I once listened to a world-renowned game developer discuss the importance of happiness in our daily lives. She predicted that within the next 5 years, the ability to provide products and services that promote happiness and well-being would be the primary metric for measuring success.

A lot of the work we’ve been doing with KEEN Footwear recently has reminded me just how important happiness can be to the process of completing a purchase online. The custom shopping experience we created for KEEN has an array of features that aren’t “necessary” to each purchase, but they go a long way in building a unique experience for each customer. With each customer account comes a KEEN Closet: a visual representation of a closet full of outdoor gear and the products purchased by that customer. “See with Jeans” is another interactive feature allowing customers to see what shoes will look like with a pair of light or dark jeans.

We developed the features to help KEEN stand out from the crowd, and have received great feedback on these extra bells and whistles. With the number of online shopping outlets exploding, it’s vital that our clients’ sites shine and provide an extra splash of “happiness” even when completing an otherwise ordinary task. I believe interactive games and entertainment really are spilling over into the traditional online marketing space, and it’s our job to keep finding new ways to provide unexpected happiness where we can.

The face of social networks has changed drastically in the past year. Last May, MySpace was the clear winner, in terms of US unique visitors, averaging double the visits of Facebook. We anticipated things would change at some point, but the growth is astounding. In the past year, Facebook has seen a 97% increase in monthly visitors, while MySpace suffered a 5% decrease. Even though the two giants saw a similar number of visitors this May, it seems natural for the trend to continue, leaving Facebook in the lead.

There’s a clear break in visitors between the top two social networking sites and Twitter, which is ranked third, after experiencing huge growth during the past year. Since May of 2008, Twitter’s number of monthly visitors has increased by 2,681%! Much of this can be contributed to the micro-blogging site being adopted by so many celebrities, high profile bloggers and media outlets. However, Twitter’s approx. 17.5 million unique visitors pale in comparison to the 70 million visits Facebook and MySpace received.

For more info and a list of the top twenty social networks, check out this eMarketer article.

In case you haven’t heard, at 9:01pm Pacific on Friday June 12, you’ll be able to create a unique vanity URL for your Facebook page. This is especially important for companies and brands, because instead of a non-descript ending to your page’s URL, you’ll be able to customize it, making it recognizable, easy to remember, and easy to find. The only stipulations are that you must have created the page before May 31, and you must have at least 1,000 fans.

If you have an individual Facebook profile, you can create a username on Friday night. This can be based on your name (with options provided by Facebook) and will become part of your profile URL. To create a username on Friday night, you’ll need to have created your profile before June 9; otherwise, you’ll need to wait until later this month.

For more information, check out the Facebook blog here. You can also contact us with any questions!

Through our experience and research in building blogs for clients, we now recommend using WordPress over other customizable blogging platforms. Since its inception in 2003, WordPress has become the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used by hundreds of thousands of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

Using WordPress’s publishing platform allows us the freedom to create customized, unique blogs without having to reinvent the wheel for each project. Best of all, by allowing template customization, our clients’ websites and blogs can share the same design aesthetics. Creating a seamless look between the two allows our clients to communicate with their consumers through a blog, while maintaining the impact of their website.

We’ve recently built blogs for SmartBank and KEEN using the WordPress platform. The SmartBank Blog has enhancements including pictures of the authors and a built in RSS feed feature allowing users to sign up for email blog updates. The KEEN Blog features the same navigation and background as the ecommerce site and an RSS feed.

The WordPress platform also offers a number of free and easy-to-use plugins. We’re currently building a mobile website for a client and implementing a plugin to automatically divert blog traffic to a mobile-friendly version of the blog. By simply uploading the files to the clients’ server, their blog will be instantly converted. And, of course the look and feel of the mobile blog is customizable too!

You can learn more about WordPress benefits here, or feel free to contact us to discuss adding a customized blog to your website.

Recently while looking around www.asp.net I found a link to a pretty cool tool for beginning dot net developers.  The Ramp Up program teaches the basics of dot net development through a series of articles and webcasts. 

This is a great resource to quickly and cheaply learn a little about the dot net framework and all it has to offer.  The site offers a wide range of information with a focus on asp.net, but also with information on general web development terms and technologies.  I think even experienced developers might be able to get some use out of these materials.

One additional cool feature about the Ramp Up program is that Microsoft offers a somewhat varied range of discounts on training once you’ve completed a “track.”  Discounts range from 25% of off any MCTS exam to 50% off of E-Learning collections.

Check out the site here.