Host: CentreSource Interactive Agency (Hey! That’s us!)
What: February 2010 Interactive Mixer
When: 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday, February 25th, 2010

Where:
CentreSource’s North Fourth Office
1313 4th Ave N
Nashville,TN 37208

To RSVP, visit mixer.centresource.com.

1. The first step is to consider the nature of your website. Is it merely a “static” HTML/CSS website with no dynamic data? If not, does it use a database of any kind? How/where does that database store its data? Lastly, does your website include the storage of a large number of files (multimedia, documents, etc)? And if so, are these crucial to the operation of your website?
2. Next, how much data can you afford to lose? Of course, no one likes to think or talk about losing data, but any solution is a compromise between resources you’re willing to pay for and the amount of data that’s guaranteed protection. This “amount” is typically/best measured in time. Any backup solution will capture “snapshots” of your website — copies of the data at a certain point in time — that will vary anywhere from “realtime” to hours or days since the last snapshot was made. If you cannot afford to lose any data, then a realtime backup solution is the only option. These solutions will do their best to use a program running non-stop in the background making a backup (somewhere) of your data. If the answer is “some” — then you just make a determination of what your acceptable loss is. Is it a day? A week? 6 hours?
3. The second “time” factor is the time-to-restore. How much time is acceptable to go from a catastrophic failure to a complete restore of your website functionality? This time is determined by many things in addition to the actual type of backup you have, including the type of webhosting you have, and the form of the failure. If you host your website on a VPS (”Virtual Private Server”), for example — and this VPS was backed-up in its entirity on a regular basis — then restoring is as simple as copying over the VPS backup and restarting it to that point. If your website has a more complicated architecture (multiple frontend webservers and multiple databases, for example), then the restore process is likely to be a more lengthy ordeal of reconfiguring the servers ahead of time before any data is put back in place.
4. Where is the data backed up? It should be obvious that the best backup is to a location that is physically separate from where your website is hosted. This is not an absolute (in fact it’s quite relative — is another server rack in the same datacenter “off-site”? What about a different datacenter owned by the same company and on the same network?), but in general you should attempt to distance your data from the potential points of failure: fires, tornadoes, hosting company incompetence, nuclear strikes — you name it.
5. Can you test the restore functionality regularly? This is a factor of cost, to some extent, and also practicality. If you opted for any backup solution other than “realtime”, you’ve decided on an acceptable level of data (time) loss — so testing a full restore right to production is not advisable, since you’d lose data. But working with your hosting/backup vendor to verify the backup, and maybe test a restore to another location are things you should pursue, if possible.

These are all important questions that you need to ask of yourself, and also of your web hosting vendor and your web developer. Together, you can decide on a backup solution that makes sense for your website. That said, what kind of solutions are there? This is not a comprehensive list, but it’s a general summary of the types of ways you can guarantee continuity of your website. Interestingly, computing/server technology has come a long way in the last couple of years. Virtualization and cloud competing have blurred the lines between continuity, load-balancing, and backup. After all, if your website is running on a virtual server in the cloud, data loss is impossible, right? Well, no, not really.

• VPS (Virtual Private Servers) – as mentioned above, a VPS can be a good way of assuring a very quick time from hardware failure to restoration. A VPS is a “server” that is entirely self-contained and run in a “virtual” environment. This means that your server itself is essentially a file or files that can be copied (regularly, or realtime) to any other backup medium for later restoration. Typically, most hosting providers that offer hosting on a VPS will also offer a backup service that makes restoration of your VPS a cinch. The above questions, however, are still quite pertinent and should be asked: How often do they backup the VPS? How quickly can they restore? Some hosting vendors host their VPS on a “cloud” server architecture which makes hardware failure a nearly negligible factor. However, you should still consider how much you trust the competence of your hosting vendor and explore the option of backing up your data somewhere else independent of the VPS itself. Many other things can go wrong — virtualization software failure, data corruption, etc. These things can all leave your virtual server inoperable or unsalvageable.
• Backup “daemons” – “daemon” is computer nerd slang for any software that runs non-stop in the background. There are many common backup solutions that use a daemon running in the background to persistently backup your website and its data. Typically, this sort of solution is what’s required for a “realtime” backup of your data. Most hosting vendors that host larger dedicated managed server environments will have some offering in this regard.
• Scheduled backup jobs – there are a wide variety of ways this can be implemented, but loosely speaking, this is any sort of backup script/program that is merely scheduled on a regular basis (say, nightly) and involves a manual copy of the website data (files and database dump) to an arbitrary off-site location.

It’s very likely that any hosting vendor you choose will have one or more of the above options — and possibly others. But it’s not enough to simply sign-off on an arbitrary product without understanding what it does and what it guarantees. Hopefully, armed with the above questions and information, you can make the right decision about how to backup your website. In an age where a website is increasingly the face of your business, you can’t afford to leave it to chance.

Devastation. Tragedy. Hopeless. Those were the words used to describe the recent earthquakes that struck the island of Haiti on January 12 near Port-au-Prince. To a nation that that was already struggling with poverty and trying to meet the basic needs of its people, the earthquake magnified the crisis for the world to see. Like many companies in Nashville, CentreSource matched its employees’ donations to give $500 to the UNICEF organization to help with relief efforts.

Late last year, we were approached by Trinity/HOPE, a feeding program aimed at providing meals for school children and teachers so that they may be agents of positive change in their communities and help lift up a nation. Their existing Web site did not effectively tell of the mission trips, year-round campaigns and coordinated efforts of partnering organizations to sponsor schools across the island. The new site builds upon Trinity/HOPE’s reputation as a spirit-lead organization that makes a difference in the lives of Haiti’s children, one bowl of rice and beans at a time.

Visit their site at trinityhope.org.

When I realized that Pepsi was offering grant money to various non profits and community organizations instead of spending tons on Super Bowl ads I was blown away. What a great idea to both raise your brands public image and help change communities across the U.S. As an active volunteer in East Nashville through such organizations as the KIPP School, YMCA youth sports, United Way, and City Church, I thought it couldn’t hurt to apply for a cause I started about 2 years ago called Clean East.

I dream of an East Nashville with no drug paraphernalia littering the steps of our library. Where trash doesn’t blow like tumble weeds through the lawns of our schools. This is possible only through the powerful combination of community responsibility and labor. Our adults and students need to come together to own the problem and work together for the solution. Clean East will do this by organizing community ‘walks’ where every volunteer is given empty trash bags, and protective gloves. Focusing the walks Neighborhood by Neighborhood will allow us to pull in students, teachers, and parents thereby empowering the change we seek physically (beautify the streets) and mentally (community responsibility). I believe this will refresh East Nashville in a way that could impact a generation.

So that’s the story and the pitch. If you have a few minutes to vote, I would greatly appreciate it. http://www.refresheverything.com/cleaneast

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.

Ozburn-Hessey Logistics (OHL) specializes in third party logistics (3PL) services, meaning that they partner with other businesses to meet their supply chain demands on a rapidly scalable platform. Our goal for the site was to communicate nearly 60 years of experience in a way that appeals to logistics decision makers. One of the ways that we achieved this is by producing a video that you can view right on their home page. The video features two people representing very different businesses, but one shared need — a partner for their global distribution network.

The OHL Excellence and Media Center sites were created to cater to the specific needs of different segments of visitors to the site. Excellence highlights OHL’s mission and values, corporate culture and awards with which they have been honored for being a global leader in their marketplace. The Media Center serves as a central location to find out about news and events for the company.

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

What makes this site different? We had the pleasure of working with photographer Carrie Vonderhaar to really bring the nautical look and feel to the Web. Our strategy from the beginning was to let her photography shine throughout the site to help create a unique user experience. The older site lacked a CMS and was spread out over several domains. Now, updates to the latest environmental news and information comes at the click of a mouse from anywhere in the world.

The site also tracks the OFS team on their expeditions around the globe, and a new Live Events section will bring the experience right to you through an integration with Ustream. Registered members can also download ringtones and wallpapers for their mobile phones. Users that register on the site are simultaneously added and updated through the Democracy In Action’s Salsa supporter management platform.

Visit the site at http://www.oceanfutures.org

The IMA judges scored our entry in the high nineties in all five of the core criteria: Design, Content, Feature Functionality, Usability and Standards Compliance / Cross-Browser Compatibility. As if the award wasn’t enough, our fellow winners for other categories included: Coca Cola, Bacardi, Red Bull, Sony and Cisco to name a few.

We couldn’t be more proud and thankful to our clients for continuing the privilege of pushing the limits of interactive and can’t wait for the results from other awards we will enter (including the Webby’s) – wish us luck.  :)

Capping off months of on-again, off-again work (Hey, we’ve been really busy!), we are proud to announce that the new CentreSource.com is finally available to the world. The new site invites you to meet our team, learn a bit about our process, see why our clients are the best and to chat with us about your undying love of cupcakes (or anything else you want to talk about).

Have a look!