Most CSS and fancy designs may have looked cool on your desktop, but quickly became unusable on a cell phone.  So, the best bet was a plain text experience for your mobile website.

With the rise of smartphones into the more mainstream, like iPhones, Androids, Palm, and Blackberries, the internet is once more accessible on the go, as it should be.

“The number of consumers accessing the mobile Internet in the United States has jumped from 54 million in May 2009 to72 million in May 2010, a year-over-year increase of 34%” – The Nielsen Co.

Those numbers are from 2 years ago, and they continue to rise.

The great thing about smartphones is that most of them are now using legitimate browsers with a universal rendering engine (typically WebKit, or at least based off of it) that render mobile websites the same way.

However, it is important to remember that even though many of these browsers are using the same rendering engine as your desktop; a mobile device is not a desktop.  There are many factors that differentiate the two.  For example: screen size, hardware (RAM, processor), and controls. Consequently, a mobile website should not be developed the same way as a regular website.

When designing and building your mobile website, remember a few important notes:

1. There is no mouse on a cell phone, thusly, there is no hover.  Keep that in mind.  Don’t make your mobile site depend on this for navigation or cool effects.
2. Limit animations, images, and scripts.  You may be tempted to have your title come flying out, spinning all around before stopping at its final resting place in your header.  Don’t.  Remember that the typical visitor to your site via a mobile is going to be using a cell network, which is slower than most wifi.  They have to wait for all those things to load.  Also, they are using a cell phone with hardware limitations.  What may look smooth on you MacBook may be choppy and ugly on a phone.
3. KISS.  No, I’m not hitting on you.  KISS is a good ol’ military term that fits very well in mobile development.  It stands for Keep It Simple Stupid.  Your mobile visitor is coming to your site from his phone, on the go, using cell coverage, and is probably looking for something specific so they can go on with their day.  Make your site VERY easy to navigate.
4. Give your site’s search center stage!  Like I said above, your visitor is probably coming to your site looking for something specific and might be in a hurry.  Put your search at the very top of the site.  I like to put mine before anything, including the title.
5. DON’T USE FLASH.  I can’t stress this enough.  It doesn’t matter that Android supports it.  iPhones, iPads, and some older Blackberrys and Palms don’t either.  All the annoying “device” wars aside, Flash is very memory intensive, and slow loading on a cellular network.  Don’t use it.  It’s 2011 anyways.  Flash is about dead.  HTML(5), jQuery, and CSS3 are more than capable for 90% of the websites out there.  Leverage them.

When designing and building your mobile website, keep all these things in mind.  They make the difference between happy repeat visitors and some angry people slamming their phone on the ground because they just waited 5 minutes for your site to load, only to find that your mobile website was frustrating or even unusable.

The trouble is, it isn’t a blogging framework. Not anymore. At one time, yes, it was. If you wanted to run a blog 5 years ago, you would go to WordPress.org, download the software, put it onto your server, design and build a theme, and blog away. You became an instant “journalist.”

That’s not the case anymore. In the recent years, it has evolved into something so much more. Using plugins and themes, people have been turning WordPress into eCommerce solutions, directories, wikis, social networks, forums, time and project management trackers, and so much more. It has gone from a small dusty backroad, to an eight-lane freeway.

Don’t get me wrong, WordPress is still VERY capable at blogging. That is it’s roots, and will always continue to embrace blogging at it’s core. But too many times in the past few years I have heard clients and friends say, “You’re building my site with WordPress? But I don’t want a blog!”

WordPress has enabled many great features for our clients that weren’t available in the past. For example, it’s robust backend makes updating content a breeze. In my day, when you wanted to fix a single sentence on your site, you had to open an FTP client, enter your login details, download the file, open it in an editor, track down the area you wanted to edit, save, upload it, and then you were done. Now, you login, open the page, edit, save, and then spend that extra 10 minutes you saved brewing a yummy pot of coffee.

There are plethora of big-name Fortune 500 companies using WordPress now as their site’s backend because of the ease it gives at every aspect of running a site. Most of which you will never know because of how well it bends to your will.

It’s free and open source. It’s extensively documented. It gets updated frequently. Best of all, it has a huge community behind it. So no matter what your project, don’t be too quick to dismiss WordPress as an option.

In future articles I will run through some plugins, themes, and tweaks that will help you take your WordPress site to the next level.

First and foremost, the number one factor is support. How quickly does the company reply to help requests, and does the company offer 24/7 support services? Problems don’t always pop up during the normal nine to five work hours. One great way to ensure superior support services is to email the staff with a few questions before you purchase a plan and see how long it takes them to respond. If you’re left waiting too long, you can expect a similar wait when you really need their help.

Another important feature to consider when shopping for a web hosting provider is uptime. The more uptime they guarantee the better. The minimum standard these days is 99%. There are many technologies that allow the company to provide both high availability and reliability.

Unlimited web space is another perk that hosts use to rope in clients. Don't get me wrong, buying enough storage to allow for growth is a great idea. Just remember not to get lured into a bad plan with the promise of never-ending gigabytes of storage that you won’t use.

Data transfer is an area of concern for me personally because I’ve made the mistake of losing track of data transfers. In the end, I got hit with a huge bill. If you don’t pay attention, so could you.

Each web hosting company has different solutions and specialties. Don’t be afraid to do your research and evaluate the pros and cons before hiring a host.

We are always testing, always learning. And this time we could use your help.

Please take our website for a spin and give us your feedback. Don’t worry, you won’t hurt our feelings. You will be helping us to better serve you and our current and future customers.

As a thank you,  all participants will be entered into a drawing to win an iPad of your very own.  You won’t have to covet the one that your Development Director brings to meetings or spend hours at the Apple store playing Plants vs. Zombies.  I don’t know anyone who does these things, by the way. Purely hypothetical.

Enter the Adcuda iPad Giveaway by August 15, 2010 to join the super, cool group of folks who have already participated. One entry per person please and thank you. The odds are 1:999 and the winner will be notified via email and announced here.

Please tell your friends and colleagues. We’d love as much feedback as possible. Plus it doesn’t hurt to have all those folks checking out our website either.

Here are a few trends and examples of “meet the team” pages. One trend worth mentioning is the most popular:

1. Employee photos.

One idea for employee photos is to make custom avatars – like we did on Adcuda’s site. This is a great way to let an employee’s personality shine through while keeping the design professional and consistent. Our team page holds a little biographical line beside each employee photo – We like to show our creative personalities by sounding not-so-serious on our about page.

2. Social Media Links

As you know there are many professionals out there that have linkedin, facebook and twitter accounts. Why not have your potential clients connect with your employees? It is a great way to lead your clients to current events/thoughts and it builds strong relationships. Before doing this, make sure your employee’s content is appropriate. You do not want to damage your company’s reputation. There is also a way to add in a team member’s latest tweet to the page next to their profile. What fun!

3. Expanded profiles

While many sites only include basic information about each of the team, others include extended profile info. this is done through the uses of pop up windows, sliders, new pages, etc. Extended info is a geat way to give clients more insight into the employees behind a company. The simpler the layout, the more effective. You do not want to bombard your prospective clients with too much info – but it is nice to include info like “our story” or “what we bring to the table”

Here are some visual examples:

Th_nk

Blue Sky Resumes

MW Design Interactive

nGen Works

glue Isobar

Etsy

kudos smashing magazine

For myself the answer to that question was rather extensive.  I wanted to use it for entertainment, computing on the couch, taking notes in meetings, and managing our web servers while on the go.  In other words, I wanted to use the iPad like it was a netbook.  I’m happy to report that after a month with the device my netbook hasn’t been opened, and while at home, the laptop rarely is.

I could devote a post to each one of my solutions to the question above (which I’ll probably do for the next few weeks), but for today lets focus on how I’m using the iPad to manage our servers.  Now ideally you’d want to do all your work from the desktop, but carrying a laptop around with you everywhere you go is both cumbersome and inconvenient.  I’ve found a nice padded case from Targus which allows me to securely carry my iPad with me wherever I go.  The whole package is light weight and no more cumbersome than carrying around a notepad.  Power and convenience wherever you go.  So let’s get to it.

One of the services we offer along with our Web Design and Development, is Hosting for your website.  We do this by managing our own servers which are located at datacenters with Rackspace.  To manage our direct interactions with the Rackspace service I use the Rackspace app for iPad.  With this app I can manage virtually every interaction I need to have with the hardware.  Reboots, backups, resizes, I can do it all, even fire up a new server to handle additional load.

iSSH is another indispensable product.  iSSH allows you to do just like the name of the app suggests. You can SSH into your servers or connect via VNC. I’ve tried a few other apps of the same type on the iPad and found that this one is superior.  The keyboard overlay is cleaner and you don’t lose things on the screen.  It’s very readable which is a big plus when you need to get in and get out.  Let’s face it, if your on the go and have to SSH into a server, your more than likely doing so because something has gone wrong.  You want the most efficient and effective way of dealing with the issue, and in my opinion, for right now, this is it.

Finally we come to an excellent FTP client.  With a built in text editor FTP On The Go Pro is the cream of the crop.  If your not comfortable editing files through SSH this app offers a compelling alternative. FTP On The Go also allows you to download files and save them for later review or editing.  If you want to access your Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF, or Image files, your covered their as well.  All in all, a well rounded powerful FTP program for use away from the desktop.

So that wraps up server management on the iPad.  With a huge app eco-system a best in class solution to almost any problem can be found. Am I a fanboy? I am now. Are you?

Well, fear no more mighty wordsmith.  WordPress 3.0 has introduced the cure for what ails you: custom post types.  With custom post types the admin level user experience can now include any post type that you feel like creating.  When you visit the WordPress dashboard instead of just seeing the familiar “Posts”, you can have “Recipe Post”, “Camera Post”, or any other type of post you’d like.  With theme customization these post types can then be styled to look a certain way, and entering meta data becomes a much more user friendly endeavor on the backend.

After having created a few custom post types myself for current projects, I believe that this feature will provide a surge in the already formidable install base of WordPress.  But as is usually the case, with great power comes great responsibility.  While WordPress 3.0 makes tremendous strides towards creating these custom post types, the actual creation of them is still in the realm of the theme or plugin developer.  That said, I would expect to see several plugins released within the next month or so  that will make this process very easy for the end user.  When WordPress flashes that “Upgrade Available” banner at the top of your dashboard, go ahead and click “Upgrade Now”.  You won’t regret it.