Tecture LLC

Businesses have another way of promoting themselves via social media (and another site to keep track of in addition to Facebook and Twitter): Google+ Pages for Business more...

Halloween is arguably one of the few holidays within the year to scare up the creative juices and embrace your inner scaredy-cat. Halloween 2011 here at Tecture was no exception. From having a majority of the office arriving to work in full Halloween garb (including a client meeting or two) to murdering some delicious pizzas and imbibing some “spirits” in record time, October 31st proved to be a bona fide dead man's party. more...

Amazon today announced a new Kindle, the Kindle Fire, which is a full-color tablet with access to apps and streaming content. The big news for web developers, though, is the Silk cloud-based web browser they have developed and installed on it. more...

Restaurants tend to have terrible websites, according to this Slate article. We agree. more...

Google has launched its Google+ Project, its latest effort to attempt to compete with Facebook. Should you run out and start replacing your Facebook Like buttons with the new Google +1? Or just add another sharing button next to your already long list of social networking sharing crap: Like, Tweet, LinkedIn, Yahoo Pulse, etc? more...

Forrester Research projects that US mobile ecommerce will reach $31 billion by 2016. more...

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Designing websites for mobile devices? This chart makes it pretty clear where to focus your efforts. more...

Nielsen reports that phones powered by Google's Android operating system are more popular than the BlackBerry or iPhone among people who purchased a smartphone within the last six months. more...

At Tecture, one of our main jobs is to build websites or web applications that look great on as many web browsers as possible, which is much harder (and more costly) than it may seem. more...

Facebook is launching a new "Promote Your Post" feature that will let page owners promote individual postings with paid advertising. more...

According to research by Alessandro Acquisti, an economist at Carnegie Mellon, web visitors are more likely to "...admit more sensitive, embarrassing and even illegal behaviors to a Web site that's been designed to look kind of cheesy." more...

Google's real-time search is now available. Real-time search lets you see live results from partners including Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. more...

It appears that Google has changed course, and is now ignoring the nofollow attribute on links. more...

The mobile wars are heating up. While Apple's iPhone is the clear leader, don't count Google out. Their free Android operating system hasn't made a major PR splash, but cell phone makers are quietly shifting to the new OS. more...

Google Announces its new Social Search product, plus a partnership with Twitter, and its intention to build a real-time Twitter search. more...

Monday was a truly amazing day at Tecture as five unique sites were launched all within the same day! It's like Christmas in October! Merry Halloween! more...

Twitter will release paid Pro Accounts by the end of the year, which will give it its first revenue. more...

Microsoft and Yahoo have partnered in a 10-year deal in which Yahoo's search will now be powered by Microsoft's new Bing search engine, and Microsoft's AdCenter self-service advertising engine will power advertising on both sites. Yahoo's sales staff will sell premium advertising for both sites, and Microsoft and Yahoo will share advertising revenue. In a joint statement, Microsoft and Yahoo say that "advertisers no longer have to rely on one company that dominates more than 70% of all search." more...

Firefox 3.5 has launched and includes HTML 5 support, with features such as built-in video support, animated PNG, dynamic content injection, CSS-based transformations, and cross-site XMLHttpRequest. more...

Starbucks is one of many businesses exploring the use of Twitter as a component of its online social marketing campaign. I read an article in the New York Times entitled "New Starbucks Ads Seek to Recruit Online Fans." Evidently, Starbucks noticed that its online fans and followers race to post photos of its redecorated stores online (the article specifically mentions stores being redecorated for the holidays, but new stores and stores undergoing renovations have been posted online as well), and is trying to create similar buzz by enticing its fans to locate and shoot photos of posters it has produced, then be the first to post a photo online via Twitter. more...

Google is rolling out a new "rich snippet" feature in their search results. Initially, this snippet provides support for reviews and people, but theoretically could support any variety structured data. more...

Google Analytics has announced the availability of a public beta for its new API, which will allow developers to pull its site analytics data into custom applications. Developers have already created applications with mashups of analytics data combined with custom application data, integrated analytics into email marketing campaigns, and added live analytics data to PowerPoint presentations. Other possible applications include viewing your website performance from your computer dashboard or from your mobile phone. more...

Microsoft announces IE 8. We at Tecture have been putting it through its paces in beta releases, and we are hopeful that its release is the death knell for IE 6. more...

Binth's Joker Playing Card deck has been featured on blog and sites across the internet, including Thrillist and Cool Material. If you haven't seen this deck, it's an amazing product. more...

Facebook nearly acquired Twitter for $500MM. Not sure what impact this would have had on either's profitability. Evidently, the deal collapsed due to disagreements over Facebook's valuation. more...

Top twittering cities... Chicago surpasses San Francisco and makes it to number 3! more...

After clandestinely changing their Terms of Use (TOS) content, facebook users protest. Facebook recoils in fear. more...

Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have announced support for a new HTML element: the canonical link element. This element will allow developers to specify the "friendly" version of URLs to search engines via a special new HTML tag. This is big news for websites that make use of URL rewriting, an increasingly common trick to mask dynamic URLs with more friendly keywords. Such sites frequently wind up with duplicate URLs in search engines such as Google. This is also big news for developers, who have a difficult time preventing search engines from finding and indexing this duplicate content. more...

You know you've made it when you get your own search engine. Microblogs provide amazing insight and information and are here to stay. more...

Google Friend Connect is a new service that allows anyone with a website to instantly add social networking features to their existing website without writing any code. The service is in beta and is now available to everyone. more...

Google's browser toolbar is an extremely useful tool for SEO. It allows you to inspect the PageRank of each page on your website as you browse. The downside is that Google doesn't update the PageRank data in the toolbar regularly. In fact, it only happens every few months. I've learned from Matt Cutts' blog that the toolbar PageRank data was last updated on December 31st, 2008. more...

Rob Conery's blog post on The Perfect Storm Botnet has a lot of great information on the storm botnet and how web developers can inadvertently contribute to the spread of the malware that renders millions of computers into zombie spambots via cross-site script (XSS) injection attacks through website form submissions. Fortunately, there is an easy way in ASP.NET to prevent this: use the HTML.Encode() method on anything output to a webpage. more...

Apple constantly pushes the boundaries of human interaction. See for yourself as Apple launches the revolutionary MacBook Wheel. more...

Firefox, major web browser player, gets closer to releasing a new mobile browser. Cell phones wait with bated breath. more...

Google has now provided style filtering on Image Searches. more...

As the rest of the web world moves on, Firefox 2 quietly slips into retirement today. Time to upgrade those browsers. more...

Alot of new press is out concerning major security flaws of Internet Explorer going back to version 5.0. The flaw allows unscrupulous individuals to exploit the flaws and gain access to users passwords and other personal information.

Google's new web browser, Chrome, is out of beta. more...