The buzz isn’t about great styling, open source systems, or amazing features. It’s about the price. At $85, it’s definitely a “value” based computer with some basic features.

Coby focuses on portability and small LCD televisions at value prices, so moving into the netbook market wasn’t a huge stretch.

The 7″ screen displays a Windows CE operating system, running with a 624 MHz Marvell PXA303 processor.

The memory is strictly flash, and it’s limited — only 2 GB. For those who know the technology, the Wi Fi is 802.11 b/g not 802.11n. Still, the WiFi is built in and ready to go. For internet browsing and other limited applications, it could be useful.

Whether or not the Coby smartbook works for you, (there are some mixed reviews on the quality of Coby’s “value” products) it can be seen as a preview into the future of mobile computing.

Prices will continue to go down as technology improves, and that means more people in the market.

Parents may spring for the under-$100 netbook for younger and younger children, opening the mobile kids game market even wider. People who won’t spring for the $300 or $400 smartphone will perhaps go in the $85 for a simple smartbook.

Bottom line — more people with access to your website more often. Make your site appealing, and make it work on mobile platforms.

We’d suggest testing out your site with a mobile device and see how your different page elements load, and make any adjustments that you need. Ask us for some help arranging your web page for the burgeoning mobile market.

What does this mean for the average business with a web presence? It means that you want to optimize your site – not just for Google and other web crawlers, but also for small screen browsers.

Although there was some talk of needing a “mobile device only” version of every website, this kind of duplication is not necessary.  In fact, a cascading style sheet, or CSS, can be written into your web page, instructing the device as it loads your page, to optimize your site for the phone or PDA that is requesting it. So writing in CSS is the first step to optimizing your page for hand held devices and smart phones.

Use a program like the Openwave Phone Simulator to test your web page and see how it will look on a “generic” cell phone type device. If you know the specific parameters of a particular type of device (say, an Apple iPhone), then you can increase the parameters and get an accurate view.

Then optimize your content. Remember that too much text is too much for a smartphone device, and keep the articles short (no more than 500 words, on average). Many small articles with relevant links are better than one long article.

Make sure that the most important elements in your page will load in the center of the phone’s screen, and are accessible without scrolling.  Make sure your pages load quickly. Cell phones and smart phones have slower internet connections than most broadband providers, and you don’t want a clunky website that gums up the works. The customer will click the “close” box after a few seconds.

Many cell phone users will block the photos on your site from loading, so be sure to have relevant and interesting ALT tags that identify your photos. You want your page to make sense to the viewer who has no photo access.

With a little planning,  you will have a great website that is optimize for both PC and smartphone use.

We’ve been using Sitecore for our own website and for client’s websites because of its incredible power and functionality. Now Sitecore has also been recognized by independent research firm Forrester Research as a top CMS.

Forrester Research points out what the experts at Webdatamation could tell you — the flexibility and power of Sitecore make it strong in areas where competitors are weak.

The system is excellent for ease in creating content and integrating the content into a site, managing the workflow, and integrating content.

Sitecore also gets high marks for its ability to effectively target sites and content, having a global approach, integrating numerous sites, and for its community controls.

Sitecore leads out in multilingual content and in providing the means for making a separation between content and the presentation. This creates a dynamic environment for delivering the message and for using graphics and text in other contexts for different purposes.

Webdatamation chose Sitecore in part because it is a powerful solution for both simple websites as well as complex, fully powered sites.

The features of Sitecore allow for a highly flexible website that can integrate all of the Web 2.0 features.  Marketing departments can add website content or sales information to a company site easily without a great deal of technical knowledge, and still maintain a professional and responsive site.

It’s simple to integrate any analytic tools  and other business software into the Sitecore system, and it’s compatible with ecommerce products so that customers and site visitors have a seamless and enjoyable experience on your site.

We also like Sitecore because of their constant updates, research and trend forecasting. We know that our customers will have all the latest tools at their fingertips as soon as they are available.

If you haven’t yet seen what Sitecore can do for you, contact us at Webdatamation and let us give you a glimpse.

Your online presentation is an important aspect of your business, and you want the appearance and functionality of your site to reflect your philosophy and your products in a way that is accessible and easy to use.

Build Trust

Your company website projects an image and an attitude. Really, the business website should be considered a part of your overall marketing campaign. The immediate impression that a visitor gets from your website tells them about your business.

If your site is well organized, well designed, and fully functional, then customers will trust your business and the products you offer. If the website looks amateur or filled with frivolous advertising unrelated to your products, they’ll likely have a negative impression and distrust your business.

Invest in great web design to create the image you want you business to portray.

Ease of Use

Great web designs are also easy to use. Make sure that there are plenty of links that connect customers with important information, and that they can easily get back to where they want to be on your site.

Today’s customers expect high quality, professional design on a website. They do respond to good marketing and great design, and want to be able to navigate around a site easily. They want to find the information, products and services that they need quickly and logically, or they’ll soon be off to find another site.

Functionality

Your website design also needs to be functional. Links need to be active, and the code needs to be complete. Simple coding errors can lead to “broken” websites that can’t be seen by viewers. Even simple things can prompt viewing errors. Not only does this deter customers, but your Google rankings drop with non-functional links.

You want to be sure your ecommerce solution is intuitive, security and functional so that your customers feel comfortable making purchases on your site. Any ease of use functions add to customer satisfaction, and that leads to repeat purchases.

Get Design Expertise

The web designers at Webdatamation know just how to design effective and creative websites that meet customers’ needs. Our designers can add any elements for interaction, information and commerce to make your site both highly attractive and highly functional.

In today’s business world, however, a having a web presence is a primary consideration for any business of any size, and should be a top priority.

Cost Effective Advertising

By using good search engine optimized copy and a great graphic design, you can attract people to your site, and keep them there. If you have an informative, useful site, other sites will link to it, giving you more free advertising. You can utilize a variety of different online tools such as videos, graphics, interactive games, calculators and photo collections that will help your customers and those who happen upon your site get to know your company and your products.

Building Community Connections

An effective website will help you make connections, both in your online business community and your offline community. When people can find your site easily, quickly learn about your company and what you do, and find a way to contact you, you have made great strides toward becoming integrated into the lives and lifestyle of virtual and actual neighborhoods.

New Means of Communicating with Customers

With a website, you have a simple way to gather information about your clients, such as their email address. Through utilizing this resource, you can direct promotional emails to your clients, run “web only” sales, and send them informational e-newsletters that provide information and promote your products.

Control Over the Message

With a website, you are in complete control over what image your business presents. Particularly for online businesses, you are able to create and preserve and image of your own making in a way that is difficult to do with traditional print advertising. A traditional brick and mortar business can use a website to extend and expand the business image they have tried to form in their store. The consistency will attract and keep customers.

If you aren’t satisfied with your business’s online presence, contact Webdatamation for ideas to fully utilize the online advantage of a business website.

Both have the advantage of being open source programs, which means they are constantly updated and improved. There are many plugins and applications created by a core of invested users, increasing functionality and removing bugs with regularity.

Still, there are plenty of differences, as anyone who has used both systems will note.

Here are some things to consider about Umbraco:

• It can be edited in Microsoft Word, making for easy editing for most users.
• There are OSS or commercial install options
• A high-quality, highly functional CMS
• Install gives you a blank page – no template, not much of anything else – This means plenty of freedom and flexibility – freedom to succeed or freedom to fail. Success of a site is entirely up to a developer, meaning you must have a highly qualified and creative developer who also knows legal compliance and standards compliance.
• Umbraco has high requirements for hosting, so it is difficult to find a “shared” hosting environment that will support it
• Still working on good ecommerce solutions
• Version 4 has better support for Safari and Firefox
• There are good plugins available, and a management system built into Umbraco

By contrast, here are some items to consider about DotNetNuke:

Has a proprietary feel, despite being open source

• Dot NET developers like it, those who are not dot NET developers have trouble with it
• Based on Microsoft’s ASP.NET, which is the most popular web technology currently
• Cheap to use and reduces total development costs – no ongoing licensing fees
• Full access to source code so it can be altered to fit individual organizations
• Can manage text, image, documents, links, events, news, banner ads and threaded info
• Supports multiple websites
• Installs easily
• Can manage site hosting, content, security, web design and membership in one program
• Multi-language ability
• Fully extensible and scalable
• User friendly interface and intuitve site wizards, help icons and interface for those familiar with Dot NET
• DNN has a large user base (125,000 registered users) and a core programming team dedicated to the system, so it is a large community. There are also an increasing number of third party developers of plug-ins, etc. for DNN

Which open-source hosting program is right for you? It depends on your abilities, wants and business model. Either way you go, using an open source CMS might be the way for you to save money and still have a strong, attractive site.

The DotNetNuke system is particularly focused on small businesses and organizations that operate on a tight budget (for example, many non-profit organizations), giving them many of the features of a large CMS on an open source platform.

DotNetNuke benefits from community sites that host developers. End users can join these communities and benefit from the combined experience of hundred or thousands of other developers who are also using DotNetNuke for the same kinds of projects daily.

Developers are able to share ideas and solutions and propose and tweak the program constantly so everyone benefits with improved projects and results.

Some advantages of DotNetNuke include:
•    Flexible and adaptable framework that can accommodate websites, extranets, and intranets
•    Intuitive and user-friendly design that allows users with little technical knowledge manage a web site
•    Site wizards, help buttons, and a user interface that is constantly updated for ease of use
•    CMS support from a dedicated core development group
•    Straightforward, simple installation for quick deployment
•    Many language options, making DotNetNuke viable for users in many different countries
•    No-cost, open source – users can do whatever they like with the program under a BSD agreement. Users can use the program for commercial or non profit purposes, with no requirements other than directing credit to the DotNetNuke community
•    Lowers the cost of managing multiple websites
•    The opportunity to create and upsell premium content for clients – site templates, content management modules and many database options, for example
•    Utilizes all the latest technologies, including modules, module packaging, ASP.NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 Express, and Visual Web Developer

There are over 150,000 registered users  of DotNetNuke, and a number of active producers of plugins, modules and templates for the program, making it a growing and dynamic content management system.

There’s some great site consistency when using DotNetNuke (DNN) and easy site navigation. The pages turnaround quickly, a number of people can work on a site at once, and there is great growth potential with DNN.

DotNetNuke is another highly versatile and functional open source solution for Content Management, particularly for small businesses and non profits.

GIMP is easy to work with and is ideal for anyone and everyone whoever wishes to create, edit and retouch any type of graphics, images or photographs. Whether you are a novice, an experienced graphic and web designer or a photographer, GIMP caters to all of your needs if you are on budget and looking for an open source Adobe Photoshop alternative. Though the project of GIMP was started by Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis in 1995, it is now maintained by a group of volunteer developers. It’s features include channels, layers, brushes, masking tools, filters and effects, tabbed palettes, editable text tools, perspective clone, improved printing, and color operations. Its color palette includes RGB, HSV, colour wheel, CMYK, mixing modes and tools to pick colors from images and graphics. It also supports hexadecimal color codes. A few days ago the team released the latest version, GIMP 2.6.5 and this is a bug fixed release. The new improved features include GEGL integration for 32 bit color support and a more versatile easy-to-use free select tool. Another interesting feature of this latest version is the dynamic brushes. The brush dynamics let you map the different brush parameters like hardness, opacity, size and color to the input dynamics like pressure, velocity and random. To use this you need to map at least 2 brush parameters namely size and opacity to one or more input dynamics.

With this latest version, GIMP has also become easy to install as now there is no need to download and install GTX Runtime Environment separately. GIMP’s professional tools and latest plug in developments have not only made it stand apart among other similar open source applications but also a genuine alternative of Adobe Photoshop without the heavy price tag.

Phew! Would you still buy Photoshop? Of course, if your work demands more intensive image editing than what I have talked about earlier. Otherwise, as we all know, “open source matters”!

Sitecore recently identified the three key web content management trends for 2009 – do any of these sound like goals for your company this year? If so, let us help you implement them using the seamless integration tools Sitecore provides.

The first trend is the growth of ecommerce elements. Companies want to integrate more and more ecommerce tools into their websites. One of the most popular tools for businesses to implement is InSite Commerce, a program that integrates ecommerce solutions. It allows a business to manage multiple websites and allows a great deal of flexibility for customers.

The other top ecommerce solution used by businesses is Microsoft Commerce Server, which offers intuitive tools for integrating ecommerce solutions including an out of the box shopping solution.

The second major trend for web content management is integrating portals into public websites. Microsoft’s SharePoint was the most frequently used type of portal. Using portals on a public website allows a company to provide the customers with quick, easy access to important information. These portals can be customized according to the needs of your customers and your business.

The final trend for 2009 in web content management is increased implementation of Web 2.0 functionalities. Sitecore’s content management system is uniquely situated to effortlessly add applications like wikis, blogs, forums, and surveys to a website. While Web 2.0 is an ongoing topic of conversation, Sitecore found that companies have increased integration of Web 2.0 functionalities at a rate that is 250 percent higher than last year, so the pace of Web 2.0 integration is growing rapidly.

Other trends that are continuing from 2008 are continuing compatibility with the .NET network and making websites compatible with mobile computing.

With Sitecore, Webdatamation can keep your website ahead of the curve in implementing and integrating any elements you’d like into your company website.

Piwik is a PHP-MySql based program. In order to get started, you have to first download this software from their website and get it installed on your own web server. It just takes as less as 5 minutes to set things up and get going. At the end of the set up process, the software generates a javascript code. You just need to copy and paste this code onto the web pages that you would want to track. There is also a plugin that would automate this process for you! Simple?

Okay, you would still probably argue that Google analytics is the most popular amongst all and that Piwik is just no big deal. However, let me mention here that alternative open source web analytics solutions have their own advantages:

The software is installed on your own server and your sensitive corporate data prevented from being exposed to third party websites
Provides a more professional look and feel, does not have to connect to a third party site for analytics
More manageable and maintainable

Piwik is one such software that not only promises, but also delivers. Being an excellent alternative to Google analytics, Piwik is unique and stands out the rest. Here is a list of features that would make you pick Piwik:

If you are a developer, you can build your own plugins with Piwik! It allows you to add and remove features. Yes, Piwik’s features are coded inside plugins!
You can publish your data in a number of formats including the most popular ones: xml, json, php, csv, etc.
The user interface of Piwik is fully customizable. Creating a report in Piwik is as easy as dragging and dropping widgets into their respective placeholders.
Easily embed graphs and charts in your website dashboard or blog
The graphs are interactive and you can view brief stats just by rolling your mouse over them!

Piwik may be a new kid on the block, but is gaining instant popularity. The official blog is updated on a regular basis and the Piwik team is trying hard to come up with more new exciting features.

I would pick Piwik for now. At 1.9 MB, what more can I ask for? You have any questions?