Tecture LLC

In February, Tecture partners Ben Rowland and Tony Moy, flanked by their designers, developers, and project managers, set out to redesign and rebuild a brand new website for one lucky non-profit organization, pro bono, in just one single day. Dubbed Tecture's "24-Hr Website Blitz," Health & Medicine Policy Research Group (HMPRG) was selected as the winner from a pool of applications over the course of a week. more...

Ever wonder how to make sure you files survive the upcoming Mayan Apocalypse? Fellow Tecturians labored day and night to build www.offworldbackup.com. A fully functioning site that allows you to "back up" your files on various datacenters around the solar system. Insuring your files will survive doomsday. Visitors can actually store and backup their files by signing up for any of our 100% free accounts. Or if you feel there's still hope for the world, sign up for our "Joni Mitchell Plan" for $5. All proceeds from this plan will go to and benefit Greenpeace. more...

Consider Logged Out, 404, and Server Error pages as marketing opportunities. more...

Few other ways exist to reach as many customers as a business Facebook Page. With 1 in every 13 people in the world on the social networking site, Mark Zuckerberg’s brainchild has become an essential marketing tool. Before you start plastering your Facebook page with content, make sure you know the best time and content to post. Tecture’s Blog offers you the numbers you need to make your journey in the world of Facebook a success. more...

With online sales on the rise, any company can reach a potentially global market with an e-commerce website. more...

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...

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

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...

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...

assets/root/images/blog/Twitter_chicago.jpg

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

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...