Insights

We have developed the habit of recommending that clients avoid making their email addresses spider-accessible. That is, rather than including linked email addresses directly in their pages, we have them use other techniques to hide their email addresses while maintaining a user-friendly approach for users to contact them via email. One rather traditional way is to use contact forms.

We have been bootstrapping our new BillBoards product for the Boerne Chamber of Commerce website for about the last week and a half. BillBoards is a hosted text ad solution that I've written using the Ruby on Rails framework. But, why does the internet need another ad service? It differs in two main aspects.

Rules of thumb are not always a legitimate claim, and can really drive folks to make poor decisions. I ran across a couple in this article:

The New Marketing Landscape

Parsing XML in Flash is no walk apart, as I've come to find out. When I first got here and saw Trevor's XML parsing actionscript, I knew there had to be a better way. Working with the DOM is tedious and complex. You're really just looping through collections of nodes, and dealing with objects that have no relation to the data you're trying to access.

This article captures the essence of the inherent tension within a marketing/design agency like our own. "If design isn't profitable, then it's art". And we're not just talking profitable from the design firm's perspective, either. In fact, it's mainly relevant in the sense of being profitable for our customers. This is what savvy clients should expect.