Drum roll, please! It’s time for Word of the Year, 2011:  Occupy

Each year, the American Dialect Society votes for the “vocabulary item” (perhaps a word, perhaps a phrase ) that was in common use or had a high profile (meaning, all us common folk might not have used it but the media sure did).

Occupy, of course, refers to the movement about…uh, did anyone figure out what it was about? I live near Oakland, which got plenty of media attention for its Occupy Movement, and from what I read, the occupiers  focused on being, to say the least, an enormous inconvenience …

What will 2012 bring? Technology can be extraordinarily fickle to predict – but here’s what I see in the coming year.
Cross-Platform CMS
Over the past year Social Media Aggregators and Content Management Systems have become easier to use and increasingly important to maintaining the variety of online properties we each deal with.

Currently everyone builds their own toolkit of solutions, but I think that this year we’re going to see increasingly robust systems until it gets to the point where you can use a single pre-built suite to manage the entirety of your online presence from a single location.
Smartphones Overtake …

Ask for it!
There’s no magic in what I do. I call people and I ask them for their business; the ones that need what I have to sell, buy. Sales are different in the 21st century, consumers are savvy, they are price aware and they can fact-check us on the Internet. Instead of trying to sell them your products and services, how about you let them sell themselves? No magic needed.

It’s easier than you may think, too.

During your prospecting calls, ask questions instead of talking. Have the questions ready before you pick up the phone. Have at least three prepared. …

January is a time of new beginnings, and since mb/i is all about quality, business-centered websites, we thought we’d take a look at 10 reasons you might want to build a new site.
10. Haphazard Growth
Some times a website won’t grow according to plan because there never was a plan to begin with. Poor navigation and uneven development are the hallmarks of an unplanned site. Some pages remain “under development” for years while others grow, and branch, and twist until even a modern Daedalus would get lost in their digital halls.
9. Hard to Update
If you need to call up …

I’ve written before about the spoken word, because whether you’re writing it down or saying it out loud, it’s communication.

Today, I want to point out how sloppy habits of spoken language do not translate well when written down.
I was like, how can he? And he was like, well, that’s what I like. So, like, I’m suppose to like that he’s like, It’s soooo great!?
How many times did you have to read that to translate the “likes”? That is a snippet  of conversation I heard at Starbuck’s last week.  (I was not eavesdropping. The speaker was on her phone in line …

Winter is not just a time of celebration, but also a time for solemn reflection. This year two of the computing world’s greatest have passed away. Without their contributions, the world would look nothing like it does today.
Steve Jobs
1955-2011
Steve Jobs is known for creating the Apple powerhouse not once, but twice. His ceaseless quest to marry function and design brought us the desktop, multi-font computing, the iPhone, the iPad, and many other inventions that will be with us for years to come.
John McCarthy
1927-2011
Though not widely celebrated outside of computing circles, John McCarthy was responsible for many computing advances …

When writing a Request for Proposal for a web development project, consider writing it with the end goal in mind: to find the most qualified vendor for your project who can work within your requirements. If you want a good response with accurate pricing and schedule, then you will need to put effort in providing the same level of detail and accuracy in your document.

An RFP can be organized into three main sections.

Information about the company requesting the proposal
The goal of …

Website development starts with intense conversations about what the site should look like and what it should do to meet the desired goals. Typically several people on the client’s end are tasked with describing what the company’s needs are from each of their perspectives and to ensure nothing critical is missed by the web developer. At the other side of the table, the web development team will ask many, many questions first to understand the company’s needs and then to make sure the site’s functions are clearly defined. After these conversations, a site specifications document is drawn. The web developer …

Writing to complain—the need can arise for us all.

I recently had to write a letter of complaint to Kaiser’s billing agency to ask them to correct their statement that says I suffered a sprained neck in a car crash. I had a sprained ankle. I’d spoken to them on the phone and they’ve said yeah, sure they’d change that sprained neck to sprained ankle. They didn’t. The time came for me to put my complaint in writing.

Complaining in writing helps you:

• Marshal your thoughts and organize your argument
• Express yourself respectfully. When you take time to write and review, you …
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There are many details to think about when developing an e-commerce site. We have developed the list of questions below which help us discover what “size” e-commerce site we will be building. An important part of our job is to guide a client through these to determine what is really needed to meet goals, budget, and timeline.

Hope you find these helpful.

PRODUCT-RELATED
1. How many products will there be at launch?
2. How many product will there be 3-6 months post launch?
3. How are these products organized? How many product categories?
4. Do products have …