Monthly Archive for March, 2004

interview with Larry Becker, Crutchfield Corporation VP E-commerce

Published
by
Karl
on March 25, 2004
in Marketing
. 0 Comments

This interview I found on MarketingSherpa.com is an interesting read and has lots of useful nuggets for anyone trying to create an excellent ecommerce experience. Especially interesting to me, considering the “user centered” mantra that I tend to hear a lot, is the balanced approach that Larry described for developing the right content for the site. First he highlights “Use consumer insights to drive content development”, like feedback, surveys, usability etc. In the next breath he describes “Use cross-company innovation to drive content development” stating

“A lot of powerful features come from asking ‘what if?’ Some of the best features I’ve seen released have started with someone having an idea at the gut level and then working it through with their colleagues.”

I think its important to balance the external influences and the internal talent. Not enough companies leverage the intellectual capital that they have living in there organization.

Read the whole interview on MarketingSherpa.com : Practical News & Case Studies on Internet Advertising, Marketing & PR

essential web dev tools for firefox (mac or PC)

Published
by
Karl
on March 15, 2004
in Marketing
. 0 Comments

my first experience with plug-ins on firefox and i am blown away. This is a set of tools that help highlight on a web page various web design elements.

Web Developer Extension on chrispederick.com

I was initially dubious because the screen shots were on windows, but i clicked the download link anyway. I was pleasantly surprised by a dialog box asking me if I wanted to install the selected extension, well sure. Here’s a screen shot of the tool in action, note the bookmark bar, those are all the tools, kudos, kudos, kudos, great job:

webdevtools-2
the web developer extension tool bar
webdevtools-3
highlighting classes and id’s on this site

valid xhtml 1.0

Published
by
Karl
on March 12, 2004
in Marketing
. 0 Comments

clearly I am a bit of a procrastinator, instead of writing like I should be, I updated three sites to validate to xhtml 1.0 (transitional, I’m not that crazy yet). validates this site, and peterson/griffin architects and R.W. Hyde construction. Also, i built all these sites without the use of tables for layout.

music with your coffee

Published
by
Karl
on March 11, 2004
in Marketing
. 0 Comments

Downloading music is cool, itunes innovated there with 99c songs and the ability to have 30 second previews of the songs. Well Starbucks is leveraging its wholly unvirtual locations with digital music, enabling you to listen to complete songs while you hang out with your latte, pick the ones you like and have them burned to a CD to go. The first instantiation of “on demand” publishing, right?

Now I’ve only just got my head around the on demand music and I’m already thinking about all the other on demand publishing opportunities for starbucks, books, magazines, newspapers… movies? now there’s a thought.

BW Online | March 11, 2004 | Starbucks Tunes In to Digital Music

(BTW this is my first post through one of MT’s bookmarklets, pretty cool K-)

decorate martha’s cell

Published
by
Karl
on March 6, 2004
in Marketing
. 0 Comments

Take your interior decorating chops and enter this competition to create a new space for martha’s new digs.

Worth1000.com | Photoshop Contests | Are you Worthy%u2122 | contest

martha's jail cell

fun queries

Published
by
Karl
on March 2, 2004
in Marketing
. 0 Comments

this is a fun little visualization tool I found via elegant hack, basically throw in a query and you get a visual representation of the top 100 results from google and yahoo. I did a search for “best search engine”…

google vs yahoo visual dual

google vs. yahoo

Not surprisingly yahoo showed up top of its own results, but google did come in second. Funnily enough google showed up 8th in its own results, and yahoo was not even in its top 100, huh.