News : July 2008
New Issue: Get a Customer Relationship Reality Check
Costa Rican entrepreneur Tej Kohli joins us this week with his customer-focused advice in eCRM: A Virtual Reality Check For Your Business. 2008 has been rife with examples of new levels in customer relationships, with a series of news stories about company-to-customer failures and successes. The principles of good usability and user-centered design have some strong parallels in customer relationship management. If you’re interested it your customers (and you should be), consider Tej Kohli’s insights.
Also, don’t forget our surfboard design contest for Web Directions South ends Friday, August 1st! Get your designs in soon to be in the running for a free conference pass (transferable to any Aussie friends if airline CRM horror stories are scaring you out of traveling). You could also win a handy Wacom Bamboo tablet! See full rules and details in our previous post.
Surfboard design contest extended to Friday, August 1st!
Digital Web is extending our surfboard design contest to Friday, August 1st, 2008 for a free ticket to Web Directions South in Sydney, Australia. That’s right—this coming Friday. Get your entry in soon to be in the running for a free conference pass (transferable) as well as one of two Wacom tablets. Full details and a ready-made Photoshop template available in our previous post. WDS ’08 is shaping up to be one of the best conferences of the year, with top-notch speakers, workshops and the amenities of Sydney.
Battle of the Graphics Programs
After last week’s contentious topic and strong response, Digital Web cannot resist bringing up another article that plays on our geek loyalties. We are happy to welcome a whole bunch of great web professionals—Travis Isaacs, Pete Lambert, Patrick Haney, Jenna Marino, Jared Christensen, Hugh Griffith, Chuck Mallott, Anton Peck and Digital Web columnist/interviewer Nathan Smith. Why this many experts? Because they’re here to debate Photoshop vs Fireworks. Nathan guides both camps through the advantages and disadvantages of each program, and hopefully opens your eyes to rounding out your skills with both.
Secondly, there is just one week left in our surfboard design contest to win a free pass to Web Directions South, coming up this September 23-24, 2008. Instructions can be found at our contest post, and make sure you enter because we only have few so far!
New Issue: Sexy v. Smart CSS with Martin Ringlein
Smart CSS Ain’t Always Sexy CSS. That is what Martin Ringlein challenges us to think about in this week’s issue of Digital Web Magazine. He asks direct questions about the basic reasons we strive to separate styles from markup, how to balance semantics, style and reasonable maintenance expectations. This is a good one for anyone who is developed a de facto CSS stance, so give it a read!
p.s. We’re running a contest for Web Directions South—check it out!
Web Directions South Surfboard design contest! (Contest now closed)
Regular Digital Web readers might have hazarded an educated guess about our contest topic for Web Directions South. Such that it is, Digital Web is proud to partner with Web Directions South to offer one lucky DW reader with a killer surfboard design a free conference pass! We also have a few excellent runners-up prizes, courtesy of WDS partner Wacom.
Not a designer? Well, we have an option for you (though no guarantees you’ll like it): express the iconic Sydney Opera House in SVG, or as an architecturally themed microformat. We don’t have any real guidance on that one…actually, we’d just like to see someone try.
Check out the rules below, fire up Photoshop and get your design going. To get you started, here’s a template—classic longboard, dude!
Contest Rules
- Contest starts at Midnight (Pacific Daylight Time) on Monday, July 14, 2008 and ends at Midnight (Pacific Daylight Time) on Monday, July 28, 2008 ends at Midnight (Pacific Daylight Time) on Friday, August 1st, 2008
- One entry per person, sent in gif, png, jpg or zip format to digweb.contest~at~gmail.com
- Winner receives one free pass to the conference. Workshops are not included. Travel and accommodations are not included. Free pass is non-transferable and cannot be exchanged for cash or cash equivalent.
- Artists keep the right to the designs. Digital Web & Web Directions will not use them for any non-conference purposes (though we do need to display them in conjunction with the contest).
Conference Details
Conference & Expo, September 25 & 26 – Sydney Convention Centre, Darling Harbour Parkside
Workshops, September 23 & 24 – PowerHouse Museum
Conference Price
- $850 before July 19th
- $950 Before September 6th
- $/files/includes/10.css50 full price
Workshop Prices
- $450 Conference attendees
- $550 Workshops only
Questions?
Hit up the comments.
dConstruct 2008 – don’t miss out!
A little birdie tells me that tickets are fast running out for what is likely to be an unmissable social event, in both senses. You’re not likely to find a smarter bunch of people working in the social network space than the speakers lined up for this year’s dConstruct conference, taking place in Brighton, England this September 5th.
From the names you know — Digg’s Daniel Burka, Joshua “Bokardo” Porter, Jeremy Keith, and Tantek — to the names you probably don’t but really should, including the super-smart Matt “Dopplr” Biddulph, and pioneering thinker and writer Steven Johnson the one-day event is shaping up to be something quite special.
No issue this week
Digital Web is taking a break this week, but we’ll be back next week with a solid article topic, as well as the oft-hinted Web Directions South conference contest and more. To tide avid readers over in the meantime, here’s a bevy of “good reads” from the week thus far:
- Our own EIC Matthew Pennell is building a webapp and blogging the process
- Our favorite columnist Nathan Smith‘s employer Viewzi is garnering great reviews with its recent launch
- Our other favorite columnist Garrett Dimon reviewed Clearleft’s “guerilla” usability-testing app Silverback (using his own in-progress issue-tracker app, Sifter)
- And last but not least in staff/columist/reader news, LinkedIn announced that Friday they will release searchable professional groups on the site. With “over 90,000” groups, the full list should be interesting. Digital Web has a group, and I’ve talked about other web-professional groups on LinkedIn before. Join up, and make sure you visit on Friday!
New Issue: Ben Ward and Portable Social Networks
If you want to annoy web denizens, ask them to join a new social network. It’s the middle of 2008, it’s obvious the web has gone social and there’s no going back. However, recreating a social network person-by-person, click-by-click is already a point of fatigue for most web professionals. Thankfully, some very smart people are working on that problem as fast as they can, with notable progress. Ben Ward joins Digital Web Magazine this week to guide us through distributed social network strategies in Portable Social Networks, The Building Blocks Of A Social Web. If your own projects involve social networking, keep distributed social network standards in mind. Not only does it benefit users, but it also helps solidify identity and credibility on the web.
Secondly, don’t forget we’ll be launching our Web Directions South conference contest soon! Final details are assembled, so check back early next week. We’ll be on break, but I’ll post the specifics about the contest in place of a new issue.
p.s. Um, yes, I accidentally pre-published this news item last night, which astute web readers (and more than a few RSS subscribers) might have caught. Sorry about that. Free sneek peak—can I call it that?