“Making the simple complicated is commonplace,” said jazz composer and bassist Charles Mingus, ” but making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”
It sounds like I’m selling usability when I talk about the return on investment that applied usability can bring to a project. But it’s a fact that research has shown again and again. An [...]

Why buy the milk when you can rent the cow? Many businesses find that software subscriptions may be more economical and efficient than endless cycles of software purchases, upgrades and customization. 
Only a few years ago, most businesses felt the pain of being software licensees. The cycle went something like this: 

Issue an RFP, then pay big [...]

Here are 5 quick tips on naming your business, from the experts at BrandNewPerfect.Name:
1. We want the perfect domain name.
In the beginning, everyone pined over what seemed to be the perfect domain names – the obvious ones like realestate.com, entertainment.com and internet.com (how would you like to own the ‘internet’?). Then some creative upstarts such [...]

Establishing a Web Governance model can be daunting and fraught with internal politics and maneuvering. Once a major Website project is in operational or “steady state” mode, a governance model for content management should also be part of your overall Web strategy and governance planning.
For the operational side of Web governance, the following three models are compared [...]

When developing content, all design elements must be considered: editorial, interactive, visual and accessible. This chart graphically illustrates and elaborates on each of four elements:

When most businesses hear about the rise of social media – i.e. blogging, podcasting, social networks such as Facebook – their reactions can be paraphrased as “Interesting, but how is that going to help our business?” or “I don’t want my employees wasting their time socializing on the Web.”
With social media, the emphasis is on [...]

With apologies to Jakob Nielsen’s Top Ten, here are the Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design, from someone who has worked as a Web Manager and Web Strategist for many years:
1. The Web Strategy doesn’t follow the Business Strategy.
Whether you’re designing for a Fortune 1000 corporation, a SOHO business, a government agency or a non-profit, [...]

(click on thumbnail image above to view full size diagram)

Normally I advise Web Managers not to create new sites with new domain names just because they think it’s the only way to promote new content. You have to be able to rely on your homepage to feature new content, and if your homepage doesn’t change enough, your users may become afflicted with the “Watching [...]

In determining site navigation options for Web sites, many Web administrators/developers are satisfied to offer several navigation options to people (e.g. site search + menus + static links) as well as redundant navigation methods (allowing users to choose several ways to arrive at the same content).
However, most people use more than one navigation choice during [...]

Web analytics practices for intranets are fundamentally different than those applied to Internet sites. Internet analytics ask: Who is using the site? What days of the week and what hours of the day receive the most traffic? What browsers are people using when they visit the site? Why are people visiting the site? With intranets, [...]

Most Web sites would receive a failing grade when it comes to providing transparent, comprehensive and responsive “contact” content.
When Web customers click on a link, that’s an interaction, but when they submit a contact request, that’s a transaction of information – they’re send you their personal “content” and expecting the site to respond accordingly. They’re [...]

Many Corporate Web sites are developed before the owning organization has signed off on a Corporate Web Strategy, which should act as the governing document for all Internet-driven initiatives.
If Web development isn’t driven by an alignment of sustainable technology, user-driven content and business-driven goals, the corporate Web presence will either fail to meet your business [...]

In January, 2004, I was asked to speak at IQPC’s Content Week conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. The following column is based on my presentation from that event.
You take your car into the shop every couple of years to get its front end aligned every couple of years, so why not do the same for [...]

A new IBM research report suggests that the best analogies for businesses in the future may no longer be the command structures of the military but the self-organising networks found in nature: schools of fish, flocks of birds and swarms of insects. This research, contained in The IBM Global Innovation Outlook 2.0 Report, reinforces Bioteam [...]

Most Web sites receive a failing grade when it comes to providing transparent, comprehensive and responsive “contact” content.  
When Web customers click on a link, that’s an interaction, but when they submit a contact request, that’s a transaction of information – they’re send you their personal “content” and expecting the site to respond accordingly. They’re sharing [...]

Ann, can you tell us briefly about your professional background, and what led you to co-writing Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy?
I have been developing unified content strategies for about 15 years and working with content management systems for about the same period of time. The unified content strategy came about as I realized [...]