Google’s increasing emphasis this year on its “ Rich Snippets ” program (an observation obtained directly from one of their Client Account Managers) should encourage businesses, and especially local vendors and eCommerce merchants, to start using additional “semantic markup” for their HTML. “Semantic markup” is additional tagging (or labels) using structured data that are added to help parsers and programs that read your webpage to understand truly what specific content areas or fragments are about. Google currently supports labels about reviews, people profiles, products, business listings, recipes, and events. The labels are invisible to users, but not to search engines. For example, a local business that states it’s located at “123 Reston Drive, Florida City, California” – might drive search engines or 3rd-party location apps a little nutty trying to figure out where it is. Likewise, a single product page may have testimonial content associated with both the product, and the compa...

In the world of online, interactive design, it’s not always clear when the business/interaction designing ends and the IT development begins – or for that matter, how much development is really needed. Even though the project plan might be very clear, governance requirements of the Enterprise IT environment can drive a chicken-or-egg scenario. While you can’t really finalize the detailed IT design and specifications until the visual design, functional requirements and information architecture are complete…these elements do need to be informed very early and often by some concrete IT direction and constraints in order to be realistic and actually capable of meeting the business requirements. IT investments to support your project also need to be confirmed as early as possible (for example if a new CMS platform is needed), since the lead time for approving, paying, installing, configuring and training activities associated with the new HW/SW may take as long as the entire project was ori...