If you’re one of our clients, you’ve probably never seen these icons. That’s OK, don’t worry about it. They relate to a techy thing called “source control.” We practice source control on all of our projects to make sure that your code doesn’t get overwritten as we collaborate to make your website awesome. Slice of Lime having a green logo and these icons being green is a pure coincidence…seriously.

While we don’t always use the exact services above (Beanstalk, Versions, and Coda are the 3 icons), we do always implement source control. As a result, we’ve never had to tell a client, “um, all of your work just got overwritten and we need to start over from the beginning.” Source control allows multiple people to contribute to your project in parallel without worrying about writing over each other’s work. Whenever we happen to work on the same file at the same time, our source control system shows us when this happens and allows us to merge our code together. In this way, even changes two people want to make on the same file can happen in tandem.

What this gives our clients is a seriously efficient process. On top of a speedy delivery, your code is always backed up in case we ever need to go back in time to resurrect a version of your site that got modified along the way.

Pretty neat, right? Yeah, we think so, too. Just thought we’d share one more thing that we do on every project that our clients usually don’t even know about.

Hi there! Richard here, proud to announce the launch of Proof, our in-house web-application that allows us to easily upload and organize information architecture and design comps for our clients.

This has been a need for a long time, and thanks to Jeff for planting the idea, Travis for the design, Lindsay and the rest of the team for valuable input, we got it built. Before this tool, a designer would have to manually create thumbnails, HTML pages, and upload them all to the server which could take a half hour or more. Now our designers can add a whole round worth of comps in just a few minutes.

The client also benefits greatly from this, by having a much cleaner, consistent experience when browsing through their comps. A client can peruse their comps arranged by project and round, and open full-size comp images in multiple tabs, thereby allowing them to compare comps side by side. And since this tool is a user-based system, with built-in authentication, clients can rest assured knowing that their designs are safe from viewing by others.

Slice of Lime had a great time sponsoring Wordcamp Denver this year. There was a great mix of designers and developers thirsty to learn more about everything Wordpress.

Slice of Lime’s CEO, Kevin Menzie, spoke on the Web Design Panel in the morning (see picture above) right after a great keynote by Matt Mullenweg.

The morning session concluded with a talk on the Open Source Community and Ben Huh describing his Wordpress driven business, I Can Has Cheezburger. Ben’s site features pictures of cats with funny captions – it gets more traffic than any other Wordpress site out there. Go figure.

From there, the conference broke into two tracks; Blogger and Technology. We spent our time hopping from one track to the next, checking out Crowd Favorite’s Wordpress framework and a workshop on building custom plug-ins and then running across the street to see Micah’s talk on promoting your personal brand.

An after party followed at the Paramount Cafe where many drinks were had courtesy of Flying Dog Brewery.

Overall, we’d suggest checking out the next Wordcamp in your area. The day flew by and we thoroughly enjoyed learning some new Wordpress techniques and meeting inspiring people.

Next we set the lose agenda for the next day, fully acknowledging that things would shift. Jeremy Tanner did an excellent job facilitating the entire event. This picture shows us setting the calendar – 4 events would be going on simultaneously each half hour or hour.

We had the pleasure of attending some neat talks such as Neil Simon’s “How to Create a Wordpress Plug-in” and Michael Sitarwzewski’s startup pitch for yourTuner.com.

We wrapped up the day with an experiment in social collaboration…learning the Thriller dance moves as a team. For better or worse, there was a video camera present and it was uploaded to the web for all of you to enjoy.

We’d highly recommend attending an un-conference if you haven’t. There are some amazing like-minded people to meet, great conversations, and excellent (and more importantly, relevant) sessions.

Last month we flew out to San Francisco on a last minute whim to check out the Adobe MAX 2008 conference. We left Boulder fully expecting to learn new and interesting things that we could accomplish with their updated line of products, most of which make up the repertoire of software we use to design and build websites at Slice of Lime.

What we didn’t expect was to be blown away by the sheer magnitude of the conference and how being around so many like-minded peers – thousands of them – could really impact the way we felt about the industry we’re so passionate about. People from all different walks of life and a multitude of professions were there, and, whether young or old, designer, developer, manager or anything in between, they all seemed as elated as ourselves to be involved.

It was enthralling to sit in on a session hosted by some of the companies in the business whose work we idolize. To hear these teams describe the way they collaborate on projects, approach similar hurdles in design and development as ourselves, and still manage to produce industry-leading work was a real treat and provided us with an indescribable amount of motivation and inspiration to get home to Boulder and apply it to our next big project.

So we went for the knowledge and returned with the experience and the wild desire to do something even greater than we’ve done before, and it was all a matter of getting inspired when we weren’t necessarily expecting it.

The Silverback application allowed us to bring laptops on location (into the child’s home) and to use the built in iSight camera to measure the reaction of the child’s face, where they were looking, what they were saying, and where they were clicking. A moderator took notes, but avoided interfering or helping the child if they were stuck.

This process was immensely helpful pre-launch as it brought some usability issues to light that we hadn’t though about. We wound up making major changes to the nav one week before launching to improve the experience right out of the gate. Here’s a small clip of Max bringing Charlie, the Big Green Rabbit, to life. His reaction is priceless:

This user testing was very valuable to us. However, there’s another sort of “user testing” that we’ve seen lately – “Socially-Driven User Testing.” We’ve found that some of our target demographic will take it upon themselves to blog and even post videos about their experience with the websites we build. This sort of data is almost more valuable since it comes in naturally (vs. us going out to actively acquire it in a controlled environment).

Here’s a YouTube video that we found of a girl dancing along to the “Learn a Dance” portion of the Big Green Rabbit site:

We’ve seen this sort of Socially-Driven User Testing before with the Jibbitz site that we built, where V and Cat talked about how “fly” the site was:

While controlled user testing will always be a valuable way for us to collect data, we’ll be sure to look more and more towards social media channels to collect invaluable information as we move forward.

We had the opportunity to sit on a User Experience panel for TechStars a couple of weeks ago. TechStars is an organization that mentors 10 start-up companies each summer and Slice of Lime is one of their sponsors.

The panel was comprised of my business partner, Jeff Rodanski, and the CEO of Viget, Brian Williams. We covered a bunch of issues around user experience within the context of a startup and used past clients like Jibbitz and PhotoVu as examples.

The main takeaway we wanted people to have was that simply creating the functionality of a website without consideration of target audience and goals can limit your chance of success. In other words, Kevin Costner is a Liar – if you build it, they won’t necessarily come.

In every project we do, we focus on target audience and goals above all else. Whether it’s information architecture, design, or development, we always refer back to these two things.

Goals

• What is the primary action you want people to take when they come to your website?
• What do you want people to do before leaving your website?
• What are your broader company goals?

Target Audience

• Research your target audience if you’re not already familiar
• What is you target audience like? How computer literate are they?
• What are their likes/dislikes?

We usually start our clients off with a questionnaire that focuses on goals and target audience to help us through strategy conversations.

If the project is more complicated, we may also do industry research or focus groups to get more insight into the target audience.

As we get into information architecture and wireframing of a website, we make sure to always reference the goals of the project and the target audience. Is this user flow going to make sense to our audience? Do the elements on this page really address the action our client wants a user to take?

We go through iterations for most steps of the process. When reviewing designs, we recommend our clients not only offer their gut reactions, but that they also collect feedback from people in their target audience.

Focusing on goals and target audience in relation to user experience may seem straight forward – and it is. As obvious as it may seem, we’ve seen companies approach projects with a “functionality-first” approach many times. In our opinion, functionality should support your goals and target audience, not the other way around.

It was a pleasure sitting on the panel and getting the chance to organize these thoughts for the amazing startup companies TechStars has assembled this year. Many thanks to David Cohen for hosting.

Oftentimes, when I mention “web-standards based design” to a client, they get a glazed look in their eye. I usually have to back that statement up with something like, “It will make the site load faster, make it easily indexible by Google, and will be simple to update going forward.” It’s usually that “G” word that makes people excited about web standards, however, the flexibility that you get stretches far beyond search engine optimization.

Slice of Lime has a collector’s edition Lego box in the office for anyone to sit down and play with when they need to get their creative juices flowing. It occurred to me that the Lego story, and it’s success, can be applied to the web standards story in many ways.

Legos

• Lego started way back in 1934 with bricks made of wood.
• Eleven years later (1945), Lego started making plastic pieces.
• Two years later (1947), Lego started making their famous, standard, interlocking plastic bricks.

Web Standards

• The first publicly available HTML documentation was created in 1991.
• Eight years later (1999), the first Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) were published.
• Two years later (2001), W3C authored WCAG 2.0, what we now know as “web standards.”

As you can see, both efforts took the same time frame, roughly 10 years, to land on a standard that lent itself to collaboration and growth.

To set the stage for what why web standards is important, here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia’s “Legos” entry:

Lego pieces of all varieties have been, first and foremost, part of a universal system. Despite tremendous variation in the design and purpose of individual pieces over the years, each remains compatible in some way with existing pieces. Lego bricks from 1963 still interlock with those made in 2007, and Lego sets for young children are compatible with those made for teenagers.

So, how does this relate to the web?

As web standards continue to get embraced by browsers, large steps can be made in terms of new technology and innovation.

On the technology front, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can almost universally be used to control the way your website displays on web browsers as well as other devices. With standardization, the once-dormant AJAX (a combination of Javascript, XML, and server-side scripting) is now a familiar term in the land of “Web 2.0″.

On the innovation front, entrepreneurs are finding it’s easier than ever to create ideas without worrying about technology limitations. It’s actually quite the opposite – technology is serving as an enabler. Everything from widgets you can install on your blog to entire platforms such as Facebook or OpenSocial are made possible by the basic building blocks that web standards gives us.

At Slice of Lime, one of the things that’s exciting is that the web feels like a pile of Legos has been dumped in front of all of us. We’re all reaching in and seeing what can be created from these pieces. It’s a time of heavy innovation as we test what’s possible.

After all, six 2×4 Lego bricks of the same color can be put together in 915,103,765 ways – just imagine what we can come up with on the web.

One of my favorite web resources is ChangeThis, which packages “manifestos” into tidy, well designed PDFs. Their latest manifesto is authored by Mohammad Iqbal from Ogilivy & Mather Advertising and is titled “The Elongating Tail of Brand Communication.”

The manifesto references Chris Anderson’s book, “The Long Tail,” which is an excellent read outlining how the web is changing our “hit-driven” culture into a “niche-driven” culture. Given a plethora of choices, people’s tastes become much more refined. This fact, coupled with the web audience reaching critical mass, makes niche-industries possible.

Iqbal’s manifesto attempts to relate this to the world of branding. Can a brand have sub-brands that relate to smaller, niche audiences?

I couldn’t help but think about the brand direction of one of our latest clients, Return Path, while reading this article. We just recently launched their new website which takes a “long-tail” approach, in my opinion. They moved from trying to promote stand-alone brands (Sender Score, Postmaster Network, List Growth, and Strategic Solutions) and instead moved them under one core brand, Return Path. This brand then trickles down to the sub-brands, which composes the long tail.

The homepage makes it easy for their niche audiences to quickly find what they’re looking for using either a drop down menu at the top or an interactive menu system in the middle of the page.

Once the user arrives at the “sub-brand”, Sender Score for example, they are asked again to narrow their focus. Are they Email Senders? An Internet Service Provider? A Mail Administrator?

From there, the messaging focuses in on that specific person, “We’re stuck in the middle with you.” Return Path talks about how they can help manage spammers. On the left side of the page, whitepapers that relate specifically to this type of customer are dynamically presented.

Iqbal mentions the importance of “trading control for influence” to help promote sub-brands. Return Path turns over control via their popular blog, the “Email Marketing Water Cooler.” Regular posts speak directly to their niche audiences. Each post, written by Return Path staff, re-inforces the sub-brands for eternity. They are easy to find via a Google search and can easily be spread around the web, discussed, or subscribed to.

I especially enjoyed Iqbal’s closing two paragraphs:

A better model to communicate complexity is to let the consumers assemble it for themselves at their end. Just ensure that they have all the essential ingredients—a long tail of diverse yet simple and easy to communicate brand messages—and they will eventually put together a complex, layered and nuanced understanding of the brand.

One of the most surprising and desirable side effects of long tail brand communication is that by merely contemplating more than one message at the same time, your consumer is assembling the complexity you sought to communicate, but wisely didn’t.

I believe that the new Return Path website has achieved speaking directly to its many niche audiences while promoting their core, “Return Path” brand. As we look towards 2008, I’m sure that we’ll continue to explore ways to think about the “long tail” in relation to this company as well as our other clients.