Social Media Etiquette

#    @    LOL ...are three of the web's most awkward phrases, according to Brenna Ehrlich and Andrea Bartz, the writers behind the sarcastic blog Stuff Hipsters Hate. This seems particularly true with the hashtag, an obscure symbol previously reserved for punching in numbers during customer service calls and emphasizing that your team is #1! Ehrlich and Bartz's feelings on the subject?

"You see, the majority of society—you know, the people who don't sit in front of their computers tweeting about how "Eating pancakes makes me feel like death now that I'm 30 #notakidanymore"—doesn't understand what the hell you're saying when you tack what amounts to a pound sign onto any given sentence/word in your correspondence (e-mails, etc.). In fact, they could get offended by what you think is an artfully punctuated joke."   Read more

Infographic: Custom Shower Pan Folding & Fastening Techniques

Infographics explain complex or technical information in a visual manner to facilitate understanding. The infographic below was designed and written for construction trades and site supervisors, the men and women out in the field building houses. In general, we made sure to target the information toward this audience by placing a heavier emphasis on visual content over written content. In addition, the infographic format offers a number of potential uses; the user can print it as a poster to hang up, save it as a PDF, view it on a cell phone, send it to friends by email, and share it through social media. This compact format is able to encapsulate an entire story in a clean and concise manner.

The infographic below takes a detailed look at how to properly fold and fasten one type of shower pan liner, a manufactured sheet membrane. The liner serves as the last line of defense against water leaks in a custom shower floor.

Intelligent Content 2011

Intelligent Content 2011 Conference will be February 16-18, 2011 at Hotel Zoso in Palm Springs, California. "Intelligent Content 2011 is all about getting your content delivered to your customer, no matter where they are, or how they’re experiencing it." The call for presentations deadline has been extended to Sept. 15th.

English Version of "Creer avec SketchUp" Book Announced

I recently received good news that Elsevier plans to publish Creer avec SketchUp: 16 projets, de l'architecture au theatre in English. Speaking for the co-authors, we're pretty excited for its U.S. release date in November! That makes it exactly one year since the book was first released in French. Its English title will be Google SketchUp Workshop.

Quality Assurance Tools

Quality assurance, or QA, is the detailed-oriented, structured process of ensuring that everything about a web environment—from its front-end to its back-end—is firing on all cylinders before it goes live. A majority of QA will occur during the testing phase of a web project. However, the beginnings of QA can be traced back to the early phases of a project, even as far back as revisiting the branding guidelines and web style guide to make sure they're up-to-date and available to the team at the start. And taking the time to draft the project specifications (particularly useful for vendors) and document the content requirements up front will help to make sure everyone's on the same page, leading to a better, consistent, and higher quality website down the road.

Other important tools that play an early role in QA include project summary worksheets (which document a project's background information and are very useful in getting team member's up-to-speed), content inventory spreadsheets, and content matrices. A content inventory spreadsheet is a record of the current content on a site, while a content matrix takes that a step further. A content matrix maps all of the content for a website, both current and planned; it can be used to track URLs, content objects, content status, content type, reviewers, authors, deadlines—basically, it acts as a central repository for all things content.

During the testing phase of a web project, checklists are an important QA tool to validate the front and back-end of the site before launch. Click every link, review every webpage, hit play on every video, if possible. In the CMS, open every content module, delete unused material, verify that everything in the back-end is displaying on the front-end. This type of meticulous attention to detail will pay off on the launch date when the first visitors step aboard.