Devbridge

Microsoft Silver Partnership and Domantas 2011 MVP

2011-10-31T14:02:52

We're excited to announce that one of our own, Domantas Jovaisas, received the Microsoft MVP award for 2011. While we all respect Domantas for his technical skills, we truly believe his maximum potential is unlocked on the dance floor.

Domantas is also our guiding star for Microsoft Gold Certification. We went Silver early in 2011 and are planning on getting gold by the end of the year. We are starting to implement code review sessions, scheduled exams for all employees to get certified in MS tech, and active event participation through 2012. A blog schedule has been created but has been a challenge to enforce. We're switching out the Aerons to wooden stakes: promotes creativity and good sitting posture.

Social Update - Fall 2011

2011-10-16T07:51:04

I’m currently somewhere over Greenland. Snowcapped mountains are reflecting pesky sunlight through the window of the 747 straight into my face and I’m coping with a mind-numbing case of exhaustion from two weeks spent at our Lithuania office. Who said business can’t also be pleasure?

It’s the crazy pace that we’re moving at that I blame for the lack of social updates to our blog. We are now twenty-three strong, twice the company we were at the beginning of 2011. That said, a good place to continue my tale is the end of summer when our Chicago team, plus a couple of extras, ventured out to Chicago River Canoe and Kayak.

Chicago Riverfront, I mused, was a pristine place to live – million dollar boats slowly coasting along gleaming towers made purely out of glass, restaurants gobbling up the remaining sidewalks next to the river, live music and crowds everywhere. After a short instructional course by a Croc. Dundee look-alike, we were dropped into the not-so-welcoming waters of the Chicago river, that, up close, have a fragrance of heavily decomposed dead things mixed with gasoline.

What from the sidelines looks like a cute little yellow canoe is indeed a plastic cast for your lower body that has intentions of murdering you if you don’t sway your hips the way the river demands (which, in a way, is similar to dancing to the Lambada). Excitement and fear in our eyes we starting paddling our way North from the Chinatown based harbor. During this water based adventure we learned the following:

Remember that scene from Terminator 2 where Arnie goes melting in a pool of liquefied metal? Chicago river has a similar corrosive effect on human skin.
Considering that every large boat aims to crush you, it is actually very romantic to paddle when the sun is setting in the west.
The discomfort of a wobbly canoe is completely forgotten when the testosterone-loaded crew starts competing for pure acceleration.
Ignas, one of our developers from Kaunas office, is a naturally occurring disaster, much like earthquakes and hurricanes, and the diagram below illustrates the movement patterns of his canoe.

All jokes aside, the trip was a roaring success. We continued to celebrate by sipping on some Hennessey in the parking lot, congratulating Mike on his recent proposal (and now inevitable marriage), and headed off to have dinner at a local Chinese restaurant.

The next memorable event is really what has me writing this blog post. I flew out to the Lithuania DevBridge office just two weeks ago but it feels like months. A lot of us at DevBridge share that very common cultural origin and the establishment and evolution of the Kaunas office now sounds as natural as breathing.

My previous trips to Lithuania were all to visit family and friends, and after spending two weeks with this talented group of professionals I would be honored to call them exactly that. A non-stop two weeks of strategy meetings, parties, and lunches has left me properly exhausted but also inspired and tingling to jump right into 2012.

Some of the highlights from the trip are:

The formality BS dropped after a mid-week “social” that had me returning home at some unhealthy hour in the morning. Apparently “handling your liquor” is a requirement for a Lithuanian developer. Not so for the Kaunas office director.
A bunch of us were disappointed with the iPhone 4s and swore we would never buy this piece of garbage. That lasted until the next morning – most were placing preorders. Vocal and critical group, we are.
A trip to Lithuania Agile Tour 2011 – Vilnius proved to be a great and inspirational success. We confirmed that our core beliefs are valid and that we have established a solid base to build the business on.
Strategy meetings with our three architects Paulius, Domantas, and Viktoras have laid the groundwork for the systems we need to implement this and next year to scale the business.
We learned of the gaps that need to be filled out in our current planning and development process.
An outing to the club proved that developers can, indeed, dance!

Surprisingly, the polar bears did not manage to break my neck this time and I am on my way back to Chicago with very little damage on the outside. The trip was, yet again, a productive and awakening experience. I’m full of goals, ideas, and strategies on how to take DevBridge to the next level and am hoping to see the whole team again in summer 2012 when we throw the yearly DevBridge outing.

Thanks for the great time, guys! We have so much happening – the coming year couldn’t be more fun.

Website Redesign Part 2: Target Audience, Page Goals, Art Direction, and SEO

2011-09-20T16:24:26

This is part two of my three-part blog post about Website Redesign. The first part can be found here. I wrote about the definition of challenges and goals for the website and in part two I will cover the planning stage of the process: audience, content, and functionality.

Determine the Target Audience of Your Website

The target audience is a subset of visitors that are coming to your website and want to purchase your product, learn more about the services, or in any other way to help you reach the goals you’ve defined in part one of the article. I say “subset” because you may have visitors on your website that land on the pages looking for something completely different and are not really the individuals you are trying to engage.

When you are planning a website redesign you may be able to easily define your target audience based on your products and services – you’re already working with that audience outside of the web, right? The target audience may be an age group, a group of professionals in a specific industry, people born under the sign of Gemini, or any other classification that aligns well with your offerings.

At certain times, however, you maybe able to perform additional recon through Google Analytics on your existing website (you do have analytics on your current website, right?). Some things to consider and research:

Look at the organic traffic coming from Google – what keywords are being used in search to find your website? Are these the ones you are strategically using or do they tell a story or an opportunity you haven’t discovered yet?
Look at the user agents and determine what type of browsers individuals are using to surf your website. A large percentage of older IE browsers may indicate a government or manufacturing industry audience as their terminals are usually running older software and are sluggish to move to new technologies because of incompatibility with legacy systems.
Furthermore, based on the above, you should be able to understand the screen resolution used, mobile platforms you should cater to, and many other aspects that should help with the research.

When you have identified your target audiences you will be able to proceed to defining goals on pages for those audiences and the SEO strategy to nurture the organic traffic based on keywords that those audiences use to search. Make sure that your design, copy, and font sizes are appropriate for the audiences.

Understand the Goals of Website Pages

A big mistake that is often made by inexperienced teams is to just move the existing content to a new design. While a fresh layer of paint is always nice, you really need to determine if the goals you’ve set for your website will be achieved after the redesign. This often involves creating interaction plans and making sure that all audiences are being addressed. Let me elaborate.

All pages on the website have to have a specific goal (or several) – there should not be any “filler” pages that one or other department just wants to add because everyone else has them. The purpose of any page on the website can range between:

Informing the visitor about a product or service
Developing credibility for company by documenting their operating history
Peaking interest of visitor with a clever blog post and gaining SEO value
Urging the visitor to click on a “conversion” button – be it a lead creation or product being added to the cart
Any other purpose that informs, interacts, promotes, and so on

Some pages, such as the homepage, may have several goals associated with them: inform the visitor of our offering, make us look credible, click on the “learn more” button and so on. It’s important to understand that the more goals we load on a page – the less focus we’re going to grab from the user because our goals will compete. When planning high-visibility pages such as the homepage it is thus very important to use something like the 80/20 rule and distill the core offerings of the site without assaulting the senses of the visitor.

Establish the Art Direction

You want to make sure that your brand identity is communicated through the new look of the website. Even if you have a solid base, you should always consider refreshing the logo and modernizing the brand. Even powerful brands like Coca-Cola are reinventing themselves over time so don’t think that the logo you had designed fifteen years ago needs to stay exactly the same. We always recommend a gradual progression: no drastic changes to the logotype, but perhaps a cleaner typeface, new patterns, slightly adjusted colors for the website and marketing materials – if needed.

Even though part of the direction will be dictated by the logotype and brand colors, you should feel free to explore the web and look at competitor websites. Web technologies are changing rapidly and you may find that additional creativity can be utilized during the redesign. We always like when customers have a set of websites that they really like – even if they are outside of their industry. This allows us to understand the styles you like and also manage your expectations and direction.

I will write more about the process of wireframing and design in part three of this post.

Implement a Search Engine Optimization Strategy

This topic in itself has spawned countless articles and books so I will not expand too much. There is a core set of rules one should follow when publishing content on the website to maximize organic traffic and they are:

Website has to use valid markup – the HTML code has to adhere to a certain set of rules so that search engines could easily read your content and file it away. You can use this validator: http://validator.w3.org/. Some errors may not be a big deal, but it’s a good practice to check.
Website should have clean URL’s – a clean URL is a “human readable” URL such as /buy/apples/. A bad example would be /cart/product.aspx?id=1 – it’s not human readable and does not say anything about the product being viewed.
Pages should have Meta information with relevant keywords – your page title should use the keywords you’re targeting, the description should be cohesive, and the meta keywords should also be picked carefully.
All pages should have an H1 tag – that’s the most important headline tag and some search engines use it to determine the type of content on the page.
Write content around your keywords – select the keywords you want to target and then assemble content that is useful, relevant, and uses those keywords within it’s context.
Establish backlinks – a backlink is a link from another website to your website. The higher the page rank of the referring website – the more “value” it brings to your site. Most of the time the page you want to be linked from is the homepage as it has the highest page rank of the site (usually).

SEO is a lot of work and any good strategy takes close to years to implement and get benefits from. Here are some articles that I find beneficial on the subject:

Coming Soon – Part 3

This concludes the second part of the series. I hope that the article has been helpful and as a result you have fresh new ideas on how to approach the redesign of the next website. Next article will cover the implementation stage: wireframes, design, feedback, launch, and post-launch review.

Have Some Sushi – Slicing the Japanese Web Industry

2011-08-24T21:09:30

Todays blog post is written by Ignas Sakalauskas – a web developer of ours who has lived the last six months in Taiwan, and before that – a year in Japan. Besides eating a lot of sushi and learning the intricacies of the local languages, Ignas was also able to form an interesting opinion about the local web industry and it’s trends.

Each Friday we eat Asian food for lunch on DevBridge’s account so I brought my steel chopsticks to the office: saving the planet and defending my lunch from sneaky Ninja Warrior attacks. From time to time we also have lunchtime discussions about Japan, yet no one visits the web development topic (which, technically, is our job). You would think that the Internet is the same all over the world and you would be correct to a certain extent. We all use the same TCP/IP, but have you ever thought that it could all be managed in a different way? Inspired by this idea I decided to write an article about the state of the web in Japan.

Small and unreadable?

That’s what people usually say about Chinese characters that all look the same to them. Not actually what I had in mind; I would like to discuss the Japanese web design trends. You are probably accustomed to large and legible titles, expressive images, visible buttons and simple instructions. That is not the case with Japanese websites – everything is small, detailed, and complex. Instead of having a clear call to action and a simple funnel you will be exposed to a ton of information that fills the screen. Why is that?

That is a good question that can be answered by looking into the culture itself. Do you spend time reading the manual after you purchase a new television set? More than likely you do not – you just glimpse at the page that you’re interested in if you experience a specific problem. It is quiet the opposite in a Japanese culture. People read not only manuals for TV’s, but also manuals for job interviews, studies and even life itself. Can you imagine a billion Chinese characters in one spot? In other words, that’s how the Japanese society works – everything looks very simple, but actually it’s very detailed and complex, like the human body. Instructions, manuals, laws and even the unwritten rules of daily life – small details are the most important component of those things. Obviously this is an oversimplification of a complex culture, but this pattern of complexity is also reflected on Japanese web design.

Design Trends - Kawaii

First of all, it’s not kiwi, it's kawaii – a Japanese word for cute, sweet or lovely. Second, we are not going to talk about girls in this blog post (I can see my coworkers rolling their eyes at me). Kawaii is a prominent aspect of Japanese pop culture. It influences merchandising, clothing, food, toys, personal appearance, behavior and mannerism. You can learn more about Kawaii on this Wikipedia page.

Take a look at a web design example that our Creative Director Adomas has created.

That looks pretty good. It’s elegant, modern, and clean. Now take a look at the Japanese website screen capture.

Assuming your client is Japanese, which will he or she choose? More than likely it will be the latter, with the small cute koala in the right bottom corner. Websites are supposed to be kawaii! This trend is currently not as strong as a lot of businesses are working towards being more internationalized.

The Mobile User – A Majority

Japanese mobile devices are not small to begin with, but they get even bigger when you flip them open. The goal is to have a bigger screen so that more content could fit at the same time, again, exposing as much detail as possible. For every Japanese, a cell phone is a must-have gadget used 24/7. It’s not polite to talk on the phone on trains or public areas, so individuals are constantly typing into the devices, using the web or messaging services.

Moreover, Japan has widely used mobile Internet since 2001 (beginning of 3G in Japan) and most websites have mobile versions adapted for cell phone use. I would be curious to learn if they have more computer terminal or mobile users surfing the World Wide Web in Japan...

Remember that packed and full of details website image? Now imagine it squeezed to a width of 270 pixels.

To save money smaller companies just make one website for both computer browser visitors and mobile devices, but it’s “tuned” to just one of the platforms. You are correct if you guessed that platform to be mobile phones. And a tiny mobile device website on your pc screen looks funny but at least it works! Larger companies build out both types of websites and also may differentiate mobile sites by cell phones User-Agent that is different for different phones and/or carriers.

Mobile Phone Technology

Japanese used to have the most advanced mobile sets in world… until smartphones hit the market. Most of the devices are currently imported into the country and the top ranked unit is currently the iPhone. The 3G version of the iPhone has been made specifically for Japan – it’s a big market of 127 million cell phone users that helped push the device into its current popularity.

Surprisingly, the iPhone does not support IR, which stands for Infrared. It’s a technology that has been around for a long time but never really picked up in the US for the consumer cell phone market. Let me explain why it’s (or was) important for mobile users in Japan.

Prior to smartphones all mobile devices in Japan had their own email addresses with the carrier’s domain. The email messages would be transmitted directly to the phone without being accessible through a web mail interface. The complex bit – all email addresses were long and hard to remember, such as easygoing-lew-si-.cp.dw-3-cb-d@ezweb.ne.jp. The solution was to implement IR that allowed the users “bump” their phones (bring them into close proximity) and exchange email addresses without having to retype or remember them. But let's get back to the iPhone! The Japanese like cute toys and all of the iPhone’s sliding UI effects look pretty cool and, say it with me, kawaii!

QR Codes

A couple of weeks ago our team visited Tech Week in Chicago. QR codes (square barcodes that are meant to be read by smartphones) were plastered everywhere in the show – brochures, advertisements, and handouts. It’s a new trend here in the US that is receiving a lot of buzz… except that it’s not really new at all. A QR code allows one to embed a certain piece of data into a visually small square block that can be them rapidly scanned – this is useful for embedding phone numbers, URL’s, or email addresses that otherwise would have to be typed in manually.

When I first came to Japan a couple of years ago everyone was already using the codes – it was actually developed in 1994 by Toyota! But, as you may guess, it was smaller and was not main concentration point in the design – small and between all the details. As I mentioned before, Japanese often have long email addresses, so to make sure you have no typos, it was easier to make the addresses as QR codes. The cheapest cell phones had functionality to generate and to scan QR’s. As I mentioned before, some technologies have been designed and implemented a long time before we even knew about them here in the states.

Mixi – the “Other” Social Network

It has nothing to do with music... or, I guess it does. Mixi is the largest social network in Japan (~80% of market) and was born almost at the same time as Facebook (beginning of 2004). Vast amount of members, millions of text messages and blog posts is the bread and butter of Mixi habitants. The network is very Japan-central – it has Japanese only User Interface and you need a cell phone from a Japanese carrier to confirm registration! Why has it become so popular?

I suspect that it due to it’s well made mobile version and communities that are similar to Google+ circles. These communities are very important for the Japanese. They are called a group society for a good reason. Recently Facebook success has also had an impact on Mixi – it received a Facebook Like “いいね” button to show your fondness of something, notifications, “what are you doing now“ field and, most importantly, the farm game!

Japanese are not ones to give up old habits easily, so Mixi is still popular and Facebook is slowly growing. That is not to say that the Japanese have not adapted new technology. Twitter is really popular among Japanese. They say it's the most efficient and not time consuming way to stay integrated into society... When I tried to create a twitter account it gave me a Japanese interface language only. I was too lazy to look how to switch back to English version, so I’m still using it in Japanese to this day.

Like short URLs?

Have you ever used short URL services like tinyurl.com or goo.gl? Ever imagine having a URL with just one symbol? Give it a shot - http://跳.jp/! You have probably heard about URL internationalization that began several years ago (for instance in Lithuanian - www.žalgiris.lt). Chinese characters were also included into the mix. Even through the URL I just gave you consist of only one character the Chinese characters needs 2 bytes to be encoded. Anyway, I tried to get a shorter URL for our company website and got “echo in town.jump.jp”, which actually looks like http://丁響.跳.jp . I have no idea how they convert the names, but you can play around if you wish and scare your grandma with “Japanese invasion” on the web.

Big and Fat Conclusions

Everything that has a beginning has an end (Matrix). I basically reviewed main features of web industry in general and Japanese national character impact on it. I realize it’s overgeneralized and one blog post is not enough to make it complete but hopefully it’s still entertaining and insightful.

I would like to emphasize one thing. It may appear that Japan is losing its position as the leader in technologies. I think they are actually learning from us, just like they did with the assembly line improvements for the automotive industry. Perhaps they are repeating themselves like they did more than one hundred years ago with research and expeditions. All I know is that decades are changing fast, so we should stay tuned and see what Japan has to show off as time goes! Banzai!

A Guide to Website Redesign - Part 1

2011-08-08T18:44:34

A couple of months ago I was invited to put together a presentation for one of the online classes at MarketingProfs.com. The twenty-minute presentation covered topics relevant to agencies and customers getting ready for a redesign project. What I have realized is that twenty minutes is much too short to cover everything I wanted to cover and so the idea for this three-part article was born.

The article is split into three parts:

Identifying the existing challenges and goals for the website
Planning the redesign: audience, goals, content and functionality
Developing the solution and evaluating success

Identify Challenges

Have you ever found yourself trying to obscure the URL of your website on a new batch of marketing materials you are having printed? It’s actually a true story I’ve heard from more than one customer. There are approximately 272 million Internet users in United States alone and this number is growing at a rate of 20 million a year. Exposing your business to this audience is critical and the first step of redesigning your website is about identifying current challenges and setting some goals for the website as a marketing platform.

Let’s identify some of the potential ailments that a redesign may address:

Website is old. Yes, websites age. Some better than others, but all websites have an expiration date and every now and then a business needs to evaluate the site and commit to a redesign. The abundance of new technologies, design trends, increasing monitor resolutions (more real estate to display the content), and other factors may make websites built five years ago look ancient. Just like your business, the website needs to evolve and a comprehensive digital strategy helps you stay on top.
Business has changed. New products and services are offered by the company and the current website does not communicate well with the target audience. The business has grown and the original edgy “I run this from my garage” approach may no longer apply or scares away customers.
Design is not professional. Lack of aesthetics on the site lead to lack of credibility and that can become a deal killer for a new visitor scoping out a potential commitment. First impressions are very important on the web because you only have a couple of seconds to impress the visitor before they go back to the search results and click on the next link.
Does not meet functional requirements. An example may be a search box that does not return accurate results or does not have autosuggest functionality implemented. There will be times when new custom functionality is needed on the website to deliver the best experience to the visitors.
Failure in Information Architecture. Content Strategy and Information Architecture are critical aspects of maintaining a usable website. Grouping and presentation of content should never feel overwhelming and websites without a clear content strategy tend to become overburdened by irrelevant historical content.

In some cases you will find that a complete redesign is not necessary and a more gradual approach can be used to improve the problem areas.

Inventory Content

A good way to start the process is to inventory all pages of the website and re-evaluate goals set forth for the site. While you may know every single page of the site, I would recommend using a sitemap generation tool to create a nice catalog of all pages. Even if you are starting from scratch an inventory of existing content may help you build out goals for the new site. Once established, review the list and ask yourself the following questions:

Are all pages still relevant? Simple is beautiful so mark pages that you don’t need.
Is content up to date? Does it generate value or is it just filler? Mark pages that may need to be rewritten.
What purpose do the pages serve? Create a spreadsheet and in a new column add a single goal per page. Examples may be to inform visitor about company history, create a lead, or provide in depth whitepapers about a solution.

This content catalog will help you communicate with the agency or technology company that will be redesigning your website. Even if they end up completely reengineering the Information Architecture at least you will know that you did not forget anything important.

Return of Investment – A Scenario of Success

A website is a tool for business to achieve results. As such it must be treated as an investment and its success calculated based on the returns generated. Some results are more tangible than others but this model can be applied to online revenue, market awareness (page views and visitors), and lead generation.

Part of the process involves a bit of guesswork but just the exercise itself may answer questions that you had about goals, challenges, and areas of improvement.

A pretend scenario could be described as follows:

Cost of redesign is $20,000.00
Goal: returning customers up to 15% (perhaps because you are planning to implement upselling functionality and email reminders when people leave your website with items in their cart)
Goal: conversion rate increase to 2.5% from 1.5%
Goal: average order size up to $100

Based on above calculate number of months needed for the project to pay for itself. While some of the numbers may be somewhat inaccurate, you can use market statistics to validate them. With quick research I was able to find on Google that website redesigns increase traffic by an average of 15%. Conversion rate usually go up by 20% to 50% (rates vary by industry starting with 1.8% to 2.25%, with niche industries having up to 5%).

Perform Reconnaissance

Sneaking through enemy lines covered in camouflage to retrieve top-secret documents is one way of gathering intelligence. Luckily for us it’s much simpler to evaluate the competition on the web.

Find market leaders in your industry and take a look at their web strategy: can you innovate on existing features or simply do something better on your website? Can your service or product compete in terms of pricing or features? Access is available to everyone on the web so take the time to look at the big players in your field and note the things you like so you could better communicate with your creative and technology team.

Coming Soon – Part 2

This concludes the first part of the series. I hope that the article has been helpful and as a result you have fresh new ideas on how to approach the redesign of the next website. Next article will cover the planning stages: feedback, wireframes, page specific goals, content, and SEO. Stay tuned!

Websites That Work, SEO Ranking, and BBB is a Big Scam!

2011-07-22T13:52:19

Last months “Build an App or Optimize for Mobile” triggered a lot of positive feedback from you, our customers, and this month I wanted to cover several new topics that may be of interest.

My online course at “Websites That Work” by MarketingProfs.com and why you should register!
Overview of SEO Ranking Factors
BBB – A Big Scam – an article by FeeFighters.com

Websites That Work – from SEO to Web Design

A couple of months ago I was approached by our good friend Andrew Follett to speak at an online course for MarketingProfs.com about planning a successful website redesign. The course consists of fifteen online classes that cover a variety of topics such as strategy, SEO, design, lead generation, and many more. Thankfully I had to prepare just one presentation… that I had to re-record perhaps fifteen times. I now find myself having great respect for public speakers. Check out the class and use our discount code DEVBRIDGE to get $200 off.

SEO Ranking Factors

We have been receiving a lot of inquiries about Search Engine Optimization and that has led me to believe that there is a big gap between what people have heard about SEO and how it really works. There are also a myriad of SEO companies out there that promise anything from “#1 position in Google” to “quintupled traffic to your website” and that rarely deliver on their promises… but more on that later.

Search Engine Land’s Guide to SEO is an excellent article that covers most of the bases for SEO. They break the ranking factors into four major groups:

On the page ranking factors
Off the page ranking factors
Violations
Blocking

The article covers in depth the value of clean HTML, good content, proper use of HTML tags, meta information and many other factors that, when combined, will help you rise in Google or Bing search results for your selected keywords.

I would also like to go back to the first paragraph where I mentioned companies that perform SEO. We have done it for ourselves and for some of our customers and we can tell you right now – it’s not something you can do in one sitting or in a short period of time. It’s a living, breathing organism that has to be managed, updated, and maintained based on a variety of control elements.

We have managed to get to the top of Google search results for “Chicago Web Development” keywords, but that has taken us over two years of continuous work. A word of advice – stay away from Optimizers that “guarantee” you incredible results in a short period of time. If you do want to give SEO a shot – ask the vendor to request payment only when certain SEO goals have been reached.

Better Business Bureau – a Big Scam

FeeFighters has recently posted an excellent article about the disgusting business practices of Better Business Bureau. The articles covers a situation where a poorly rated credit card processor was promoted to an A- rating by simply paying off BBB. FeeFighters is an excellent service that we’ve used ourselves more than once – they make credit card processors compete for your business. An excerpt from the article:

“Many people mistakenly think that Better Business Bureau is a government agency that is a consumer watchdog making sure that companies do no wrong. Unfortunately, that is completely false, just an image that the company gives. The BBB is legally a C-Corporation that is much closer to the mafia of old, the guys who went into small businesses and told the scared owners that bad things might happen if they didn’t pay. While it started with noble intentions 100 years ago, in recent years the company, started to protect us from scams has degenerated into being a scam itself.”

Read the full article here.

Mobile Apps vs Mobile Websites

2011-07-21T15:38:33

There are more than 350,000 applications in the Apple App Store and you’re starting to get that tingling sensation that you may be the last person to join the party. Even if half of the applications should have never made it out to the store (do we really need another glowstick app?) it is definitely a playing field that needs to be explored and understood. In this blog post I will explain the differences between the App Store Apps and the iPhone / iPad optimized websites that are also called WebApps.

The iTunes Store App

The App is a piece of software that is written on the iOS platform, has to be built on a Mac, go through the iTunes approval process and will then finally end up being sold or distributed for free in the iTunes Store. There are several advantages and disadvantages associated with the App.

Advantages

Can be designed for a wide range of uses - games, business productivity applications, media applications, time management, and others. Some of the more complex and graphic intensive functionality cannot be delivered over Web Apps.
Can function without Internet connectivity - once installed the application resides on the device and does not require a signal to work. Excellent when you’re in the subway and need to slash some fruits.
Background operation – application can run in the background and send push notifications to the user. For example – a task on the calendar can notify the user of a pending due date and so on.
Can be sold through the iTunes store and have a subscription based service. And then you get to pay Apple on a recurring basis! Glee!
Can directly interact with mobile device peripherals such as the camera, GPS, and touchscreen.
Can perform complex operations on data without the need for server side code. In other words, you don’t have to buy rack space for your monster servers because Mike can now resize his profile picture on the device itself.

Disadvantages

Development time and cost is much higher than optimizing a website and creating a WebApp.
To make application available to the whole market you will also need to develop Apps for the Android and Blackberry platforms. Code cannot be reused across the platforms.
The application is harder to test for simple users – a deployment package needs to be installed on the device, devices have to be authorized for testing.
App needs to go through Apple App review process.
You need to share 30% of your total sales revenue with Apple.
Every single bug fix will need to go through the Apple approval process which takes anywhere from 2 to 4 days on average.

The WebApp – Website Optimized for Mobile Devices

A website optimized for mobile devices is usually an “m” subdomain of a regular website which renders the web pages in a very specific way that is dedicated to mobile devices. You can see some of the more popular WebApps on Apples website. The functionality is somewhat limited to web technologies but with the spread of HTML5 this is becoming less and less of a problem.

Advantages

Lower development time and cost. Since the mobile web app is essentially a different front end for you website the development cost is much lower than that of the App. We are currently creating a mobile optimized website for GoSarpinos.com and we’re able to reuse most of the code-behind and do just minor design work for the mobile pages.
Cross platform scalability is easier: while you still have to account for slightly different layouts and capabilities of mobile devices such as Android and BlackBerry OS based phones, it is easier to do since all output is just HTML and the back end is controlled by your website (and not several development teams that work on different platforms).
Testing is simple – it’s just a website you can surf from your computer.
Does not have to go through Apple’s approval process and is not limited by their TOS.
There is a bit of overlap with this, but the mobile site is not platform bound for development. The server side code can be written in .NET, PHP, or any other language that spits out HTML to the browser. Want all JavaScript – can do that, too!
You can integrate analytics into the web application since it’s a good old webpage. Learn the amazing conversion power of shiny buttons!

Disadvantages

Application capabilities limited to web technologies – you can forget 3D games or processor hungry applications that heavily use touch and gestures.
Cannot function without Internet connectivity – something that may be very important if you want your conference attendees to be able to get to their materials in dark and wet basements.
WebApp can’t run in the background and cannot send push notifications.
Can’t sell the WebApp through the iTunes store – less exposure, can’t get user reviews, and monetize unless you make the user register and pay through your website.
Peripheral integration is not 100%, but getting there. http://www.phonegap.com/ supports most of the features on multiple platforms.
Operation of the WebApp is not as smooth and seamless as that of the App. Transitions and effects rely heavily on CSS3 and JavaScript and are limited.

Conclusion

What I’ve written in this blog post only skims the surface of both approaches but it should be a good starting point. We believe that there are more benefits to developing your mobile solution via the WebApp approach mainly due to the following reasons:

Ease of maintenance
Lower cost
Ease of deployment, revisions, and testing
Detachment from a specific back end technology platform (CSS3, JS, and HTML5 are going to stick around for a long time)
Ability to reuse existing code from your website
Avoiding the Big Brother approval process from Apple
Internet access coverage is spreading like fire so offline functionality is not as essential

That being said – it’s not a solution for every business or task at hand. There are many applications that simply cannot be developed as WebApps and should not be. ServiceBridge, for example, needs offline functionality so that a technician could operate the device in areas where there is no wireless signal. The application allows to queue up the requested changes and then communicates with the server once signal is established.

Contact us and let us know if we can help you find the right approach for you. We develop both WebApps and iTunes Store Applications and can set you on the right path.

Social Update - Summer 2011

2011-07-16T15:03:05

I would like to present the launch of our new blog! NASA’s final space shuttle mission was kicked off on the same day so I hope there is no correlation between the finality of that event and our blogging frequency. My records show that the last social update was posted more than half a year ago so it’s time to brush off the quill and get to work.

Ignas and Karolis Visit Chicago

With a combined height of over 13 feet, Karolis and Ignas enforce the DevBridge stereotype of tall Lithuanian developers. I have a feeling that either:

basketball-crazed mothers add something funny to our cereals with hopes of their kids becoming the next Arvydas Sabonis; or
Chernobyl disaster related mutations have some positive side effects;

Either way, the two developers have joined our ranks in Chicago office for the duration of the summer. They are a natural fit: just a few days after arrival Karolis was receiving t-shirt shipments from ThinkGeek.com, destroying multiple burritos for lunch, and kicking our collective asses at Call of Duty. Well played, well played indeed.

Green Means of Transport

The first thing Martin did upon arrival of our brethren was to buy a couple of bicycles for Ignas and Karolis to explore Chicago. As of right now myself, Tim, Ignas, Karolis, and Gedas all bike to work. We’re looking for some nice wall or ceiling mounted racks to set up at the office, so if you know of such things – please drop me a line.

Tim and I have started riding during lunch, and, as the picture below should illustrate well, the workday just isn’t as difficult to cope with. Now if Martin would just stop ridiculing my pink helmet…

New Hires – Welcome Adam and Stanislovas

World domination can only be achieved in numbers. As such, we have expanded our ranks with two new hires – Adam and Stanislovas. Adam has worked in several creative agencies before joining DevBridge and in the two weeks he’s been here he has already managed to make us look prettier (no small feat if you’ve seen our pictures). Stanislovas has joined our Kaunas powerhouse of developers and we’re excited to get started on new projects that seem to be springing up like mushrooms after the rain.

DevBridge Picnic 2011

In preparation for our annual summer picnic, Adam has put together a design for our yearly shirts. I’m happy to report they came out great – check out the good-looking group below! We didn’t skimp out on the material this year and I’m planning on keeping five of these shirts and wearing them everywhere I go. I sincerely apologize to anyone who wants to invite me to his or her wedding, as I will be the only guy wearing a t-shirt.

Launched Websites

I would like to wrap up this post with some of the websites we have launched in the last month or two.

Trip Baltic - Accommodations Portal for EuroBasket 2011

2011-07-14T12:20:02

We are excited to announce that as of yesterday TripBaltic has been announced as the accommodations reservation portal for EuroBasket 2011. It's a proud moment for our team as we're huge fans of Lithuanian National Basketball Team and are happy to see TripBaltic get some public recognition!

TripBaltic offers the accommodation and hotel reservation management process and provides the most convenient online reservation and payment methods.

Continuous Integration in .NET Projects

2011-07-13T22:38:45

Today's blog post is about optimizing your development process. We will identify some red flags that you should be on the lookout for, suggest best practices, and offer insights into our development process and the related benefits.

You are in trouble if you find any of the following in your software development process:

You are deploying your applications manually, it’s a pain in the neck, and it takes a lot of time.
Your source code integrations are performed manually and conflicts occur often.
You are editing application configuration manually in staging or production environments.
You tell other developers that “it works on my machine” and the problem is in their code.
You do not have automated tests.
You often have last minute hot-fixes.

Fear not – even if you are feverishly nodding in agreement this article should help you correct your course.

A Better Way to Develop Software

Say Hello to Best Practices

Here is a general list of best practices that software developers across various industries and fields should be aware of and follow:

Use version control. There is not a single reason not to. Everyone is using and it’s easy to implement. You can use Team Foundation Server, Visual Source Safe, Subversion or even old CVS.
Automate the build. A common mistake is not to include everything in the automated build. Automated build should not only get latest source code from repository and compile it but also stop/start web site and other processes if needed, execute SQL to update database if necessary, manage application’s configuration and so on.
Your build should be self-testing. Include automated tests in the build process to catch bugs faster and with higher efficiency. At the minimum you should prepare unit tests and integration tests. Automated tests for user interfaces are also a very good idea (see magic of http://seleniumhq.org/).
Developers must commit at least every day. More frequent - better. The single most important prerequisite for a developer committing to the main branch is that their code can build correctly. This, of course, includes passing the build tests. As with any commit cycle the developer first updates their working copy to match the main branch, resolves any conflicts with the mainline, and then builds on their local machine. If the build passes, then they are free to commit the changes.
Keep the build fast. The whole point of Continuous Integration is to provide rapid feedback. A build that takes an hour is unreasonable. If you're starting a new project think about how to keep the build fast. Usual bottleneck is testing - keep your tests fast!
Test in a staging environment before deploying software on production. No, seriously, you need to test. Surprised? /sarcasm.
Make it easy for everyone to get the latest executable. Anyone involved in the project should be able to get the latest executable and be able to run it: for demonstrations, exploratory testing, or just to see what has changed this week.
Everyone should see what's happening. One of the most important things to communicate is the state of the main branch build. Build status can be reported via email or RSS feed. An even better solution is to integrate green and red lava lamps with Continuous Integration Server.

Bubble, Bubble, Build's In Trouble http://www.pragmaticautomation.com/cgi-bin/pragauto.cgi/Monitor/Devices/BubbleBubbleBuildsInTrouble.rdoc
Automate Deployment. To implement Continuous Integration you need to set up multiple environments (development, integration, staging, and production) that will run your build and tests and, if possible, automate as much deployment between these environments as possible. You may be doing these deployments several times a day.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment

Environments

You should have a development, integration, staging, and, obviously, production environments.
Development environment usually is a developer machine with required software installed on it.
Integration environment is a separated machine that runs Continuous Integration Server and periodically runs auto-build-test scripts and reports status of builds.
While difficult, you should try to have a staging environment as similar as possible to your final production environment.

Database Continuous Integration Strategy

Database schema changes and corresponding code changes must always be deployed together. While deploying software to an environment, code files and libraries may usually be deleted or overwritten. Database files, however, must be intelligently manipulated so as not to destroy vital business data.

Successful database change management requires a consistent strategy to be applied by all team members. The ideal process for database change management would consist of:

Developers using their own local database to do their development work.
Each environment has a dedicated database. I.e. development, integration, staging, production.
Each developer maintains changes locally. When the database changes are ready to commit alongside the application source code, the developer follows these steps:
- Create a change script that wraps all of the database changes into a single transactional change script.
- Save the change script in to a folder in your source tree called Update.
- Commit the change script along with the source code that corresponds to the change.
The continuous integration server detects changes to the source control repository and:
- Builds the application code.
- Executes the applications unit tests.
- Executes the database create task to create a new database if needed.
- Executes all of the new changes that are in source control under Update node if needed.
- Executes the projects integration (data access) tests.
- Marks the builds a success when all the tests pass.
Each developer runs the build script locally after receiving new schema changes scripts from the source code repository.

For more information: http://code.google.com/p/tarantino/wiki/DatabaseChangeManagement

Build and Deploy Strategy

Developer builds new version of the application locally and runs unit tests.
Developer checks in source code to version control.
Continuous integration server sees the updates and automatically calls auto-build script.
Build script runs any new update on the environment database.
Build script replaces the configuration files with the environment server configuration.
Build script compiles the DEBUG configuration of the application.
Build script runs all unit and integration tests.
If tests are OK build script publishes new version of application in integration environment.

The same changes should be made in the strategy for staging and production environments: run build script only after manual verification if everything is ready to go up to staging/production. In other hand if you have separated branches for development, staging and production in version control then you can map build scripts to run automatically for staging and production environments too (if new revision exists in corresponding branch). For production environment build script it is a good idea to add backup tasks for database and application too.

Summary

The setup of a Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment environment adds a certain overhead to the project but the benefits far outweigh it. Collaboration between developers becomes simpler with less time spent on environment and database synchronization. Testing and deployment drops in complexity and last minute surprise issues and burning fixes practically disappear.

Devbridge

Microsoft Silver Partnership and Domantas 2011 MVP

Social Update - Fall 2011

Website Redesign Part 2: Target Audience, Page Goals, Art Direction, and SEO

Determine the Target Audience of Your Website

Understand the Goals of Website Pages

Establish the Art Direction

Implement a Search Engine Optimization Strategy

Coming Soon – Part 3

Have Some Sushi – Slicing the Japanese Web Industry

Small and unreadable?

Design Trends - Kawaii

The Mobile User – A Majority

Mobile Phone Technology

QR Codes

Mixi – the “Other” Social Network

Like short URLs?

Big and Fat Conclusions

A Guide to Website Redesign - Part 1

Identify Challenges

Inventory Content

Return of Investment – A Scenario of Success

Perform Reconnaissance

Coming Soon – Part 2

Websites That Work, SEO Ranking, and BBB is a Big Scam!

Websites That Work – from SEO to Web Design

SEO Ranking Factors

Better Business Bureau – a Big Scam

Recent News

Mobile Apps vs Mobile Websites

The iTunes Store App

Advantages

Disadvantages

The WebApp – Website Optimized for Mobile Devices

Advantages

Disadvantages

Conclusion

Social Update - Summer 2011

Ignas and Karolis Visit Chicago

Green Means of Transport

New Hires – Welcome Adam and Stanislovas

DevBridge Picnic 2011

Launched Websites

Trip Baltic - Accommodations Portal for EuroBasket 2011

Continuous Integration in .NET Projects

A Better Way to Develop Software

Say Hello to Best Practices

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment

Environments

Database Continuous Integration Strategy

Build and Deploy Strategy

Summary