has a really cool feature which let's you identify a font by answering a series of questions relating to how certain letters are displayed. Although I wasn't able to answer most of the questions due to the small sample of text I was working from; after about 5 minutes I was presented with a list of 30 possible fonts that matched my answers. Sure enough the tenth font on the list was the one we were looking for!

Identifont probably saved us a couple of hours of research and we were able to satisfy a clients request in a timely manner.

Adobe Spry

Though Ajax is the driving mechanism behind Web 2.0, it is often cumbersome to create Ajax applications do the combination of technologies and languages. Along came Adobe (again) to rescue the over-stressed and over-tasked web programmers.

Adobe has created a framework for Ajax development, called Spry, to help centralize much of the libraries and technologies used in Ajax development. Spry helps in creating dynamic web apps that can include widgets, effects, and data transformation and management. Thus, making it easier for the web programmer to create a more robust and interesting experience for the end user.

Recently, Adobe released and new version of Spry that will help to incorporate these Ajax applications into Adobe Air, which creates standalone desktop apps for your computer.

I intend to start playing with this new toy. However, you can check out more about it at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/home.html.

Flex360 Conference

Hello All,

I will try to use this blog to download the information taken in at Flex360 in Atlanta. There was a ton of information to absorb, a good bit of it way over my head in terms of the technical aspect, however, still extremely insightful. One of my favorite sessions was that of Doug McCune, in which he spoke to the open source aspect of the Flex community. Doug was kind enough to post his slides as well as examples on his blog at http://dougmccune.com/blog/2008/02/26/examples-from-my-360flex-session-using-open-source-community-projects/

There's a few cool examples in here...Clapton...how do we use them to create products of value??

The first one, is a physics form. Go ahead, try the example, type in a username and password and click Login. Not sure where this would come in useful, however it is using a physics engine in the background to develop the logic around what should fall where. Pretty funky...

The second piece is a Flex app that's been styled to fit the Vista look. Note the ability to cascade and tile the windows. In the conference Doug also used the alt+tab to show the funky vista look, don't think it works in the example posted though. I think this piece can be really useful when developing web apps for our clients familiar with Windows.

Third piece combines degrafa with a sweet little login box. Click the little red arrow at the top of the screen to pull down the login. Again, we'd want to make this more intuitive for the user, however it's a cool little app. The background utilized degrafa, which will be covered in another post

The Fourth is an air app that combines the ability to pull in the meta data of specific file formats with the ability to drag and drop a file (mp3 in this case) from the pc to the app and have it read in. The air app that I downloaded didn't have the coverflow piece (iTunes piece that Pauly built as well), however, it's still a great piece of work

As well, the slides for Doug's presentations can be viewed at http://dougmccune.com/360Flex_ATL/360Flex_DougMcCune_Using_Open_Source_Flex_Projects.pdf

I will definitely set aside some time to walk us all through this, perhaps after seeing a few examples, as well as resources to plenty of open source components, we can piece together some apps of value for our clients.

That's it for tonite.