The site connects to a proprietary inventory management platform, but most of the heavy lifting for the catalog and content pages are built on the Symfony PHP framework. It also integrates with the content management system provided by Nashville-based SiteMason.

Check out the site at NashvilleOfficeFurniture.com.

With all of that information, managing the taxonomy terms and categories could easily get out of hand. Working with his staff, we created a Symfony module dubbed “HyperWords” (the name is a work in progress) that scans the page content and recommends the appropriate taxonomy. Now, when a new page is created, it suggests to the author relevant categories and tags.

The new site is easy for prospective clients to navigate thanks to a clear strategy and professional design. The site is also easy for Dr. Biesman’s staff to manage thanks to innovations like HyperWords. We call that more than just a facelift.

Visit the site at http://www.drbiesman.com.

Being a lady who loves clothes, makeup, general online shopping … and GOOD DEALS, I find myself signing up for these things all the time (hang in there, boys, we’re getting to the techie/strategy stuff momentarily). In fact, there are so many ladies like me out there, that designer discount collective sites have started popping up everywhere. They package themselves as “invite-only” and spread by incentivized referrals and word of mouth. Sites like ShopItToMe.com, GiltGroupe.com are some examples. I get … well, I GOT emails from both of these sites, and a few others, at least once a week, if not more up until a few months back when I found out that I’m going to have a baby, realized that a waistline and online clothes shopping would likely be distant memories for at least 9 months, and started hitting those unsubscribe buttons.

It was when I encountered the ShopItToMe.com unsubscribe page that I saw something that made me NOT unsubscribe … and instead, take note for my strategy clients. Too many times, when we are dealing with customers on and offline, we give them options in black and white – yes or no. Either you want this, or you don’t want it. If you don’t want it, you’re no longer a prospective customer … if you do want it, you’re in. When it comes to email lists, which are becoming more and more specialized, we have the ability to give our clients more options. It’s about time that we actually started doing this.

ShopItToMe.com has the right idea. I clicked on that “unsubscribe” button and was presented with a few options for altering my email subscription in addition to just plain unsubscribing. The ShopItToMe.com email gurus examined every possible reason why I might be seeking to unsubscribe from their email list and presented alternatives for me to customize my subscription accordingly. It was not black or white / yes or no … not even shades of gray. I had a regular color wheel of options to choose from to customize my email subscription to fit changes in my lifestyle or email reading habits.

Their options included:
Take a Temporary Break – “We know you’re busy. Take a breather! We won’t come back ’til you tell us to.” Then, you choose a date in the future when your subscription will re-activate.

Make SaleMail More Affordable – “Set a maximum price. How about $100?” Then, you choose a maximum price point for the items that show up in your email. This allows you to customize the products being shown to you to more realistically fit your budget.

Receive Email Less Often – “How does one Salemail a week sound?” You choose how often you’d like to receive the newsletter. It’s as simple as that.

If none of these options satisfied me, and I still wished to unsubscribe, they said they’d miss me and asked for me to share with them why I was unsubscribing (at my option, of course).

Being that I was unsubscribing because I wouldn’t have a waistline for the next 9 months, I selected an option to simply suspend my subscription for 9 months instead of unsubscribing altogether. I came away with an appreciation for how consumer-focused ShopItToMe.com was, and how they presented me with an option for relating to me on my terms in away that suits where I am in my personal circumstances.

Consumer-focused organizations should take note. Customers may have a variety of different reasons why they may cease engaging with your products and services. When forming a strategy for leveraging the internet to better relate to your customers, take advantage of the many different options for customizing electronic communications. Pay attention to your opt-out rates and Twitter un-follows. Use your observations to examine what might be causing your customers to lose interest and examine ways to improve upon the way that you relate to your customers where they are in their life circumstances. Think of beefing up your e-communication options as comparable providing a customer service team with additional training. It could ultimately lead to higher customer satisfaction and retention. And we all know that happy and plentiful customers make for a positive bottom line.

fontcapture
http://www.fontcapture.com/
Create a font from your own handwriting. No software required. All you need is a printer and a scanner – and it’s free!

Gliffy
http://www.gliffy.com
With Gliffy online diagram software, you can easily create professional-quality flowcharts, diagrams, floor plans, technical drawings, wireframes, and more.

HTML to PDF
http://www.htm2pdf.co.uk/
Free online tool that allows you to convert HTML to PDF. Also includes a free “save as PDF” option for websites.

Thinkature
http://thinkature.com/
Real-time collaboration/virtual team workspace for the web.

MyStickies
http://www.mystickies.com/
Sticky notes for the web. They let you save the web for later – like bookmarks on steroids.

feedly
http://www.feedly.com/
feedly organizes your favorite sites into a fun, magazine-like start page.

Adobe Browserlab
https://browserlab.adobe.com
An easier, faster solution for cross-browser testing.
Preview and test your web pages on leading browsers and operating systems – on demand.

Fliggo
http://www.fliggo.com/
Build a video blog, the next YouTube, or just a private place to share videos … in seconds.

CentreSource is proud to announce that two of our own have been nominated for awards! CEO, Nicholas Holland, has been nominated as a candidate for the Lifetime Achievement Award (sponsored by ComFrame Software Corporation). And Director of Technology, Chip Hayner, has been nominated for Software Programmer / Engineer of the year.

The winners for the awards will be announced at the “Feel the Beat” Technology Awards Gala on October 27th from 5:30pm – 8:00pm at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center.

Click here for registration information.

Go Nick and Chip!!

Kanye has already chimed in to share his thoughts.

Hehe.

ClickTale is a monitoring service that “delivers innovative In-Page Web Analytics that reveal the mystery of what visitors actually do inside website pages, allowing you to analyze and optimize website performance and usability.” Not only does it track visits and clicks, but it visibly records a user’s mouse movements on each screen during a visit. You can actually click “play” and sit back and spy on someone’s actions during a visit.

Initially, we set up ClickTale to monitor users habits on our SEM landing pages to ensure that we’d been accurately predicting the amount of time that a user would devote to the text area vs. a portfolio gallery vs. a conversion contact form. Here are some of the interesting observations that we made:

• Users were not clicking around in our landing page portfolio slideshow as much as expected.
• Users were not clicking on our contact form “Discuss Your Project” button very frequently. When they did, they almost immediately left.
• We this text on our homepage that says ““…inviting you to think bigger about what interactive can do for your organization.” The “bigger” and “interactive” words are highlighted in green…and people think they’re links! We had no idea.
• Users were actually reading the text on our landing pages, but were not inspired to reach out to contact us immediately.

After making these observations, here are some of the resulting decisions that were made:

• Contact forms would be placed directly into pages whenever possible instead of being a click away.
• We’d take advantage of the opportunity to make different colored text exist as easter egg links…to capture every click possible.
• We’d take steps to make our content text more actionable and inspiring.
• People like both images of and talk about our work. We’d make sure to feature our portfolio images as much as we feature ourselves talking about how great our work is.

When the new centresource.com strategy came about, the visitor habits observed in our ClickTale monitoring helped us to make key decisions about where and how to feature items within the new centresource.com. Be sure to keep that in mind when checking out the new site in the not toooo distant future!

Side Note: ClickTale has a free temporary trial available. I’d wholeheartedly suggest that anyone interested go try it out. It’s quite fun to watch what people do when visiting your site. If you are considering a site revamp and want an expert to help you make your ClickTale observations actionable, give me a call. I’d love to help you spy on your visitors! 615-313-7679 x125

January’s mixer proved to be a great success with over 100 attendees from various competing and complimentary firms, independent graphic designers and developers, and local tech enthusiasts. So successful, in fact, that we simply could not get people to leave! The centre{source} office, alone, proved to be a warm and inviting atmosphere for the event, and the added incentive of a networking competition for the Golden Kraut and Sivlery Beans Awards created an energy for the event that fueled repeat attendance for months to come.

For the past few months, we have seen many regulars showing up to partake in complimentary kegs of Yazoo, wine, gourmet cupcakes and munchies, and invaluable networking opportunities. Beyond the “repeat offenders,” we have welcomed many new faces from the local neighborhoods of Germantown, Salemtown, and Hope Gardens; newly unemployed job seekers coming out to share calling cards; friends and family members of c{s} employees; satisfied c{s} clients; and even a rare guest appearance from the newest member to our team, Brayden Holland, born to Nick and Brandi in February.

Each mixer has incorporated traditional interactive activities of hands-on competition through trivia, meet and greet score sheets, and coin hunts in competition for the coveted Golden Kraut and Silvery Beans Awards. Additionally, more “techie” interactive features have been utilized like wirelessly networked music throughout the house and live updating Twitter feeds using the #csmixer hashtag showing on big screens. More recently, the newly launched iPhone/iTouch application GPSAssassin has been a big hit, where people attempt to assassinate one another through GPS location used in the game.

With the advent of Spring and Summer weather, these mixers are sure to continue to grow in attendance, further solidifying the event as a staple of the local Interactive Community providing valuable networking opportunities and general camaraderie for anyone wishing to partake.

We hope to see you out at the next mixer! Bring a friend.

Can dogs eat pears?

Why doesn’t H&M sell clothes online?

Can you bring your own alcohol on a cruise ship?

I love Yahoo! Answers. If I have a question, someone there has already asked it… And more than likely, someone else has already answered.

I cannot imagine the number of minutes and hours I have saved customer service representatives by consulting with others on Yahoo! Answers to give my questions answers before sending an email or making a phone call. Sure, the answers are not always accurate, but knowledge is power and there is power in numbers.

It’s a two-way street. I’m saving customer service time and energy, and I’m getting sufficiently semi-accurate answers to my questions without having to listen to elevator music.

Now, the real question here is, “What does this have to do with building web sites for c{s} clients?” More than you would think! It’s becoming increasingly popular to recreate the Yahoo! Answers model within corporate web sites.

Real-world scenario: You have a question about how to import phone numbers from your iPhone to your Prius via Bluetooth. You decide to go to Apple.com to just schedule an appointment with the Genius Bar. Before scheduling, you hunt around the site for answers and discover not just an FAQ section, but an entire customer to customer help system! Chances are, you’re going to find the answer to your question here. If not, you’re free to go ahead and post the question. You will likely receive a few possible answers and make some new friends before your Genius Bar appointment on Saturday at 7am. You’re happy. Apple is happy that they just avoided you.

Apple is unique. Their lifestyle-permeating products cultivate customers who enjoy providing answers to others with no evident reward beyond the satisfaction of shared knowledge. Not many companies are blessed with such dedicated customers. Taking the Apple.com customer-to-customer model a few steps further in the Yahoo! Answers direction, a Q/A system can involve call and response credits. This inspires users to answer each other’s questions in order to earn the ability to ask a question. This is precisely how Yahoo! Answers built up such an active body of users sharing an incredible wealth of knowledge (and lack, thereof)!

Dunder Mifflin is not the best fit. Much like creating a social network, this is not suited for every company. Here are some key questions to ask when evaluating whether or not the Yahoo! Answers model would be a good fit for your company:

1. Do my customers consider my product or service to be a part of their lifestyle?

2. Do we get a high volume of customer service inquiries?

3. If we have a message board on our company site, is it very active?

4. Do my customers have more than just one or two questions about interacting with my products throughout the course of our relationship?

5. Do my customers have things in common with each other?

If you can answer “Yes” to all of these questions, your company would likely be a good fit for a Q/A system modeled after Yahoo! Answers.

AND you’d be a great fit for centre{source}… Call me, we’ll chat!

And we’re in great company – we share the list with a number of our clients, including eMids Technologies and VACO. Congratulations to all the other 49 companies on the list, and thanks to the whole centre{source} team for making this honor possible.