MDC Wallcovering has introduced an innovation in the paint industry. Their new Tabrasa product will transform any smooth surface or plain wall into your own personal scribbling pad. The Tabrasa paint was specifically designed for office, school and hospital-like environments; however, I’m already brewing up an extraordinary number of creative uses. I need to get my hands on this!
“An image is not simply a trademark, a design, a slogan or an easily remembered picture. It is a studiously crafted personality profile of an individual, institution, corporation, product or service.” ~Daniel J. Boorstin
Thinking it’s time to refresh your website? Do your customers and yourself a favor by taking a page out of the Agile Development Methodology. Rather than spending months on a complete redevelopment, approach your website redesign with a customer focused, evolution. Sit down with your web designer/developer on a monthly or quarterly basis and take a look at how you can introduce small changes into your website to help promote usability, readability, interaction or conversion rates. Set achievable goals that can be implemented and tested before your next web development meeting.
Making small changes over an extended period of time will allow you to see exactly how the changes you make are affecting your business on the web. You can focus on providing your users with content and usability that will improve their experience without investing loads of cash on a complete redevelopment which you may find doesn’t meet your user’s needs.
Agile software development refers to a group of software development methodologies based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams.
The term was coined in the year 2001 when the Agile Manifesto was formulated.
Agile methods generally promote a disciplined project management process that encourages frequent inspection and adaptation, a leadership philosophy that encourages teamwork, self-organization and accountability, a set of engineering best practices intended to allow for rapid delivery of high-quality software, and a business approach that aligns development with customer needs and company goals.
Yes, I took this straight from Wikipedia. I’m leading up to something… stay tuned.
Apple has launched a subpage (http://www.apple.com/html5) on their website to showcase some of the advantages of HTML5 in the development of future websites. It’s a bright future for web developers. The new HTML5 standards will offer excellent tools to implement interactivity and more accessibility into client sites and applications. However, Apple has seized this as an opportunity to promote their web browser, Safari 5. If you visit their HTML5 showcase in any browser other than Safari 5, you will be prompted with a dialog box asking you to upgrade to the new Safari browser. While it is true that Safari leads the way in the implementation of HTML5, this approach is somewhat sketchy. Rather than suggesting that Safari is the users only solution, I believe it would have been a much more forthcoming to do a comparison of all the major browsers showing that Safari 5 ranked higher in their support of HTML5, allowing the users to make a more informed choice. Apple’s recent tactics are disappointing. More and more, they are beginning to resemble their most hated competitor.