Here’s three sites I never leave home without checking first.

kayak.com
I start with this one. They are an aggregator of airline prices. They are not online travel agents like Orbitz, rather, they report pricing through a fantastic GUI, easy to use, and covers 250 some airlines.

Farecast.com
If you have flexiblity in your travel schedule, you may want to check this website out. It uses a modeling engine that estimates roughly when the lowest fare will likely happen in the near future. Started from a University of Washington research project, computer scientist Oren Etzioni has developed modeling engine that does pretty accurate job. Nice!

Yapta.com
Airfare prices fluctuate, and occasionally you can get a real deal if you’re there at the right moment. Once you’ve picked the an airflight and fare that you want, you can use this site to alert you to any price drops. If you already bought a ticket, go ahead an do it anyway. The real secret is that most airlines will give you a travel voucher for the difference if you tell them that you noticed that they dropped the price of your ticket.

Ryan Singer of 37 Signals gave a talk on ways to improve a sign-up forms for websites. It is a good refresher for web professionals to remember to think about the user experience first and foremost. It’s easy for developers to get into their projects’ technical goals and forget that their users are going to come with varying levels of expertise and experience. Its vitally important to put the user experience first, and “building momentum” as Ryan refers to it, is very important. Your website conversion or your web apps adoption rates depend on it.

I love using the “don’t make me think” rule of thumb, heck, it’s a core principal as far as I’m concerned. Your websites and web apps need to be designed to minimize the amount of “thinking” your users have to do when interacting with them. Especially with sign-up forms, if it’s complicated, if it’s long, if it has ambiguous language, this is going to work against you by increasing the likelihood of a frustrated user experience.

Tips, helpful advice, embedded reminders, are now more easily applied with AJAX technologies than ever before, so there’s even less of an excuse not use them. More on this topic soon.

By the way, yes, apparently the camera man was distracted by Ryan’s stage pacing, so unfortunately some of the presentation slides were not included, sigh… yes, that’s another topic for another day as well.

We are fast approaching the end of the year and for some of you, you only have a few days before you leave for the holidays. Before you rush off to gift giving and eggnogs, here are 5 things to do right now to make sure your web site is in good shape for 2008.

1) At the top of the list, check that darn copyright date! Nothing is more glaring than reading about all the rights you’ve reserved, last year. Make sure that the date either automatically updates itself (dynamically generated) or that someone in your organization adds 2008 to the date range the minute they get back into the office January 1st (yeah right). Yes, it may be a mere formality in most cases, but search engines do look for incongruent elements like these and factor them into their algorithms to determine your page rank and ultimately your search engine results placement. If they see your site is still claiming rights for 2007, they may penalize you over your competitor who’s got a brand new 2008 copyright declared.

2) While your you’re at it, check that privacy statement and terms of service. A year has passed and can you remember the last time you looked at the privacy statement? Probably not. Is it still congruent with your company policies? Does it reference services or products you no longer support or provide service for? Privacy statements and TOS’ seem to fall into the “create and forget” types of pages. However, considering that in the even of a dispute or issue, they may save you or your customers some heartache, you should really be periodically reviewing them. Every 6 months for information web sites (corporate web site), quarterly for ecommerce sites, and monthly for any innovative, user content generated web sites. Yes, that means reviewing them with your attorney if your fortunate enough to afford one.

3) Do you need update pricing? Now is as good as any to decide if you need to update your pricing or inventory. Look and see if there will be any increase in shipping costs in particular. 2008 is already shaping out to be a sketchy year so you might as well get ready now.

4) Look for any outdated or soon-to-be-dated content. Do you need to move anything into those “archives” like you did the year before? Do you need to setup any new 2008 areas of your web site? It is better to avoid creating directories with the date as part of the URI. Yes, my blog does say 2007 in each of the top posts. And yes, in this particular case, do as I say, not as I do. Again, search engines will automatically start to defer down dated content, particularly last year’s content. Don’t be surprised to see drop in your web stats, it’s part of the search engine year end clean up that happens. That leads us to #5.

5) Create and stage any new content for early 2008! After a week or two off for the holidays, you will likely have to take a little time to get back into the routine of updating your web sites. So get started now! Create a few draft articles for your blog and try to get the bulk of it done before you leave. Sure, you may want to write the proverbial “look back to 2007″ article, but its far more important to talk about what’s coming ahead in early 2008 than what happened in 2007. As far as SEO goes, nostalgia is always out, “new and improved” is always, always going to be in.

Happy holidays everyone! Thanks for making 2007 fantastic.

Ernesto Gluecksmann

We have been working recently with the folks at Project On Government Oversight (POGO) on their new and improved Federal Contractor Misconduct Database. This database site is a resource that tracks the top 50 federal contractors and their, errhm, bad habits.

Their goal was to provide a centralized database listing of instances of misconduct, and vital to that was making sure the system easily provided all their cited publicly available sources.

POGO was founded in 1981 and they are an independent nonprofit that investigates and exposes corruption and other misconduct in order to achieve a more accountable federal government.

buy atarax

We provided consulting and development services for their new database site. They needed something they could easily update and keep track of large body of links and information on a daily basis.

The database itself is a customized CMS system, completely CSS driven with built RSS feeds to facilitate syndication and tracking. In other words, pretty nice tool. Future articles we will discuss some of the underlining technologies, why they should matter to your business or organization and how you can benefit from these relatively news technologies.

LogoLounge.com

This is probably one of the best sites I know to keep up with the world of logo design. Bill Gardner of LogoLounge puts together an annual Logo Trends report is just fantastic.

Logo Design
Creating new websites or blogs from scratch can be an overwhelming process, particularly for new businesses or clients whereby this is their first foray into the online world as content providers. There are just so many possibilities and decisions to make.

Let The Pros Do It
Occasionally, a client asks me to get involved with a logo creation and selection process. You should always hire a professional or a agency to develop the creative materials. My professional web consulting background stems from years of web programming and development. While I can definitely tell you how the aesthetics of your website/logo are impacting your business, I am not going to be the guy to design your logo. And unless you are a graphic design, you need to hire a professional. Creating art and discerning the quality of art in a market, are entirely separate skills.

Function And Form, Always!
I have long since learned (as well as the entire web industry) that function and form must go hand in hand. Consider it an absolute.

The example, is this blog I have started. We have all the sophisticated functionality of a WordPress blog in place, what are we missing? We’re missing a compelling ‘look’. Something that signals to visitors that this is a substantive site with valuable information.

“But I like this template, what’s wrong with just using the WordPress basic template?”

A visitor coming to this site is less likely to come back. It has a “template” like feel to it. The message a template site delivers is that the author doesn’t care enough or isn’t capable to provided a unique site design that represents itself as ready to serious business. And the more experienced the visitor is with the web, more likely they have been exposed to default templates that come built in.

I do care, by the way.

The Making of WCDC

One of the goals of WCDC is to implement many of the techniques and concepts of developing websites by not just talking about it, but by developing this blog and reflecting on it. So trust that, a logo and design template are on my list of To-Do’s for WCDC.

It should not go unnoticed the order I recommend when creating a website from scratch is how I am writing these posts. Its my hopes that I can chronicle its growth and share with you the many things that go into developing a great website.

Step 1
Find an available and suitable domain name by stopping BustAName.com.

Step 2
Get creative and put together a logo. Stop by LoungeLogo.com for ideas concepts.

Step 3
Develop your site design (I’ll come back to this).

Of course this a grand over simplification, but it is the initial first steps.