Extra! Extra!

Extractable is pleased to announce a new hire within our Strategic Services group: Mathew Quilter.

Mathew Quilter joins Extractable as a Web Strategist. He previously worked at Walmart.com, Logitech.com and Xerox.com. He has managed content from initial development to global rollout, launched Web marketing programs across multiple geographies, and consulted to various start-ups on issues from Web lead-generation to globalization strategies.

We are proud to have Mathew on board!

Extractable is pleased to annouce the launch of the Schwab MoneyWise web site! Kudos to the Extractable team for a solid inital project, resulting in site launch during Financial Literacy Month. The team is excited to continue enhancing the site with additional activities, tools, content, and a community forum! More information regarding the site’s charter can be found in the official Charles Schwab press release.

The site is live at: http://www.schwabmoneywise.com

Congrats to the Extractable team on the launch of the redesigned Merit Medical website.

The site is live at: http://www.merit.com

Need to explain “Web 2.0″ to your friends? There is a short video available that might help. It manages to convey the central idea in fairly non-technical language. The presentation is at a music video pace to keep the viewer interested and walks through a short history of the evolution of the web.

Chip Gettinger of Astoria Software interview Rahel Bailie about World Usability day, noted via Scott Abel, the content wrangler, who writes:

In addition to providing a succinct overview of usability, Bailie discusses why understanding the user experience is critical for information experts, content management professionals, and content management technology vendors alike.

Is usability related to content management? “Absolutely!” Bailie says. “Content management is about usability in two ways. First, the content management system itself has to be usable. The system developers need to understand the mental model of users in order for clients to be able use the system efficiently. Usability testing is critical here, to understand how the system can support business processes, instead of contorting processes to fit the system - which still happens all too often, I might add. Then, the CMS output has to be usable by the front-end users.”

Just in time for the new school year, over a year in the making, and with thousands of pages migrated from the old design, Extractable is pleased to announce the relaunch of the redesigned and re-architected website of the California Teacher’s Association. CTA servers more than 300,000 members and the site features a new MyCTA extranet section offering a wide range of online services to those members, including active teachers, student teachers, and retired NEA members.

CNET’s news.com surveys the evolving mobile web development field (The mobile Internet: Are we there yet?), hitting on the major question we all wrestle with: develop a distinct unique site for mobile users (at example.mobi, possibly) or somehow dynamically optimize a single site for multiple types of user agents.

Our sense is that we are still in a transitional time so, at least on one major project, we are taking a hybrid approach. In fact, we are still working out the details: We may redirect mobile users to a version of the primary site optimized for their converged devices, or we may simply encourage them to use the mobile-optimized version of the site while still enabling them to satisfy their curiosity by visiting the web-basic version of the site.

In the latter case, we’ll use a smart enough stylesheet and user-agent sniffing regime so that they can have a satisfactory experience even if not visiting the mobile-specific site. Either way, we want to build both “flavors” of the site from the same content and image database, flagging some content as web-only and optimizing versions of the images for the mobile interface.

A key thing to remember is that even though a single site can be carefully crafted to be adequate in both interfaces, the use cases are not necessarily the same. We don’t expect people to read reams of paragraphs on their phones. More likely they will seek answers, help with problems, contact information, shortcuts. They will save their research and studying time for the full computer / laptop experience.

Of course in time this may change and things continue to converge, but it’s important to build for today with an eye on tomorrow and not get too far ahead of ourselves.

Suzanne Stefanac is writing a book on blogging called Dispatches from Blogistan for Peachpit/New Riders. Naturally, she’s been blogging the whole process and posting snippets of work in progress and the texts of interviews she’s conducted for the book.

I know Suzanne from The Well, where I host the blog conference and where I’m known as <xian> and she’s known as <zorca>. A while back she interviewed me via email and she recently published the results on her book’s blog: Dispatches From Blogistan » interview with christian crumlish.

In the interview we talk about blogging (of course) as well as social media, RSS, wikis, politics, media, authority, trust, online presence, and the long tail. Hope you enjoy it (in lieu of Friday UX blogging, which I’m too lazy busy to do today.

Scott Abel, Content Management Strategist at The Content Wrangler, Inc. alerted the community to a free webinar on Cutting Edge Web Content Management, July 26, 2006 at 2PM EST, to be presented by Ann Rockley, The Rockley Group:

Developing and delivering dynamic, personalized content via the Web for superior customer service.

Mountains of content. Multiple websites in multiple languages. How do you ensure that you aren’t recreating content and that the right content is delivered to the right person? A unified content strategy will enable you to save your content in a single place for distribution to anywhere - the Web, email, a cell phone or PDA, etc. Anywhere - as defined by your customer. In short, personalizing your content will drive revenue and improve service to customers and business partners.

Identifying the issue is easy enough, how do you do it? In this presentation, you’ll learn how to unify your content strategy to support dynamic publishing across multiple channels to fulfill the ideal of true one-to-one marketing. While the focus will be on the Web as a delivery channel, the discussion will include the need to deliver content via other distribution channels.

I meant to post this a while back. In response to an ongoing blog-driven conversation about content inventories, Lou Rosenfeld wrote about the inherent limitations to a traditional content inventory, in that it represents a snapshot in time of what is, often, a moving target. Instead, he proposes the idea of a rolling content inventory:

That’s why I’m increasingly recommending pursuing a rolling content inventory. Instead of a snapshot, as all those silly IA books suggest, inventory your content on an ongoing basis. Put another way, a content inventory is an process, not a deliverable. Put yet another way, content inventory shouldn’t be something that you allocate the first two weeks of your redesign to; allocate 10% or 15% of your job to it instead.