Fresh

Three years ago I began working on websites as a young account coordinator/project manager. I did not understand what CMS (that’s Content Management System for you kids at home) stood for or let alone what the difference was between open source and proprietary software. But, that didn’t matter because clients wanted a way to update their content that didn’t involve them taking classes at community college. Back in those days eROI had three CMS options to offer:

Marqui – A hosted proprietary system, which wasn’t terrible, but definitely was not worth the money and developing for it seemed to be a pain. I averaged 10 calls a month from two sites that had been live for years.

CMS/MS – An open source solution that served the purpose of a basic CMS with the best price around (FREE!). The only problem was that it was difficult to use from an Admin perspective, and was not as flexible for developers to be a truly powerful CMS.

Contribute – A trimmed down version of Dreamweaver by Adobe sold on Amazon and came in a real box. I won’t go into those forgotten nightmares too deeply, but let’s just say the software in the box had about as much value as an old AOL CD. The amount of time wasted trying to get this software to function as it was billed to could have been used to go to Mars by now.

Having had clients on all of these systems made me completely hate CMS systems. (more…)

In this years’ election the Internet played a new, critical role in politics that gave us a glimpse at what’s to come and the future of the World Wide Web as a multi-functional tool that has already been used to accomplish everything from organizing grass-roots campaign efforts, raising campaign funds, creating discussion boards, inspiring countless blogs to becoming the constant face of a whole campaign.

The key word here is constant. Anyone at anytime could go to a candidates website and learn their views on the issues and how they plan to deal with them. They were taking advantage of higher bandwidths to show video and audio clips of rallies, speeches and even supporters’ home videos.

They were also taking full advantage of the e-commerce aspects of the web by not only offering sections to donate to the campaigns but also pages to buy t-shirts, buttons, coffee mugs and signs. The Obama-Biden site even has selected products for sale directly on the home page.

A major difference in their e-commerce sections was the user experience. Once in the McCain-Palin store each section takes you to a different looking third party e-com site that doesn’t even attempt to carry over any design or feel from the home site. This is in stark contrast to the Obama-Biden store experience that was fluid and consistent with no disconnect as the store carries every aspect of the design into their e-commerce interface.

Obama’s Store Page               Mccain’s Store Page

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Recently I was on the lookout for an easy way for clients to resize images prior to uploading them to their WordPress blog.  I had already used up the handy ‘thumbnail’ and ‘medium’ sizing rules built into WordPress, and was needing to resize the original to a maximum width or height of 600 pixels.  A quick search for plugins to do this for me failed, and I quickly decided I didn’t have the time or knowledge to whip up some server-side resizing code for myself.

So resizing images before uploading needed to be a part of the process of adding new content to the website.  From past experiences I know that just instructing a blogger or webmaster to ‘resize your image to 600 pixels wide’ is not necessarily enough to get them going, if they are not well-versed in the ways of image editing.  Even if they can take the red-eye out of their family photos in Photoshop, that doesn’t mean they know how to prepare an image for web.  When they upload their vacation pics to Flickr, it does all the resizing and prep work for them.  But we’re not developing Flickr-level apps over here. (Yet, anyway.)

So how to simplify this whole process so that it creates the least amount of frustration and confusion?

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