Upgrading Your Social Media Presence

If your social media strategy is limited to a Facebook page and/or some occasional Twitter posts, you are missing out on some great opportunities to interact with current and potential customers. Like everything else on the Web, social media is best when used interactively: it should be a two-way dialog between your organization and your customers. The better and more effective that dialog, the better your results in social media will be. Let’s take a look at a few things you can do to enhance your social media presence.

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How To Recuit (And Keep) The Best Developers

The quality of your development talent can make or break the success of your interactive project(s). Outstanding developers not only do great work, they tend to see possibilities for the project you may not have considered; and they also develop in a way that allows for greater extensibility down the road. In other words, great developers may cost a bit more, but they can both increase the potential income for a project, and reduce the long-term costs of development.

Obviously, salary is a motivator. Like anyone else, developers have egos and bills to pay, and a high salary helps with both. Paying a high salary to a mediocre or even average developer can be a sinkhole. But paying a high salary to a highly-skilled developer is truly an investment in the long-term success of your organization.

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Sites vs. Applications: Management Differences

In the early days, the only thing being built on the Web were sites. Web sites are information-oriented. Their goal is to present a specific type of information to a specific type of audience. These types of sites are usually relatively static: the information being presented doesn’t change much, and stays mostly the same no matter who is viewing it, or when.

Increasingly, however, the Web is being dominated by applications. Applications are based on functionality. With applications, the information displayed is highly dynamic and often dependent on multiple factors. Even projects which appear to be Web sites are in many cases applications. Is your site running on a content management system? Then it probably has a great many application-like features, and the administration area of your CMS is definitely an application.

Managing a Web application is much different than managing a site. It involves more complexity and requires more planning. Let’s take a look at some key differences between the two:

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The Shift to Client-Based Development

There’s a profound shift in progress in the development of interactive media, and it’s not the mobile/tablet revolution, although it’s tangential to that. No, the shift I’m talking about is from server-focused to client-based development.

What does that mean? In the “old” days, most of the work in generating a Web page was done at the server level. When you accessed a page, you sent a request to the Web server. The web server figured out what information you were seeking, then it formed the HTML that would present that information to you, and then it sent all of that back to your browser.

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