Inbound Marketing Blog

I recently met with a B2B firm who is hoping to dramatically grow sales as quickly as possible. Their dilemma is how to make this happen with the most return on their investment. They feel that hiring an outside salesperson to pound the pavement and the phones is the surest way. Sooner or later, someone is bound to be in the market for what they’re selling and they’ll be in the right place at the right time to make a sale. It could take 10 cold calls to get a meeting or it could take 50. Once they get a meeting, how much time will it take to convince the prospect that they need the service? And then, that they’re the best company to offer it?more

One of the biggest usability problems I've run into when viewing sites that are not properly optimized for mobile is forms. They can look terrible, be incredibly difficult to use and are something to be avoided at all costs. Let's be honest, forms are generally cumbersome to use on desktop. They always have been. All of these flaws are amplified when you cram them into a 3.5 inch screen. So what can we do to make the experience better? Last month, I attended a workshop at An Event Apart Chicago, put on by Luke Wroblewski. He had some really great ideas on web form usability -- especially in the mobile context. The workshop really got me thinking about all the things we could be doing to create better experiences. So, with some inspirate from Luke, here are several things we can do right now to create them.more

One of PHP's strengths that I like the most is its versatility as a prototyping language. While the venerable MVC and friends are important in a large project with a lifespan measured in years, sometimes you just need to jot up a quick utility script or internal tool. In these cases, PHP's global context and loose typing really shine as you can mash everything into one sloppy file to start with, then gradually refactor logic out into functions and includes. That said, I've never liked mixing languages in the same file. scans pretty easily, but any more complicated than that and it gets pretty unreadable pretty quickly. It can also do a real number on syntax highlighters, which makes debugging a painful process. For generating well-formed XML of any dialect, you can't get much more thorough than PHP's built-in DOM implementation but there's nothing concise about it, and I'm trying to be fast, here.more

I received a cryptic message from Eric Patterson, one of our Software Engineers today. He pointed me to a javascript error report that he noticed while trolling through them and eating lunch.more

If you're a Web Developer or Designer, you probably hear about Interaction Design all the time these days. I hear it a lot at work. After a bit of reflection, a lot of Web Designers would probably say "I already do that." Others might be intimidated by the term, confused about what Interaction Design actually means as it pertains to their job. And that's the thing. Interaction Design applies to all sorts of things, not just Web Development. Interaction Design is about understanding the behavior of people and how they use your product. Although its sort of a buzzword that's popped up in recent years, Interaction Design has always been a component of good Web Design. As our technology becomes more advanced, so do the interfaces and experiences we can dream up and bring to life. Interaction Design is a bigger component of Web Design now because we are viewing our content on laptops, smart phones, tablets, televisions and all kinds of other devices. Those are all unique experiences and we have some great tools at our fingertips to make each of them great.more

Let's face it, SEO (search engine optimization), or SEM (search engine marketing), can be elusive terminology. What is it? What does it mean? Who can do it? How hard is it to learn? Can I do it myself? In an age where information is just a Google search away, we can learn about anything, anytime, from nearly anywhere. SEO/SEM is no different - anyone can learn how to do it, much like you can learn how to do lots of new things by researching online. You can learn how to repair a clothes dryer, install a door, build a website and much, much more. Not that you’d want to take those things on yourself. But, how does the quality of the work compare with professionals? The role of an SEO "professional" changes constantly. While your company may be interested in SEO for your website, you're really interested in online success. Marketing the site, or optimizing it for the search engines, includes a lot of different elements like content, page structure, inbound links, social media connections and much more. Search engine algorithms have nearly or over 200 different elements.more

Every once in a while, I look at the date and wonder how fifteen years have passed since I graduated high school. Looking back at those four adolescent years, they feel more like four decades. It is crazy to experience the speed of life. The software we build wonders the same thing. Has it really been seven years since that website was built? Wasn’t it just yesterday that Ajax was the thing of the future, and IE 7 was the greatest step forward in Internet history (ok, maybe that was never the case). Time and Technology stop for no man, and it certainly does not stop for the applications we build. So what can we do to keep them fresh and healthy? It’s not so different from the additional exercise, better diet, and regular checkups that we do for ourselves. In the case of technology, the key is to keep up on blogs, product releases, and to continue to use the application so you can understand its needs.more

If you’ve ever had to buy a new computer or laptop, then you’ve probably been bombarded with acronyms and metrics that may not be familiar to you. RAM, HDD, CPU; the list could go on and on. Now, salesmen X at computer retailer Y will try to sell you the best so that his commission can buy little Joey a new Xbox. But let’s break down what each of these measurements are, what they mean, and how much you should have.more

I was having a discussion about great literature the other day, and something that was said struck me as very applicable to software development.more

Request.URL can be used in .NET to get the value that the web browser used to access a page. However, there are many different properties to choose from, and sometimes it is difficult to know which property to use.more

Back in February, we were buried under a mountain of work. It’s not a bad problem to have, but it sure made for quite the logistical nightmare. It was not easy to schedule dozens of projects for dozens of team members and still make sure we hit our deadlines.more

Have you ever attempted to work on a Microsoft Word document with friends? You created the document, emailed it to six friends, and suddenly found yourself struggling to merge all of the different changes that came back to you.more

I've tested all this on IE9, Chrome 19, Safari 5 and Firefox 12. Your mileage will vary for earlier browsers, especially earlier Internet Explorers. If you're targeting IE < 9 I'd recommend taking a long look at Peter-Paul Koch's compatibility tables to watch out for potential landmines.more

Have you ever had a house built, or an addition added to your house? Did it go like this? ***** “Good day, Mr. Architectman, I would like you to build a home for me,” Chris VonClient said. “I would be happy to help, Chris. How big do you want the house to be?” Andy Architectman responded, tilting his head to the right so that he could hear Chris better. “I was thinking we needed three bedrooms and two bathrooms. So I don’t know, two thousand square feet?” Chris was not really sure what he wanted, but he had a vague picture in his mind. “Two thousand square feet, eh? Hmm. Yes. I can see it now. That’s enough for a big kitchen, vaulted ceilings, a den in the basement, a living room upstairs. Wait, you do want a basement, right?” “Oh, that’s a great idea, Mr. Architectman. A basement is just what we need!” Chris was excited. He could see the house better already. “Alright then. We can get started next week. How’s $150,000 sound and we’ll be done by September?” Andy was quite sure he knew exactly what Chris wanted. “Perfect! Thanks Mr. Architectman!” *****more

Do you know what front-end programmers dream about? It is not an answer to the national debt, or if Democrats and Republicans can get along, or even if there is life on other planets. No, front-end programmers dream of something that seems entirely more difficult to attain. A front-end programmer wants a world where they can do their work one time and be done. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? Most of us go through life completing a task and knowing that having completed the task, there is nothing more to do.more

I recently had a client ask me if developing a mobile application would help them with their SEO and search engine ranking. I love the question, so I thought I would write a quick post on it. From an SEO perspective, an app actually COULD influence ranking, but not how you might think initially.more

I recently came across a problem in an ASP.NET MVC Web Application where it needed to upload an image with some extra form fields, but still have the controller’s post action testable. This seemed like an easy enough task, but I soon realized that in order to get the uploaded file from the view I had to grab it from the request object’s files collection. Doing this would make my testing harder, and, more drastically, decouple this action from the view model. I scoured the Internet to find out why the magic behind binding the view model to the controller would not put the posted file in an argument alongside my strongly typed model. After coming to the conclusion that no direct articles or examples with my scenario existed, I turned to learning more about the binding that was taking place behind the scenes.more

Last year I had a few rooms in my house repainted. In order to determine which company I would use for the work, I invited them to the house to quote the work. I showed them the rooms, told them the type of paint and color I wanted, and told them when I wanted the work done by. Each company was able to calculate the amount of paint they needed, the cost of the paint and how many people would need to work on the project in order to have it done by my deadline. Having painted a multitude of rooms before my request, they were able to imagine potential obstacles before they happened and be fairly sure that they were not missing anything in their quote. The resulting quotes were very precise and given to me with a high degree of confidence.more

It’s 2012. Is this the year your website will work as hard as you do? A well-planned, thoughtfully designed website that positions your business to grow like crazy using the power of the Web isn’t cheap. For a business owner or manager, it can be difficult to know just when to approve the investment in a new website. Below are some thought starters on when to pony-up.more

So you've built a groundbreaking mobile app in the "virtual farting" genre or a great mobile website. You're hoping people will check it out. You've built it, but how do you know if they will come? Traditional Web analytics will sometimes work on mobile sites, but they are not always ideal. A more mobile-centric approach to analytics may sometimes be necessary. It really depends on how large your mobile audience is. But how will you ever find that out without mobile analytics? Here are six solutions to mobile analytics for your mobile website or mobile app. Spend some time reviewing each one to make sure it fits your needs. I'm not endorsing them so much as compiling them here in this article as a quick round-up of the major players in mobile analytics. In fact, the descriptions below each one are basically marketing copy pulled from their respective sites.more