Tecture Blog

A Peek Inside the 24-Hour Website Blitz Project

3/6/2013 12:00:00 AM

In February, Tecture partners Ben Rowland and Tony Moy, flanked by their designers, developers, and project managers, set out to redesign and rebuild a brand new website for one lucky non-profit organization, pro bono, in just one single day. Dubbed Tecture's "24-Hr Website Blitz," Health & Medicine Policy Research Group (HMPRG) was selected as the winner from a pool of applications over the course of a week.

It's the End of the World, Save your data!

12/14/2012 4:01:00 PM

Ever wonder how to make sure you files survive the upcoming Mayan Apocalypse? Fellow Tecturians labored day and night to build www.offworldbackup.com. A fully functioning site that allows you to "back up" your files on various datacenters around the solar system. Insuring your files will survive doomsday. Visitors can actually store and backup their files by signing up for any of our 100% free accounts. Or if you feel there's still hope for the world, sign up for our "Joni Mitchell Plan" for $5. All proceeds from this plan will go to and benefit Greenpeace.

Intern(alizing) an Application for Tecture

12/12/2012 4:02:00 PM

Tecture's latest intern, Muhammad Khan, reflects on his daunting, yet exciting, experience building an application from the ground up that would serve as Tecture's internal business resource manager. Muhammad details how he handled an internship and a client that were one in the same.

iOS 6 upgrade rate is astonishing

11/5/2012 2:05:00 PM

Apple announced one very interesting (and mostly overlooked) item at their iPad Mini announcement: the iOS 6 upgrade rate is the fastest of any major software upgrade in history. 200 million iOS customers upgraded to iOS 6 in 5 weeks. 60% of iOS devices now use iOS 6. One report indicated that 15% of iOS devices were upgraded within a SINGLE DAY of it being released.

Tecture Halloween 2012

10/31/2012 12:00:00 AM

Every year we get excited to put on our Halloween's best and shamble around the office in our favorite costumes. This year, Tecturians devoured a bushel of taffy apples, all the Halloween candy that should have otherwise corrupted the teeth of little ones, and collaborated on a total-team-effort holiday painting experiment that is soon to proudly hang from our walls. From clean-cut starship captains to bloody messes, Tecturians eat up the Halloween madness and we can't wait to do it again next year.

Commonly overlooked pages make great marketing opportunities

10/11/2012 1:27:00 PM

Consider Logged Out, 404, and Server Error pages as marketing opportunities.

A Statistical Look At Creating a Successful Facebook Page

9/12/2012 11:56:00 AM

Few other ways exist to reach as many customers as a business Facebook Page. With 1 in every 13 people in the world on the social networking site, Mark Zuckerberg’s brainchild has become an essential marketing tool. Before you start plastering your Facebook page with content, make sure you know the best time and content to post. Tecture’s Blog offers you the numbers you need to make your journey in the world of Facebook a success.

Enjoy the View From the Bleeding Edge

8/30/2012 2:07:00 PM

An estimated $119 billion dollars are expected to be spent through mobile commerce (m-commerce) by 2015. Your business’ ability to have a fraction of those profits widely depends on how quick you are to jump on the new technology.

Tecture Trio Earns Bright Orange Bragging Rights

8/23/2012 11:37:00 AM

Tecturians Tony Moy, Jay Simon, and Ricky Ruggles triumphed at the Tough Mudder event this past Sunday in Toronto, Canada. In their adventurous endeavor, they climbed black diamond ski slopes, swam through freezing pools of ice and ran through hanging live wires coursing with 10,000 volts. All three men experienced moments of fear and near injury,

Three Reasons Behind the Rise of E-Commerce

8/15/2012 10:39:00 AM

With online sales on the rise, any company can reach a potentially global market with an e-commerce website.

Tecture Developer Takes Innovation to the Streets

8/3/2012 3:37:00 PM

Tecturian Malerie Kaplan had an eventful weekend power racing. She competed at the Detroit Maker Faire and will be close to home this weekend at the Maker Faire in Evanston, Illinois, racing her team's Power Wheel's car.

Interactivity At Its Best

7/31/2012 4:09:00 PM

There are many reasons why businesses have websites, but have you ever stopped to think about why people, and potential customers, use the web? The average internet user in the United States spends 32 hours online each month. What are they doing with that time, and how can you leverage it?

An Intern(al) Perspective

6/14/2012 1:01:00 PM

My initial impressions of the project were excitement with a little bit of fear thrown in. The excitement came from the fact that I knew I was going be learning a ton of new things, face many new challenges, and was given the opportunity to build something new from the ground up. The fear set in a bit during the first official meeting regarding the MyAdventures.com project when I wasn’t sure if I’d gotten myself in over my head.

Google+ Launches Pages for Business

11/8/2011 3:29:00 PM

Businesses have another way of promoting themselves via social media (and another site to keep track of in addition to Facebook and Twitter): Google+ Pages for Business

The Haunted Halls of Tecture

11/4/2011 11:16:00 AM

Halloween is arguably one of the few holidays within the year to scare up the creative juices and embrace your inner scaredy-cat. Halloween 2011 here at Tecture was no exception. From having a majority of the office arriving to work in full Halloween garb (including a client meeting or two) to murdering some delicious pizzas and imbibing some “spirits” in record time, October 31st proved to be a bona fide dead man's party.

New Amazon Silk Web Browser Announced

9/28/2011 11:34:00 AM

Amazon today announced a new Kindle, the Kindle Fire, which is a full-color tablet with access to apps and streaming content. The big news for web developers, though, is the Silk cloud-based web browser they have developed and installed on it.

Restaurants have terrible websites

8/15/2011 12:40:00 PM

Restaurants tend to have terrible websites, according to this Slate article. We agree.

Google+ Project Launches

6/29/2011 8:21:00 AM

Google has launched its Google+ Project, its latest effort to attempt to compete with Facebook. Should you run out and start replacing your Facebook Like buttons with the new Google +1? Or just add another sharing button next to your already long list of social networking sharing crap: Like, Tweet, LinkedIn, Yahoo Pulse, etc?

Mobile Ecommerce to Reach $31 Billion by 2016

6/21/2011 8:16:00 AM

Forrester Research projects that US mobile ecommerce will reach $31 billion by 2016.

Illinois online sales tax law to impact online stores

3/10/2011 3:24:00 PM

Designing websites for mobile devices?

3/3/2011 1:13:00 PM

Designing websites for mobile devices? This chart makes it pretty clear where to focus your efforts.

Android Rapidly Gaining Market Share

10/5/2010 3:28:00 PM

Nielsen reports that phones powered by Google's Android operating system are more popular than the BlackBerry or iPhone among people who purchased a smartphone within the last six months.

The State of the Browser (as of September 2010)

9/2/2010 1:35:00 PM

At Tecture, one of our main jobs is to build websites or web applications that look great on as many web browsers as possible, which is much harder (and more costly) than it may seem.

Facebook Launches Promote Your Post Feature

3/2/2010 12:10:00 PM

Facebook is launching a new "Promote Your Post" feature that will let page owners promote individual postings with paid advertising.

Web visitors more likely to give up personal information to "cheesy" websites

12/23/2009 2:16:00 PM

According to research by Alessandro Acquisti, an economist at Carnegie Mellon, web visitors are more likely to "...admit more sensitive, embarrassing and even illegal behaviors to a Web site that's been designed to look kind of cheesy."

Google rolling out real-time search

12/14/2009 1:30:00 PM

Google's real-time search is now available. Real-time search lets you see live results from partners including Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.

SEO News: Google is ignoring nofollow

12/11/2009 11:14:00 AM

It appears that Google has changed course, and is now ignoring the nofollow attribute on links.

Android is silently stalking the iPhone

12/10/2009 1:42:00 PM

The mobile wars are heating up. While Apple's iPhone is the clear leader, don't count Google out. Their free Android operating system hasn't made a major PR splash, but cell phone makers are quietly shifting to the new OS.

Google Announces Social Search

10/23/2009 9:50:00 AM

Google Announces its new Social Search product, plus a partnership with Twitter, and its intention to build a real-time Twitter search.

Five, count 'em, FIVE Sites Launched Today!

10/7/2009 6:03:00 PM

Monday was a truly amazing day at Tecture as five unique sites were launched all within the same day! It's like Christmas in October! Merry Halloween!

A viable business model for Twitter? Pro Accounts are coming

8/21/2009 12:04:00 PM

Twitter will release paid Pro Accounts by the end of the year, which will give it its first revenue.

Microsoft and Yahoo partner in search deal

7/29/2009 9:11:00 AM

Microsoft and Yahoo have partnered in a 10-year deal in which Yahoo's search will now be powered by Microsoft's new Bing search engine, and Microsoft's AdCenter self-service advertising engine will power advertising on both sites. Yahoo's sales staff will sell premium advertising for both sites, and Microsoft and Yahoo will share advertising revenue. In a joint statement, Microsoft and Yahoo say that "advertisers no longer have to rely on one company that dominates more than 70% of all search."

Cool Firefox 3.5 HTML 5 demos

6/30/2009 11:12:00 AM

Firefox 3.5 has launched and includes HTML 5 support, with features such as built-in video support, animated PNG, dynamic content injection, CSS-based transformations, and cross-site XMLHttpRequest.

Starbucks keeping tabs on customers via Twitter

5/20/2009 8:27:00 AM

Starbucks is one of many businesses exploring the use of Twitter as a component of its online social marketing campaign. I read an article in the New York Times entitled "New Starbucks Ads Seek to Recruit Online Fans." Evidently, Starbucks noticed that its online fans and followers race to post photos of its redecorated stores online (the article specifically mentions stores being redecorated for the holidays, but new stores and stores undergoing renovations have been posted online as well), and is trying to create similar buzz by enticing its fans to locate and shoot photos of posters it has produced, then be the first to post a photo online via Twitter.

Google adding "rich snippets" to search results using microformats

5/12/2009 3:41:00 PM

Google is rolling out a new "rich snippet" feature in their search results. Initially, this snippet provides support for reviews and people, but theoretically could support any variety structured data.

Google Analytics API Launched

4/24/2009 12:21:00 PM

Google Analytics has announced the availability of a public beta for its new API, which will allow developers to pull its site analytics data into custom applications. Developers have already created applications with mashups of analytics data combined with custom application data, integrated analytics into email marketing campaigns, and added live analytics data to PowerPoint presentations. Other possible applications include viewing your website performance from your computer dashboard or from your mobile phone.

IE 8 released

3/19/2009 9:35:00 PM

Microsoft announces IE 8. We at Tecture have been putting it through its paces in beta releases, and we are hopeful that its release is the death knell for IE 6.

Binth Joker Playing Card Deck featured on Blogs

3/5/2009 1:43:00 PM

Binth's Joker Playing Card deck has been featured on blog and sites across the internet, including Thrillist and Cool Material. If you haven't seen this deck, it's an amazing product.

Facebook nearly adds Twitter to friends list

3/2/2009 2:15:00 PM

Facebook nearly acquired Twitter for $500MM. Not sure what impact this would have had on either's profitability. Evidently, the deal collapsed due to disagreements over Facebook's valuation.

Chicago is all a Twitter

2/19/2009 12:00:00 AM

Top twittering cities... Chicago surpasses San Francisco and makes it to number 3!

Facebook Recants its Changes to Terms of Use

2/18/2009 12:00:00 AM

After clandestinely changing their Terms of Use (TOS) content, facebook users protest. Facebook recoils in fear.

New Canonical Link Element to Ease SEO and URL Rewriting

2/17/2009 11:30:00 AM

Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have announced support for a new HTML element: the canonical link element. This element will allow developers to specify the "friendly" version of URLs to search engines via a special new HTML tag. This is big news for websites that make use of URL rewriting, an increasingly common trick to mask dynamic URLs with more friendly keywords. Such sites frequently wind up with duplicate URLs in search engines such as Google. This is also big news for developers, who have a difficult time preventing search engines from finding and indexing this duplicate content.

Search engines expand to Microblogs

1/22/2009 12:00:00 AM

You know you've made it when you get your own search engine. Microblogs provide amazing insight and information and are here to stay.

Google Friend Connect

1/12/2009 1:39:00 PM

Google Friend Connect is a new service that allows anyone with a website to instantly add social networking features to their existing website without writing any code. The service is in beta and is now available to everyone.

Google updates PageRank data in toolbar

1/10/2009 5:57:00 PM

Google's browser toolbar is an extremely useful tool for SEO. It allows you to inspect the PageRank of each page on your website as you browse. The downside is that Google doesn't update the PageRank data in the toolbar regularly. In fact, it only happens every few months. I've learned from Matt Cutts' blog that the toolbar PageRank data was last updated on December 31st, 2008.

Prevention of cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks in ASP.NET

1/9/2009 12:00:00 AM

Rob Conery's blog post on The Perfect Storm Botnet has a lot of great information on the storm botnet and how web developers can inadvertently contribute to the spread of the malware that renders millions of computers into zombie spambots via cross-site script (XSS) injection attacks through website form submissions. Fortunately, there is an easy way in ASP.NET to prevent this: use the HTML.Encode() method on anything output to a webpage.

Apple says, "Keyboards? Where we're going we don't need Keyboards..."

1/6/2009 12:00:00 AM

Apple constantly pushes the boundaries of human interaction. See for yourself as Apple launches the revolutionary MacBook Wheel.

Firefox Mobile takes Another Step

12/23/2008 12:00:00 AM

Firefox, major web browser player, gets closer to releasing a new mobile browser. Cell phones wait with bated breath.

Google makes update to search - images rejoice

12/22/2008 12:00:00 AM

Google has now provided style filtering on Image Searches.

Firefox 2 Checks in to Retirement Home

12/18/2008 12:00:00 AM

As the rest of the web world moves on, Firefox 2 quietly slips into retirement today. Time to upgrade those browsers.

Internet Explorer Security Bugs Web Surfers

12/17/2008 12:00:00 AM

Alot of new press is out concerning major security flaws of Internet Explorer going back to version 5.0. The flaw allows unscrupulous individuals to exploit the flaws and gain access to users passwords and other personal information.

What, a Google product out of beta?

12/11/2008 12:00:00 AM

Google's new web browser, Chrome, is out of beta.