Writings from Force 5 Basecamp

09/20/10

There has been a lot of activity in the browser market over the past few months. The most recent step forward is Microsoft’s release of Internet Explorer (IE) 9. Microsoft is touting improvements with IEs handling of web standards, graphics, and JavaScript. JavaScript has become the de-facto standard for web designers of dynamic and highly interactive websites. Since so many

09/16/10

What are Response Headers? Response headers is data that gets sent from the server to the browser. The data can include date & time, content type (ex: text/html, text/javascript), and server information (ex: Microsoft-IIS/7.0). Why is it important to hide them? Security. At the most basic level it will not broadcast what operating system the web server is and which

09/13/10

As a Certified Brand Strategist here at Force 5, I am always on the look out for brand done well and brand that needs help. Both are easy to spot. I have found two examples of wonderful brand ambassadors locally and want to share them with you. The first example of a great brand ambassador is one of my favorite

09/09/10

Force 5, South Bend, In., announces the addition of Christian Mattix as web application developer and network administrator. Mattix’s responsibilities include technical design and development of web applications, along with building, optimizing, maintaining and trouble shooting complex and secure databases, among other duties. Mattix graduated from Purdue University with a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science and a minor

08/23/10

400 million…500 million…..and still growing. Whether you “like” it (pun intended) or not—Facebook is dominant in helping companies build relationships with their clients. Look at the chart in the article below (thanks to AD Age…)—and with the likes of Starbucks having 12.7 million fans, and growing at almost 79,000 a DAY-you can’t help but consider facebook as a dominant player

07/09/10

During the process of migrating development over to the .NET 4 Framework there have been noticeable improvements. One of the newest improvements is used quite often, Response.RedirectPermanent(). This new feature does a permanent redirection from a requested URL to a specified URL. For a quick flashback to how this was previously completed review the code below: /* * Previous 301

07/06/10

In a previous post I showed how-to add specific page keywords & descriptions while using ASP.NET with Master Pages. Compared with the latest ASP.NET 4 version, this technique was not coder friendly. In ASP.NET 4 adding page keywords and descriptions is as easy as this shown below. protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { // page keywords Page.MetaKeywords = “keywords

06/24/10

As a marketer I’m always looking for inspiration, and I’m certain most of us who work in the industry would like nothing more than to conceptually develop and execute the next big idea.  Some of you might wonder what I mean – big idea seems slightly vague I assume.  In this instance I liken a big idea to something that

06/09/10

If you are a web developer or familiar with web technologies, there’s no doubt you’ve heard about HTML 5 and the “next level” of web design and functionality. It’s morphed into a buzz term that has been thrown around a lot lately. Between Apple’s spat with Adobe over Flash and the latest browsers touting HTML 5 compatibility, there’s still a

05/21/10

In case you haven’t noticed the web is changing. There is a huge movement underway toward clean, simple, user friendly websites that promote productivity and, consumer interaction. The average consumer doesn’t care how creative a design team you have or, how technically advanced your development team is. They want information. Honest, peer driven information. Whether a potential customer is at

05/07/10

Sitemap.xml What are Sitemaps and why are they important? Sitemaps are a tool for developers to inform search engines about the website content that is available to be indexed. The sitemap protocol is made up of XML that contains a list of URLs, last modified dates, and page priorities for your website. Here is a quick sample in simple form

04/29/10

I just finished an amazing book.  It really made me think. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life, by Donald Miller. It was about the author working with two men, Ben and Steve, who wanted to make a movie of Miller’s life.  It was during the discussions of his “real life” he discovered