It came from topLingo's blog ...

With millions of people on the Mall today, some of you might have missed the inaugural launch of the new White House website.  From a pure design and architecture standpoint, it’s a study in how to do it right.

A few things we picked out right off: incredibly well organized content, rich media, fast loading pages, a simple email opt-in, easy site search, understated elegance.

Of course we’d expect nothing less, now that we have our first National CTO (Chief Technology Officer).

topLingo has designed over 400 custom websites. Why not yours?

Free, insanely valuable stuff should be exploited. Google’s Website Optimizer is just such a thing.  Essentially, Website Optimizer enables you to figure out what works and what doesn’t on your site.

For example, using Website Optimizer you can easily launch multiple versions of your Call to Action and see hard statistics about which one’s most effective in converting visitors to action.

Visit the Google link above or check out this 37Signals post for examples of how Website Optimizer works.

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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Try developing a custom website and you’ll see what we’re talking about. No matter what the process or methodology, somewhere in the project plan is an unwritten task that - if it were written – would say, “micacle occurs here”. That task is usually contained in the prototyping phase.

The key benefits of prototyping are: better designs, faster realization, for less money.

Prototyping takes on a lot of different forms, depending on project requirements. You’ll hear terms like wireframing, grayscale, high definition and the like. Below’s an example of a “high definition prototype” topLingo did recently for the David Textiles ecommerce site. This prototype is dynamic in the sense that it’s navigatable, that forms can be filled in, that error handling behaviors can be simulated, etc.

Many prototyping efforts don’t lend themselves to this high degree of visual definition, but in this project the artwork was already available and using it provided the team with clearer communication without slowing the development down. In the next image we jump to the live site for a quick comparison. Not apparent from these two static images, is that the rotating banner images of the live site were simulated in the prototype as well.

There’s often a tendency to skip the prototyping step - to skip, in effect,  the process where the magic occurs. Do this at your own risk.  And only if cost and time are not important elements of your project and high quality isn’t an intented outcome.

Want to know more about how prototyping can benefit your project? Contact topLingo.

The blog WebWorkerDaily posed the question, is the word “social” overused in reference to social web sites? That seemed like an interesting question to comment on, and so I did:

I’ve noticed we humans tire of words quickly and to demonstrate, here is the question, “Is Social So Over?”

I think not.

Web evolution is causing us to evolve and invent language – to create shortcuts to describe sometimes nebulous concepts. Nebulous like computing in the “Cloud” one might punningly say.

There’s a reason why Eskimos have over 30 words to describe snow. Snow is more important and ever changing in their world – as the web is in ours. They’re probably not so much tired of the word, but have found it not specific enough for many purposes.

A nice short useful word like “social” will be with us for a very long time, I’m guessing. But like Eskimos, we won’t be satisfied just to know there’s snow outside – we’ll want to know the color, texture, granularity, depth and more - and on the web, that the site is a dating site – or a social cause site – or a targeted community site like “a long haul trucker load board community site”.

Yeah, social’s a bit worn and saggy.

But still as good as snow.

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Tattoos are landing on heads at Air New Zealand.

We had a lot of fun working with Air New Zealand while developing their travel site. It’s easy to image why – just check out their recent ad campaign that rented billboard space on people’s heads.

These guys know how to shave and rock.

We have a lot to be thankful for. Besides having a really cool place to work, we have awesome clients. One in particular comes to mind, as they launch their site called APlaceToSayThankYou.com. Here’s wishing you and yours all the best from all of us here at topLingo Development.

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As 30 million members already know, LinkedIn is a serious social networking site for the business crowd. According to Quantcast, it gets about 5.5 million unique visitors a month. Barack Obama’s a member. So’s John McCain.

Members should check out today’s launch of Apps for LinkedIn. Apps is definitely the lime in LinkedIn’s coconut and includes 9 well selected applications in this first release: 

Never one to pass up a free lime, topLingo principal Mike Glezos wasted no time hitting the download buttons. He added the blog and presentation apps, which LinkedIn members can see here.

Check out more about LinkedIn Apps here.

According to this chart on TechCrunch’s CrunchBase, the number of unique visitors to topLingo has tripled, to about 3,000 per month. We think that’s a little amazing – especially this year –  and we’re pretty stoked and thankful to all of you for that!

Want more visitors? Ask us. We create traffic…the good kind™.

Recently we talked about visual searching with SearchMe.com. Now they’ve added a MUSIC tab.  A search for “Corinne Bailey Rae” returned this:

One cool thing is you get to listen to the full songs for free, right from the search results screen. And with the Stacks feature, you can save results for later listening. Want to buy something? SearchMe links to iTunes, Amazon and eBay.

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Google, MSN, Yahoo take notice. A lot of people will love this visual way to search. 

If you go to SearchMe.com and enter a search term like “food” or “chocolate” or “topLingo” you’ll get a screen like this:

SearchMe instantly presents relevant categories for the search string. For “topLingo” it presented “web development”, “advertising”, “real estate”, etc.
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Whether you just enter the search term, or refine your search by clicking a category too, what you’ll see next is a very visual results page:

We could be wrong, but we think a lot of people – like artists, photographers, creatives, and the analytically impaired – are going to love this.

Twitter’s been around since 2006, but still somewhat of an enigma to many of us. 

For the uninitiated, the one essential thing you need to know about Twitter is this: it’s another way to get you and your company noticed.  This is the sex, sizzle, and lure that draws us to it.

Twitter lets you publish and read tiny posts – up to 140 characters in length – from cell phones and computers.  Users get to set up simple profiles that are searchable by others. They also get to subscribe to (“follow” in twitter parlance) other bloggers posts. Twitter keeps a running total of how many people you’re “following” and how many are “following” you.

Who’s using it? Forrester Research Senior Analyst Jeremiah Owyang has 12,000+ followers of his “Tweets”.  Michael Arrington of TechCrunch has over 26,000. There are over 2,000,000 others in this demographic.  And in case you’re wondering how to leverage Twitter in the enterprise, check out this post by Ed Kohler about his recent experience at a conference at Best Buy’s corporate headquarters. 

Twitter tips for the first time users:

1.       Create your profile with the intended audience in mind

2.       Make posts that are relevant and interesting to that audience

3.       Develop a consistent “voice” and don’t deviate too much from it

Want more? Here’s 35 Twitter Tips from Darren Rouse at ProBlogger. Or Google twitter.  I did, and now I seriously think I’m being followed.

We’re a web development company. As you might suspect, we’re dialed into K-W-E-B nonstop. All web, all the time.

So when a new Web 2.0 application hits the net, we’re all over it like yellow on yam. Today, we’re messing with Yammer, a new Twitter-like application targeted at enterprise users who share company email addresses. 

So what is it? Where Twitter’s your personal network and answers “what are you doing”, Yammer’s your company network and answers “what are you working on”.

Say, you’re too busy (or inert or cool or what-EVER) to walk over to the next cube or office. Just browse Yammer and you’re all clued in.

Course, the real communication happens between the guitar licks when we get together for a little topLingo jam session. Sometimes we’d rather jam than yam.

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We could be talking about Ellen Page’s quirky character Juno MacGuff, but we’re not. Instead, we’re talking about Google’s new lightweight, fast, and pretty stable browser, Chrome. Currently it’s the fastest browser on the planet – by far. If you’re running a Windows PC and want to see what all the buzz is about, download a beta copy.  Then strap yourself in, sit back, and enjoy the ride.

Why Chrome and why now? The ease of downloading and setup, the lure of speed (especially with Google Apps) and the ability to gain firsthand knowledge of something everyone will be talking about for months and years to come.  To ease the transition, stored favorites and passwords can instantly be copied in from IE and Firefox. And like most of Google’s “beta” versions, it’s pretty stable.

Longer term, Chrome’s open architecture is bound to germinate a gazillion 3rd party enhancements and provide a viable alternative for business people looking to lower the cost of maintaining their desktops.

Will Microsoft take Chrome lying down?  Doubt it.  Redmond is sure to challenge Google’s plan for world dominance.

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