As a mom to two elementary-aged daughters, my time is constantly divided between work, the girls’ activities, family events, household responsibilities and everything in between. How is an online marketer supposed to garner my attention? Today’s busy mom, the person in charge of 80% of all household spending, is someone marketers need to know intimately.

So how should online marketers best approach selling to moms like me? According to a recent eMarketer interview with Laura Fortner of CafeMom, there are several key factors for moms when interacting with a brand online.

• Moms like companies who listen to the feedback they provide. This can be accomplished by offering them opportunities on your website to weigh in on your product and where it may be headed in the future.
• Moms need information at their fingertips. Give them the information they need, which they can then share on Twitter and Facebook. Moms connect on social networks to share coupon codes, offers and other vital information.
• Moms value honesty. Women want to be respected and understood by the brands they choose. The same word-of-mouth connections that allow moms to share deals also make it easy for disgruntled mothers to exploit the viral effects of the Internet if they are unhappy. Staying in touch with moms via social connections provides marketers valuable information regarding how their products are viewed by their consumers.

In order to stay connected to the mommy demographic, companies need to keep these factors in mind, while remaining up-to-date on the latest trends, technologies and communication patterns. Click here to read the full eMarketer interview.

I can’t tell you how many times it’s happened to me: I’m checking my iPhone at red lights and on the side of the street. I enter my destination in a map or web search, and bam – they’ve got a website. I anxiously click the link, eager to learn the missing piece of information, and I am rewarded with a blank screen with a small blue Lego block in the center... nothing else! What? How can this be? Did the designer/developer of this site, really develop the ENTIRE site in Flash? Come on…even the navigation?

Today, more than ever, it’s become vital for businesses to adhere to some of the most basic web strategies, to ensure this doesn’t happen to every customer who has the luxury of looking you up on the iPhone. It’s part of the reason we advocate for developing two separate sites: One for desktop users, and another for your mobile users. Why not spend a portion of your web budget to ensure an optimal browsing experience regardless of how someone chooses to view your site? There’s no need to download huge images and rich media if you are in a car and just need basic contact information. On the flip side, the desktop/home user would prefer to see the large, beautiful photography and a more complex user experience.

We need to recognize our audiences, and many of them are beginning to rely heavily on mobile browsing. Not providing a mobile-friendly version of your website is making a conscious choice to ignore the fastest growing web browsing audience in the world. If you're interested in our mobile website development services, you can learn more here, or visit m.keenfootwear.com to see a mobile commerce site in action. 

We’re proud to announce the launch of a new suite of software called Saffire, developed by Wright Strategies. Saffire is the first proven, flexible alternative to restrictive off-the-shelf website products.

We’ve been on both sides of a website: we’ve developed them and we’ve managed them. So, we know how important it is to have a beautiful website that also functions properly and efficiently. Saffire combines the best of both worlds: it gives clients a custom website design, paired with a standard set of proven, successful functionality.

Saffire has options for promoting events, selling online and creating mobile sites. Each of our offerings, Saffire Event, Saffire Product and Saffire Mobile, comes equipped with the standard functionality a site needs to be successful, along with the option to add customized modules. Behind the scenes, Saffire provides easy content management, friendly reporting and guaranteed 24/7 technical support.

You can see Saffire in action on one of our latest launches: Rodeo Austin, www.rodeoaustin.com. Implementing the Saffire Event software has cemented Rodeo Austin’s status as the technological leader in the fair and rodeo industry. Not only does the site have a fully-integrated shopping process for streamlined purchasing, it also boasts a new event interface that has generated new buzz excitement among visitors. Now, customers can slice and dice events, build their own event schedules and share events via Facebook, Twitter and rodeo e-cards.

Want to learn more? You can get all of the details about Saffire for events, ecommerce and mobile sites on our website: www.wrightstrategies.com/saffire.aspx.

And if you want to take our demo for a spin, click here. We’ll even give you a tour of the behind-the-scenes features!

In a move that couldn't make the fellas in the Portland office any happier, Google announced that they will no longer support Internet Explorer 6. Beginning March 1, users of IE6 will notice that certain Google services, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites, will stop working well and eventually won't work at all.

Internet Explorer 6 has been a major headache for web developers everywhere. IE6 is well-known for bugs and incomplete, inconsistent, and often incorrect support for Web standards. Hearing that Google is beginning to phase out their support of IE6 gives developers around the world more confidence to do so themselves and encourage their users to download more recent browser software such as Internet Explorer 7 or 8, Firefox, Google Chrome, or Opera.

Google Apps senior product manager Rajen Sheth recently wrote, “The web has evolved in the last ten years, from simple text pages to rich, interactive applications including video and voice. Unfortunately, very old browsers cannot run many of these new features effectively. Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.”

Even Microsoft itself won’t be supporting IE6 in its own Office Web applications. However, though Microsoft has been encouraging Windows users to update to IE7 and IE8, it intends to support IE6 through 2014.

Part of being on our technical team is looking for more efficient processes that we can employ. Lately, we’ve been looking very closely at ways to stop “rehashing” the same code over and over. We’ve noticed areas where code tends to be very similar across many websites. Why re-write it for each one?

We’re looking into two types of tools to aid in this process: ORM and dynamic code generation.

Object Relational Mapping (ORM) allows us to generate the basic code needed to store and retrieve objects from a database without having to physically write a line of code. There are many more pluses to these set of tools, but this would lead to much more efficiency for our technical team. Some of the ones we’ll be learning more about are:

• Subsonic: http://www.subsonicproject.com
• Entity Framework: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa697427(VS.80).aspx
• NHibernate: https://www.hibernate.org/343.html

Our other option is simply pure dynamic code generation. I’ve been researching T4 templates (Text Template Transformation Toolkit) and love the possibilities! The idea is to create a template that represents a coding structure you write often, then have the system use that template to generate a code base for you. These templates are being used by many companies in order to increase efficiency and productivity. In fact, the ORM Subsonic listed above uses T4 templates when generating code to represent a database.  

You can learn more about Microsoft’s MSDN page for T4 templates here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb126445.aspx.

As always, we’ll keep you updated as we continue to work on more efficient, repeatable processes for our projects.