Life moves fast in a web 2.0 world. You can’t wait to respond to technical issues. You plan for them. Ideally, when one of your servers fails, your business would experience little to no downtime. Your staff would have a spare system and a ghosted image of the failed machine ready to go live before you even knew it was down. In reality, servers and software are expensive and your staff might spend hours, if not days figuring out the failure and making repairs.

Keeping up with software updates across a variety of operating systems and applications is time consuming if the process isn’t automated. One missed software patch can allow hackers to gain entry and expose sensitive data. These potential fiascos mean serious downtime, lost productivity and fewer sales. They’re also easily avoidable.

Whether you have 10 employees or 10,000, you need intelligent IT solutions that scale quickly, are robust and provide performance and reliability. You need people who keep up with the latest technological advances and have the skills to support you now and the vision to chart your future. Thanks to the era of virtualization, you have those people.

Dell is here to support you. Service areas include:

• Desktop Configuration

• Security

• Storage Solutions

• Content Management

• Network Monitoring

Consulting with Dell Enterprise it management means working with IT professionals who are experts in cloud computing, database support, application integration and enterprise solutions. Enterprise software solutions simply refer to business or organizational software and systems as opposed to retail or personal software.

We can evaluate the software your office currently uses and observe how your operations work. Moving into the cloud means you’ll be able to access applications via the Web, so no more worries about keeping on top of updates or having the latest versions. If you have public computers, or employees who share computers, your machines can boot up with clean software installs every morning, fresh from the cloud. You’ll gain instant access to petabytes of off-site data storage.

Dell may advise that you outsource some or all aspects of your IT operations, even user support. Migrating your entire office to a new IT system may seem like a monumental task, but they will guide you and your staff through it and help streamline the entire process.

Ben Terrett of Noisy Decent Graphics has written a list of things that describe what “his Internet” is like. From an encounter with a technologically-challenged executive comes an inspiring exercise to get everyone on the same page first.

…I thought it might be a nice idea to get everyone to describe ‘their internet’ at the first meeting of any new client. Like they do at school when the new kids arrive mid term. Get everyone up to the same level. That way, everyone would know the ‘level’ of everyone else and there would be no clangers later on.

The list is not only informative, it’s also prescriptive (in a sort of passive-agressive way!). It addresses the little things clients don’t really take into consideration when they describe what they want for their websites. But the thing is, you’re the expert, so grab the opportunity to teach what thoughtful and usable design is. Some of my personal favorites from the list:

• Not using Flash for anything other than videos
• Giving simplicty and clarity top priority
• Not reinventing the wheel

You may not agree with everything on Ben’s list, but the idea is not just to yell at your client for “not getting it”, but to explain why you’re doing “it” that way. It strengthens the relationship you have with your client, and ensures clear communication pathways in between.

The first step for starting the business will be having your own site. Remember, your site needs to look flawless. It is a direct indication to your future clients of what you are capable of doing. While setting up the establishment for your business, you can use wireless internet routers for connecting several computers in a single network. Learn the things involved in successful web designing by researching. Try to offer additional services like SEO, IM, traffic promotion and search engine submission. You will find that most clients will pay extra for this.

You might also want to learn some fundamental coding technologies necessary for web designing. Be comfortable with HTML, XHTML, PHP and CSS along with Flash, Perl and MySQL. Decide the focus of your business and research the charges your competitors are offering. Always have a business plan and set your financial goals.

Gradually build your portfolio. You may start by designing the site of a friend. Try to work for no-profit organizations such as local clinics and churches that will look nice on your resume and you will be doing something good. Try to establish a partnership with other freelancers such as copywriters, search engine specialists etc. This working together in a group assures jobs landed through indirect associations.

Nowadays it is possible to use templates for web design as it is a tremendous time saver. Try to become a businessperson rather than being happy with freelancing and join the local chamber of commerce to promote your name.

Kottke’s unread posts notification in the title bar

It’s not just web applications like Gmail or Twitter that can enforce the “push” instead of “pull” format that is associated with the real-time web. If you spend a significant amount of time browsing Jason Kottke’s site you’ll probably notice the title bar changing when a new post gets published.

I added a new feature to kottke.org over the weekend: live updating on the home page. If you leave kottke.org open in your browser (with JavaScript on) and I post a new link, the page will display a message urging you to refresh to view some new posts. The page title changes too, so if you have it up in a tab, you can tell at a glance if something’s new. Right now the page checks for new posts every ten minutes, but that could change depending on server load, etc. Thanks to Twitter Search and Tumblr for the inspiration.

Developer hack: Kottke didn’t give details on how he did it, but this script is doing the work.

Infinite scrolling

Paginated websites make digesting content more manageable, but sometimes you just want to consume as much as possible too. Imagine devouring as many Google search results and Flickr images as you can.

Infinite scrolling—at least the hacks mentioned below—load the next page when you’re done browsing the current one. The next and previous page links are still there, so you have both options to choose from.

User hack: install Greasemonkey and the AutoPagerize user script.

Developer hack: use the jQuery plugin or the WordPress plugin.

FFFFOUND!’s keyboard navigation

Don’t underestimate the efficiency of the keyboard. At image-bookmarking site FFFFOUND!, using the keyboard is the best way to get around.

Developer hack: install paging_keys_js.

Badges

Gravatar-enabled WordCamp Badges

Let me first say that Gravatars, or globally recognized avatars, should be a staple in every social network or web app that lets uses upload avatars, because why upload one everywhere when it can be pulled from a centralized location?

Now combine Gravatar with sister application WordPress, specifically its conference WordCamp, and you’ve got brilliant automated way to print photos on conference badges. The best part is you can download the source code!

Creative Mornings Q&A Badges

This one’s not so high-tech, but a neat little idea nonetheless, especially for smaller, more frequent gatherings such as Creative Mornings. In place of names on the nametags, participants have to fill in the blank with an answer to a certain question.

Past sessions have asked questions like “What would you like to redesign?”, “What can you teach me?”, “What would you do if you had your own storefront?”, and “What would make you a good client?” Cheap, easy, and an instant icebreaker.

Crowdsourcing

dConstruct Time Capsule

With the theme of dConstruct 2009 being Designing for Tomorrow, it makes total sense to come up with a Time Capsule competition, where the best entry wins free passes including hotel accommodations and a seat at the speakers dinner.

The question is simple: “What do you see that you would like to preserve for the future?” but it also underscores how important understanding the past and present is in order to build for the future. Especially when it comes to the Web.

SXSW Panel Picker

For such a massive event as the South By Southwest (SXSW) Conferences and Festivals, tapping into the wisdom of the masses makes sense. Not only does the SXSW PanelPicker increase interactivity by letting the participants vote for the talks that will go live, but it also builds extra buzz as the speakers themselves campaign for their own panels.

Twitter & Co. Mashups

MIX09 Flotzam

These days everybody is contributing to the coverage of any one event, and it’s even more awesome to experience that collaboration during instead of after the fact. Mashups such as Flotzam grabs streams from Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Twitter, and the blogosphere. This one looks especially nice with the Tetris skin, which was originally built for Microsoft conference MIX09.

Read more about the process here. Grab the .NET and Silverlight source code here.

Carsonified @HelloApp

@HelloApp, which debuts at the Future of Web Apps – London 2009, lets conference-goers meet new people via Twitter. First you tag yourself during check-in, earn badges and points for meeting new people and completing certain tasks, and browse the seating chart according to professional background (design, development, PHP, Rails).

A perfect blend of socializing and tweeting at the same time. Read how Carsonified created it.

What’s your great idea?

Got a great conference idea already executed, or still brewing? The moral of the story here: don’t leave your geekiness behind when you go offline. Embrace it, because it makes things a hell of a lot more interesting.

Rhetoric is a framework that allows us to quantify valuable information as having a beginning, middle, and end. This philosophy can be carried over to your websites to create an effective experience for your users. However, the three steps differ slightly in that they become attract, inform, and invoke.

Attract Them

The ability of blogs to attract customers is directly related to the quality of the content on their site. This also involves the topics discussed on a site. However, another element that generally gets overlooked is the aesthetics of the site. If the aesthetics of a site compliment the content, then you are already one step closer to a better design.

Just because you start another web design site, what differentiates it from the rest that will make people want to visit? How will it attract people? Will it be through the looks and feel of the site, the content, or both?

When attempting to attract people to your site and your message there are two main questions that must be answered by you, “Why should I listen to you?” and “What’s in it for me?”.

To answer the first question you must achieve credibility and in this community that can be a difficult thing to do. Over time if you continue to write quality content that others link to then over time you will develop a credibility for yourself. One should not expect credibility from simply placing a website on the web. Another way to gain credibility is through the endorsement of someone else who has high credibility. If Bowman was to one day write an entry talking about a designer that taught him everything he knew then that designer would be given instant credibility and people would be more willing to listen to his words.

The quick answer to the second question is that you will provide the audience with something new to learn and share. If there is nothing to be gained from your site, then there is no reason to visit it.

Inform Them

Once you have attracted users to your site it becomes your job to inform them. Certainly they have showed some interest because they are on your site, but how do you go about informing them? Of course the answer is content, but there are other issues that are involved with informing someone.

To effectively inform an audience you have to convince them of the relevance, importance, and timeliness of the message. This opens your audience up and allows them to more readily receive your message. The best example of this occurred when Zeldman began his tract on Web Standards with the article, To Hell With Bad Browsers.

Invoke Them

There are a lot of “call to actions” in the web community. Examples range from building accessible websites to getting rid of “www” in urls. A major problem with these movements is that they do not address anyone’s needs. To invoke individuals into action (eg. purchasing something online) their interaction with your message must address their real motivations and their real needs. It’s no use saying everyone should develop sites with CSS if making quick money is the intention of the audience.

The Three Steps

If you are consciously aware of the three step process and use it to relay your message over time then you should have no problem developing an audience that is willing to listen. All of the great writers on the web have captured this ability to implement the 3 steps in almost all of their writings whether they intended to or not.

Many of these ideas can be found in John Lenker’s excellent book, Train of Thoughts.

Since Twitter is an ecosystem of early adopters, it didn’t take long before a bookmarklet surfaced, which sports only a minor difference with the original code in the date format, and seems to display better on this site.

Note that this method inherits your websites styles, which means you may or may not have to tweak your CSS to accommodate it. Unfortunately it still looks bad in feed readers.

Has progress been achieved here?

I’m not sure this is any better than a screenshot. Putting aside the long-winded user flow of grabbing the code since that can be remedied once it’s built into the Twitter system, there’s an overflowing amount of inline CSS to copy and paste. The advantage to this static code, however, instead of a JavaScript embed is that the text is preserved even when the tweet is deleted.

The question remains: should people go through all this trouble to use tweets as quotes? Is there really that much more to be gained by preserving the tweet “format” over a simple blockquote? I still don’t think so.

Most of these features are available in Firefox, whether by default or as an add-on, but the reason I’m focused on Chrome is that it’s a Google product, and this company can push both its browser and search forward by turbocharging the omnibox the way they’re continually adding new features to Google search.

The Chrome extension Google Quick Scroll, which highlights and jumps to portions of a page where one’s Google search query can be found, is a perfect example of Google search and the Chrome browser working side by side to improve the search—and more importantly, find—experience.

Google’s autocomplete search box is getting more powerful each day, so why not integrate it into Chrome? It probably won’t matter to those who can’t tell the difference between a web browser and a search engine, and use Google as a jump-off point to browsing other sites, but Google can significantly alter the whole searching-browsing experience if it so desires.

One downside would be eliminating the need to visit Google.com itself and contribute to the ad impressions, but that should only happen for quicker, smarter searches such as weather forecasts, currency exchange rates, stock quotes, etc. The fewer clicks, the better.

1. The Chinese cyber attacks on Google (and at least 20 other large companies) got through because the exploited code worked only in IE6, on Windows 2000 and XP.
2. The German and French governments have both asked its citizens to upgrade their IE6 browsers to prevent attacks happening to them.
3. Microsoft released a security advisory warning against attacks specifically against Internet Explorer 6.

Mashable includes the three items above in its list, but the last one is the most compelling:

This will not be the last massive IE6 security breach: This flaw was unknown before Google’s groundbreaking China announcement. And it’s not the first flaw ever found with the browser — there are at least 142 vulnerabilities in IE6, 22 of which are not yet patched. Would you use armor that had 142 weak spots?

Internet Explorer 6 is a run-down browser with very little support for exploits. It’s more costly for businesses to leave it lying around like a ticking time bomb than exert effort to upgrade their systems.

The good news is, we’re getting bigger institutions stepping up against IE6. Let’s hope their spheres of influence really are that effective. You can’t get much bigger than European governments, Microsoft, or Google.

Internet Explorer is the “best”

IE8 Comparison (comic by Brad Colbow)

I think people around the world made a collective ROFLMAO when the infamous IE8 browser comparison chart came out. I reserved any biased judgment when I first saw it, but oh my, Microsoft sure knows how to put its best features forward.

That’s not all it’s doing to promote the latest version of Internet Exploder, though. There’s a treasure hunt for $10,000 buried “online” (you have to use IE8 to find it, of course), and a donation of meals to charity (per IE8 download, of course).

Firefox has a new icon

New Firefox logo

Firefox is definitely the darling of the browser lot, so even a branding update—the fire, the fox, and the glossy globe are still intact and recognizable—is under magnified scrutiny.

Of course that’s not all there is to the next major release of Firefox, but I’m just glad they also care about their image. Lots of open source products pay little attention to the designery stuff. Firefox knows how to stay fresh and accessible to its audience without trying too hard (cough, see previous browser, cough).

Opera unites

Opera continues to innovate with its upcoming release, including an interface refresh from the same person who brought the Firefox logo to life. But it doesn’t stop there. Opera Unite cuts off the middleman for sharing photos, music, and all other kinds of files by turning the browser into a web server.

It’s not for everybody, but it’s a fascinating idea. An interesting twist to the “web as platform” concept. First there was web-based equivalents of desktop apps, as well as full-blown desktop interfaces on the web, then it was cloud computing, then it was the real-time web, then we have this. The jury’s still out on whether this will actually take off—considering Opera’s level of influence compared to the fox and the blue “e”—but any venture into Web 3.0 is a welcome effort. Here’s hoping we jump into it very soon.

But what is a web browser?

But apparently we can’t jump just yet. According to this discovery by The Next Web, the average internet user can’t tell the difference between a search engine and a browser, about 92% of those interviewed. Ironically, it was Google conducting the survey, and the final question was whether people knew that it had its own web browser.

Although Internet Explorer and Firefox were mentioned, people still didn’t know where the Web ended and the software began. It’s all just a blur of computer terms, which, at the end of the day, help them “find stuff”.

Knowing this, shouldn’t web browsers be scrambling to teach its users how the Internet works, including typing URLs into the address bar, and not just relying solely on search engines? Or should they just give up on the nth incarnation of the Browser Wars?