Ventum Group - Newsletter - Newsletter

Newsletter: Issue 007

Kevin Potts — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 14:33:23 GMT

Accessibility: Colour Contrast

Juicy Studio offers a quick and efficient tool for measuring color contrast in order to meet WCAG 2.0 criteria.

Search Engine Optimization: Canocial URLs

Yoast details and explains the new canoical URL standard being rolled out by the major search engines. Evidently, it’s the biggest thing since XML sitemaps.

Branding: Lego Business Card

LEGO corporation has some unusual but incredibly effective business cards. Too bad every employee does not get one.

Newsletter: Issue 006

Kevin Potts — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 20:56:40 GMT

Management: Line-Item Management

Ad Aged offers some critical insight into how companies are missing the forest for the trees by killing specific line items in their budget.

Technology: The Rise of Personal Informatics

A summary of some recent social-media-like applications that allow people to track very specific metrics about their life. (In related news, Daytum is an incredible application that is currently still in beta, but worth looking into.)

Content: The Automatically Updatable Book: The Danger of Provisional History

Nicholas Carr offers a thoughtful piece about how the current trend of content delivery — digital — leaves itself open to possibly nefarious and not-so-obvious censorship issues by virtue of its intangible nature.

Newsletter: Issue 005

Kevin Potts — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 02:47:51 GMT

Economy: Seven Hiring Trends for 2009

Bnet breaks down some CareerBuilder research. Bottom line: fewer companies will be hiring, but salaries are on the rise. I guess this is good news.

Web Design: 10 Ways Twitter Will Change Blog Design in 2009

Mashable writer Rachel Cunliffe makes some bold but realistic projections. As blogging and Twitter drift ever closer to each other like two galaxies, their technologies continue to mesh and mash. Rachel writes about some theoretical technology that sounds sweet indeed. Tweetbacks, anyone?

Web Software: Pixie

Pixie is an intriguing new CMS that takes an extremely light-weight approach to content and template management. The interface is super clean and easily navigable, and the overall theme is simplicity and elegance — there are very few bells and whistles. It won’t topple Drupal, but it will power your blog.

Newsletter: Issue 004

Kevin Potts — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 03:33:24 GMT

Accessibility: WCAG 2.0

The Web Accessibility Initiative arm of the W3C have finally ratified the second version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Massive improvements all around. They even provided this nifty document to help designers and developers get started.

Globalization: Time to Reboot America

Thomas Friedman goes on in his fashion about how America needs to desperately catch up with the rest of the world in terms of technology. One of the leading voices in this arena, this article is summarization of at least two of his books.

Satire: The Datsun and the Shoe Tree

Speaking of Thomas Friedman, The American Prospect published this brilliant satire. Read the above article first, then read this. (The title is a play on Friedman’s book The Lexus and the Olive Tree.)

Newsletter: Issue 003

Kevin Potts — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 12:56:50 GMT

Entrepreneurship: Building an Albatross

While my patience for Seth Godin is limited, he occassionally writes a post that I find worth the word-of-mouth he is such a fan of. And any time you can relate starting a business to an albatross takes off … well, you’ve won me over.

Survey: The State of the Web 2008

Take this survey so we all can understand how to understand each other more betterish.

Books: Designing for the Web

This is going to a very, very good book. Mark Boulton applies classic design principals to web design (good typography, grid systems, etc.) and the results are excellent. I expect this so be a distillation of his knowledge and thus probably in the top five best web design books for 2009.

Newsletter: Issue 002

Kevin Potts — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 19:40:39 GMT

User Experience: Good Experience: It’s the little things

A short read from the Signal vs Noise blog about how adding small personal touches to things such as monthly bills can go a long way in building customer loyalty.

Tools: Quarkbase

A great tool for getting fast, somewhat detailed information about any given domain. Stats include typical Whois info, but also aggregates social bookmarking numbers, most popular pages, general traffic, and even some technical information like server platform and blogging software.

SEO: Just Make Good Content is Bullsh*t

A very interesting article by John Andrews exploring his theories on why Google is profiting from typical “white hat” SEO techniques, and how the future of this practice is limited by design.

Newsletter: Issue 001

Kevin Potts — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 02:02:31 GMT

Accessibility: Designing for Dyslexics

A three-part article on designing for those with dyslexia. Contains valuable background information, as well as detailed tactics to make a website as accessible as possible.

Localization: Is Web Content Localization a Race to the Bottom?

A short and powerful article on the value of creating localized content that is as strong and current as the primary language. What happens when your Japanese prospects read the English version because that has better info? Not a good first impression.

Tools: Free Site Validator

A comprehensive site validator. Scans the entire site — not just a single page. Way beyond the W3C validator.