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Today, The Bivings Group is proud to announce the release of GlobalMapTiles, the first part of a set of PHP and JavaScript code that assists with aggregating markers on a Google Map. Our clients wanted to be able to display markers on a map reflecting the locations of people who provided their location (city, state, zip, and in some cases, street address), but with tens of thousands of expected sign-ups, it’s not feasible to display all the points on the map at once.

One of the challenges with displaying a map with lots of markers is that if there are too many markers in one location, the placemarks themselves quickly become an unmanageable sea that obscures the map. In some cases, this is the desired effect, but in our case, we wanted to present a cleaner map that showed a single marker that provided an indication of the number of people present in an area. (Less markers also has the advantage of loading faster.) (more…)

The week of President Barack Obama’s inauguration, the Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism launched its New Media Index.

The NMI is a partner project to its News Coverage Index, which tracks the top five stories across traditional, U.S., print-based media on a week-to-week basis.

The NMI was designed to combat criticism that monitoring traditional media sources only is missing the boat. The Index uses Technorati and Icerocket to track which news articles are being shared and commented on the most across social networks and the blogosphere. The NMI isn’t all that exciting on its own, but when compared to the NCI, provides interesting insight into what the public is following and what the professionals are publishing.

During the first few weeks of the project, news about President Obama’s inauguration, cabinet choices and stimulus planning topped lists on both indexes, but now that Obama buzz has died down a bit, the disparity between what’s being written about and what’s growing virally is more interesting.

From Feb. 9-13, stimulus news was by far the most shared, but behind that was an article from New York Times on how to pay less for contacts and glasses. After that, the internet buzz surrounded Muppets and Satellite Radio. The NCI, by comparison, focused most on the president’s economic agenda but also on a plane crash in upstate New York and tensions in Israel.
While the NMI-NCI comparison certainly adds a new dimension of analysis to the PEJ’s coverage, there are a lot of steps they could take to improve their new tool. First, the data is mined in different time periods for each index. Comparing news trends from Feb. 9-13 and new media trends from Feb. 15 can be useless if something major happens on Feb. 14.

Next, I hope to see two expansions to both indexes. For the NMI, looking at blogs worldwide and taking in data from sources other than Technorati and Icerocket would help increase the content. The trick would be keeping analysis manageable. For both the NMI and the NCI, I hope analysts will look outside U.S. publications and monitor global trends eventually. The comparison would be helpful if users could access both local and global statistics.

Still, PEJ’s addition is an important step toward the consideration of how blogs and social utilities are entering the conversation as primary sources of news.

This is shaping up to be one of those weeks where you have more ideas for blog posts than time to write them.  Given that, I’m going to cheat and write up a quick link post covering some of the things I’ve found interesting this week.  Most of these items have already been featured on the Bivings Twitter feed, so follow us there for more frequent updates.  Here goes:

(1) Here is an interesting list of around 40 famous athletes on Twitter.  Of these, I wholeheartedly endorse Shaquille O’Neil’s Twitter account and will also endorse Lance Armstrong.  Your mileage will vary on the other accounts.

(2) While we’re on the topic of Twitter, an impressive number of reporters/editors at the Austin American Statesman are using the tool to engage with readers and provide quick news.  As a Texan and Longhorn fan, I’ve been following Suzanne Halliburton for awhile as a way of getting up to date Longhorn football news. 

(3) Apple releases the beta of Safari 4.  I have given the new browser a try and am quite impressed.  Everything loads much faster than my default browser, Firefox, and it has some slick features borrowed from iTunes.  The only thing keeping me from switching is my reliance on a variety of web development focused plugins that come with Firefox.  Give the new Safari a try. 

Added: our Senior Director of Programming Services, John Bafford, has an interesting post up on Safari’s use of the Webkit rendering engine. 

(4) Politico released a list Top 10 Twitter users in DC, and the LA Times responded with its own competing list and then Mark Drapea wrote yet another list.  All the lists are sort of equally good/bad, and accomplished the primary goal of such articles – to get people arguing and drive traffic.

(5) Slate put out a good story that highlights some content providers that have had success with charging for content online.  It provides a nice counterpoint to the orthodoxy that all content wants to be free. 

The Bivings Group has been creating web programs for clients for over thirteen years.  I’ve been around and involved for a lot of those years.  Pretty much everything – from the tools you use to the way you write code to the Internet knowledge of our clients – has changed for the better since 1996.

One aspect of web development that hasn’t evolved as much as it should is the fundamental way most organizations view the site development process.  I think most groups still view site development the way they view developing a brochure, meaning that it is something with a beginning, middle and an end.  It is something that can be finished. Organizations either see themselves as in a redesign/development phase, where you are redoing everything, or as in a bare bones maintenance phase where the focus is on simply posting content.  There really is no in between.

The result is sites with designs and features that are stuck in time and don’t evolve.  The content may get updated, but the site takes on a dated feel as design styles change and new tools become ubiquitous.

In this day and age, the problem really is one of mind set.  The tools development firms like ours utilize, from Drupal to Wordpress to Ning, make it easy for organizations to make small, iterative improvements over time.  Tasks that might have taken substantial time and money five years ago, like changing site colors or adding a new section, can now be done more efficiently due to the flexibility of the tools and the move towards CSS-based design.  So you don’t really have to think of your website in terms of development/maintenance phases.  Iterative development is sort of the sweet spot between the two.

There are a lot of benefits to taking a more iterative approach:

1. It allows you to quickly incorporate feedback from your site visitors.  Big site redesigns are often done in a vacuum.  Sure you might run a focus group or share your site with a group of beta users, but the redesign process primarily happens in private.  If you think of site development as an iterative process, it enables you to more quickly respond to user feedback than a traditional development/maintenance structure allows for.
2. The sweat equity required from your staff is lower than in a big redesign.  Redesigns require a lot of work and are often painful.  Taking an iterative approach allows you to break projects into smaller, more manageable pieces.  Instead of rewriting all your copy at once, why not focus on improving one section at a time and then moving on to the next.  Improvements are more likely to happen if the effort required is made manageable.
3. It allows your website to evolve along with the times. The Internet moves fast, with features and trends changing on a month-to-month basis.  If you want to keep up and constantly maximize the value you get out of your Internet program, it is important to reevaluate what you are doing constantly.  Thinking about your site in terms of iterations makes it possible for you to actually keep up.

Large web properties pretty much exclusively make iterative improvements due to the complexity of a full redesign and the need to incorporate user feedback.  As an example, go to the Wayback Machine and see how Yahoo! has evolved month by month over the years.  Below are some screen shots showing some key moments in the evolution. (more…)

Yesterday we launched a new version of the marketing site for our monitoring platform, ImpactWatch.  The new site includes new branding and copy, a new IW Twitter feed and a redesigned blog.  I would encourage you to check out the blog if you haven’t already.  JW has a great post up that provides a bit of a behind the scenes look at our redesign process and Hannah has a good take on a recent social media study.  Anyway, give the new site a look and sign up for an ImpactWatch demo if you haven’t checked out the product. 

Anyone that has done a lot of work in Drupal knows what a complete pain it is to upgrade from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6.  The change was dramatic, and many vital Drupal 5 modules still haven’t been upgraded to work in Drupal 6.  For many sites, going from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 isn’t so much an upgrade as a rebuild. 

Given this, it is sort of amusing that Drupal’s flagship website, www.drupal.org, is down today for maintenance as they upgrade from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 a full year after the release of Drupal 6.  I guess it really is as hard of an upgrade as it seems.

The current version of our company website has served us well.  It performs well in search engines, consistently generates leads and highlights our most important marketing resource, our blog.  This bit from a blog post I wrote when the new site launched in August of 2006 sums up the strategy behind the current site pretty well:

We finally started making progress when we shifted the focus to our blog.  We decided to keep www.bivings.com really simple and not to overwhelm folks with lots of brochure content they don’t want to read anyway.  We brought our blog content front and center.  Our goal with the new site is to tell the story of our company a little bit every day by writing about the projects we are working on and the things we are passionate about.   We think this will be much more effective than producing some sort of slick, heartless brochure site.

But, in Internet time, two and a half years is an eternity, and it is time for us to take a fresh look at the site.  Starting with the homepage, we are starting to go through through Bivings.com section by section and figuring out what improvements we want to make to both copy and design.  We go through this process with our clients all the time, but for obvious reasons we can’t write about it.  Since we are our own clients on this one (which is always a dicey situation), we figured we would write about what we’re doing as it happens as a way of soliciting feedback and educating people on how the process works.

With that, here is a quick summary of what we’re trying to accomplish with our homepage redesign:

• Better explain what we do through a very straight forward homepage Flash feature.
• Show examples of the projects we are working.  We really don’t do this at all now. 
• Better highlight some of the research we are conducting and our contributions to the open source development community.
• Continue to feature the blog, but to a lesser extent than the site does now.  Our blog readers generally go directly to the Bivings Report, so we don’t need to make the homepage of our marketing site quite so blog heavy, although we do want our new users to find headlines quickly and read it.
• Modernize the site design and clean up the site’s CSS.

With those goals in mind, click here to view a rough wireframe I developed for the new Bivings.com homepage.  Let me know what you think in the comments, as I’ll be simultaneously posting this here and distributing internally for feedback.  Stay tuned for more updates as we get further in the process.

Due to low prices and marketing muscle, Go Daddy is the first name that comes to mind for me when I think of domain registration.  Over the years, I have purchased a series of domain names that I manage through the site, and have even bought hosting services from them out of convenience on occasion.  I have been consistently appalled by the Go Daddy user interface throughout the time I've used the service. 

Yesterday, I got a renewal notice for one of the domains I own and logged into Go Daddy to reserve for another two years.  In an era where most e-commerce sites have worked to make it as easy as possible to buy goods with as few clicks as possible, Go Daddy has taken the complete opposite approach.  It took six clicks for me, as a logged-in account holder whose credit card is on file, to renew my domain.  Previously I had always chalked up Go Daddy's horrible interface to incompetence, but upon close review it is pretty clear that the interface is purposefully clunky, and that Go Daddy is putting a lot of barriers between the user and the final purchase step in an effort to manipulate them into buying additional services.

It is the online equivalent of the candy and trashy magazines in the check-out line at the grocery store.

Here is a summary of the six steps I had to take to get to my final payment step (click on images to see full size versions).

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