The Black Hole of the SEO World

White and black has always represented two sides to something—yin and yang, Spy vs. Spy, Oreo’s. As with the rest of the world, there are two distinct sides to search engine optimization (SEO), white hat and black hat. White hat tactics follow the rules put in place by the search engines to rank better, whereas black hat tactics try to fool the search engine. Where there is good there will always be evil, and this evil’s name is black hat.

Search engines put these rules in place early on to combat the number of spammers out there and create a more user-friendly experience by increasing the quality of the search result. Since search engines know it is generally in human nature to lie, cheat and steal, they started penalizing those for doing the same with SEO and “black hat” tactics.

A Major Innovation in Mobile Prototyping

It’s no secret that prototyping mobile applications is hard. HTML5 doesn’t really provide a great facsimile for native apps—you just don’t get the responsiveness or layout that makes you want to develop native in the first place—and a lot of tools that are great for web functional prototypes, like our much beloved Axure RP, are not necessarily ideal for prototyping native mobile applications depending on the UI complexity. We, here at ThoughtMatrix, are huge fans of Axure which is not going to change anytime soon, but we do realize its limitations for certain types of applications.

Using Salesforce for Authentication

Recently, a WordPress-based web portal was built for a technology company to serve the needs of several thousand partners and resellers worldwide, which included providing access to confidential documents for registered users. The new portal replaced a very basic site they had built using Salesforce’s “Partner Portal” offering. As such, we had to evaluate the options for logins to the new WordPress site:

LinkedIn Performs Last Rites for HTML5 Mobile App Development

We experienced quite the extraordinary turn of events this past week, though not entirely surprising to those up on industry trends. Simply put, LinkedIn—the company who just last year espoused how HTML5 client development was still extremely relevant—released a major new update to their application and without any forewarning quietly let it slip that they have moved from a hybrid application to an all native design.

Who’s Qualifying Whom?

Having started my career in sales and attending countless sales training courses and seminars, there’s one thing that was engrained in my thinking for the better part of 20 years—“Sales is a process, regardless of which of the many ‘proven approaches’ you follow, and following a defined process will equal success.” Each of these processes shared one thing in common—they were all linear. One of the first steps in each process was learning how to qualify a customer. If they’re not qualified when you meet them, either move on or find a way to present something to them that would move them into a qualification phase.

No matter how you looked at it, the salesperson was responsible for capturing a potential customer early in their buying cycle and moving them through the proverbial funnel. Every company and executive sales leader subscribed to some sort of sales and marketing funnel.

SDL Tridion – 2013

A couple of days ago, I attended the 2013 SDL Tridion Bootcamp conducted by Mihai Cadariu and Alvin Reyes. Some pretty exciting stuff, and it just so happens the new 2013 version is being released today!

Mobile App Development – Native vs. Cross-Platform

Given the current proliferation of mobile touchpoints, we are often tasked with helping clients create mobile roadmaps and strategies. Inevitably, we are asked if there is a way to build content or functionality once and deploy it on a variety of different mobile platforms. The answer, of course, is yes. In fact, there are several ways, and the benefits of doing so vary from a more streamlined development process to higher adoption rates to lower costs. However, when is the right time to use cross-platform solution? What kind of requirements lend themselves to this simpler approach? When is the cross-platform approach actually simpler than developing for native applications?

Patagonia’s Long View of Content Marketing

Patagonia’s content marketing strategy is the kind of thing we are always gabbing about at our industry events and the like. It’s easy to reference and they’ve been doing a great job for a long time, particularly in the digital space.  Giselle Abramovich, from Digiday put out a great piece on them last week that made me think about how we can learn from Patagonia’s insights. It’s a great article, not very long and worth a read if you have the time. To me, the quotes from Bill Boland, Patagonia’s Digital Creative Director are the most interesting part of the article because they are so clear and insightful.

“Our content stays away from the hard sell,” said Bill Boland, Patagonia’s digital creative director. “But we are finding that our customers are interested in talking about our products.

Aggregate This! Feedly and Flipboard Concisely Consolidate Content

I may be a bit of a creature of habit; I tend to do about three things when I use my smartphone—email, then over to Facebook and then maybe check stocks or an ESPN app to check scores, but that sadly feels like the extent of it. Oh, I’m sure I do other things here and there that make smartphone ownership great; I use maps when I’m lost, Yelp when I’m hungry, Google Voice for texting and Evernote. Yet, rarely do I go out of the way to read news and fun content on my phone because it usually requires a lot of slow loading, phone turning, pinching and zooming.

Always Test! Have You Considered Remote Testing?

At ThoughtMatrix, we believe usability testing should be done early and often. Not only are well-tested sites and applications better from a user-experience standpoint, they save on support, re-design and re-development costs.  One drawback however is the considerable time, effort and dollars often associated with testing. A great way to alleviate this resource burden is by utilizing remote testing. Remote testing uses many of the same methods of data collection and reporting you would use in a lab setting but does so more efficiently and often more effectively.