Of late, there have been murmurs and rumblings around the office about this blog; specifically, what its focus should be. Several members of the team sat down and had a chat about it earlier this week, discussing how we can use the blog better for sharing all of the interesting conversations that crop up within Habañero’s walls every day.  We do work on a variety of compelling, innovative projects and initiatives here, and we all feel that we need to do a better job at sharing that with our readers. (An example of this is the new re-focused blog at Cooper — check out some of the recent posts compared to older ones).

Externalizing our existing content

What’s interesting to note is that at Habañero, we have a myriad of blogs — personal, internal, and of course this User Experience ”group blog.” The question came up as to whether we should align our efforts more and develop a Habañero-wide blog. This revamped blog would attempt to focus more on internal happenings at Habañero, and the information could be from anyone within the organization. We also talked about linking less to external articles or posts (we know — this goes against many of the tenets of blogging!) and instead to focus more on developing quality content about what’s happening within Habañero with our employees.

Frequency of posting is another issue that we run into time and time again — we definitely need to improve that. Creating fresh, interesting content should not be like pulling teeth for our team. We came to the conclusion that we need a ‘blogging team’ who would be responsible for keeping content fresh and making sure the blog doesn’t lose its steam. This is something that makes sense, but will take a bit of time to establish.

The future of the blog

Having a Habañero-wide blog is more of a long term plan (it won’t happen tomorrow), but what do you think? Would a blog driven by the entire organization — instead of only a subset — appeal to you? Would you find it interesting or distracting to include content from a project management, or development perspective as well as the design view?

Please leave some comments, we’d love to hear your feedback!

This post was co-authored by Jas and Nick.

While Gap previously allowed visitors to create one account that worked for all of its sites and allowed you to go to its other sites (Old Navy, Banana Republic and PiperLime) the tabs make it easier. Will be interesting to see if it affects average order value and if other multi-brand online retailers follow suit.

So you might be asking yourself; ”What’s a Quick App?”

Quick Apps are projects that showcase the Microsoft Live Platform  service offerings and also serve as templates which developers can use as a springboard to base their own projects off of. They are open-source projects release under Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL).

In the case of Contoso Riders, we implemented services and APIs such as:

• Live ID for user authentication
• Live Messenger Presence API and IM Control for Instant Messenging
• Virtual Earth Map Control to display and Virtual Earth Collections for storing map and routing information
• Silverlight Streaming for hosting videos
• Live Spaces Weblogs and the Metaweblog API to store and manage content
• Live Spaces Photo Albums to store photos

You can download the source for Contoso Riders on CodePlex as part of the Windows Live Quick Apps project.

In January we hired Kurtis Beard as a Junior Designer and at the beginning of this month we were pleased to welcome Ben Ng to the team as a Junior Information Architect for the summer term. Both students come to us from SFU’s School of Interactive Arts & Technology program. If any of you are considering hiring a co-op student I would highly recommend it.

The process is surprisingly simple:

• Find a school that offers a program that compliments the skills you need in your organization.
• Post a position with the co-op office (be sure to tailor it to students, you can’t expect them to have loads of client experience with specific technologies).
• Review the incoming resumes and determine your first cut for initial interviews - we prefer applicants with an online portfolio.
• Provide an assignment for the students to present at the second interview - this gives you a feel for the kind of work they can do and also gives them a good idea of the kind of work you want them to do.
• If you are lucky and you find the right fit, you simply notify the co-op office that you wish to make an offer. Assuming you made a good impression with the student they will be keen to accept!

SFU dedicates an entire page to the benefits of hiring a co-op student (new perspectives, ready & eager to work, cost effective, future hiring potential etc..) and I would have to say it’s pretty bang on. One thing to note is that you have to be prepared to move fast, the good students gets snapped up early!

(I think I need to play a few more times!)

The user experience of this is interesting – it’s a one click operation from the browser with nothing to install, nothing to wait for - it’s just all part of the browser with a desktop icon. If it all works as described, it’s much simpler than other options out there.

This will be an interesting space to watch, and I’m starting to think about how the websites we build today are going to change into much richer applications in the future, where a user can choose how and where they want to run them.

If you’ve never seen progressive enhancement in action, it’s worth a peek at the North Shore Credit Union site.

Inspired by an article on Progressive Enhancement and SEO we identified some problems with how search engines were indexing content on the home page of their site. The page utilizes a content switcher widget which allowed a large amount of content to fit into a smaller visible area. Prior to the change each ‘tab’ of the widget changed to the next on mouseover using JavaScript. Each tab was also setup to work when the user did not have JavaScript enabled by adding a query string to the URL that would show that tabs content (e.g. ?widget=1). While this allowed the widget to work for visitors with and without JavaScript enabled, search engine robots had trouble indexing the site. Some search engines would index the root level page (e.g. /index.jsp) as well as each of the variant pages that were using the query string. This would result in the home page being indexed multiple times and page rank split among those pages — or depending on the search engine robot and its ability to execute javascript — some content not being indexed on the page at all.

After a few mockups and some code changes we eliminated the query strings (and the indexing issues) providing a page that is still accessible to visitors with or without Javascript enabled while also exposing to search engines additional content that can help increase keyword density and organic search relevancy. Check out the changes (home page, product page, product landing page and tabbed content page). You can view the progressive enhancement in action by turning off JavaScript on your browser.

Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies

Habañero has already been employing semantic markup such as the hCard and hCalendar microformats for several recent projects, so this is especially relevant to our business.

The addition of semantic information to web documents is an important evolution of how meta-information is both stored and accessed on the web; it’s looming large as a major trend for 2008, especially considering Yahoo!’s recent announcement of support for indexing of semantic markup. Yesterday, Yahoo! Europe pushed out 26.5 million microformats in the hListing classified ad listing format, which is a major step in the process.

In his article, Alex explores much of the hype and fuss behind the semantic web, and how it will be important to everyone in the near future. It’s definitely worth a read.

Just go into installer.app, find and install the SummerBoard app (if you haven’t already). At that point go find the “Habanero” theme under the “Themes (Summeroard)” category. Just select it from the list, click “install” and you’re done!

Getting to First Base