It would be easy to make an argument that development of a mobile website is a frivolous endeavor, considering the advancement in mobile browser capabilities. However, the reality is that even with the ability of some smart phones to view web pages intended for desktop browsing, it is still a necessity to have a mobile-friendly aspect to your website.

Phone-based browsing is becoming too much of a presence to ignore. On-the-go connectivity isn’t just knocking on the door of technology, it’s letting itself in.

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Typography on the web has been a thorn in the sides of website designers since the very beginning. Currently, a user has to have fonts installed on their system to display them in browsers, which means true web type is generally limited to a few basic fonts (Arial, Verdana, Georgia, etc). A few basic fonts just doesn’t cut it when designing attractive websites, so designers and developers have created a few workarounds.

The most basic is to simply save type like headlines as an image. This ensures it will render properly on any browser, regardless of what fonts users have installed. The problem is that it’s not really type; users can’t highlight it (for copying and pasting), and search engines won’t index it as such. It’s also a bigger file size, although this is less of an issue now that more users are on high-speed connections. In general this is the most common solution, but fundamentally flawed. For various reasons, text on the web should be actual text.

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At the Mackinac Policy Conference on Friday, Edsel B. Ford II spoke about bringing unity and a collaborative spirit back to Detroit and the State of Michigan as he presented the 2009 One D Scorecard.

The One D Scorecard, www.onedscorecard.org, is part of a regional, civic initiative that launched in November 2006 to support regional progress in Southeast Michigan.

The scorecard analyzes more than 75 indicators for five priority areas: Economic Prosperity, Educational Preparedness, Race Relations, Regional Transit, and Quality of Life. Based on the five areas, the scorecard sets a baseline to track progress and compares Michigan and the Detroit metropolitan area against other metropolitan areas and states.

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A war is raging with new lines, territories and allegiances being created every day. It is the Browser War, the fight for “usage share,” or what particular browser people are using the most. The browser war traces its roots back to the start of the Internet with Mosaic, Netscape, and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer - once the overwhelming choice, finds itself under attack from all sides.

Internet historians consider the battle today the second ‘browser war.’ The first is generally accepted to be the rivalry that exploded in the mid to late 1990s between Netscape and Microsoft.  Microsoft’s development of Internet Explorer (IE) versions one through five (and its subsequent addition to all Windows platforms upon installation) nearly eliminated the competition.  By 2002, IE had 95% of the user share.  The war had ended.

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(TROY, Mich.)— Creative, unique and memorable are all words that can be used to describe the art of Salvador Dali.  With those concepts in mind, Media Genesis has unveiled a new website dealing with one art gallery’s collection of the famed artist’s works.

Park West, a Southfield, Mich. based art gallery with collections including Picasso and Rembrandt, chose Media Genesis to build a new site to showcase their collection of Salvador Dali originals and display them to the public for informative and commercial reasons. (http://dali.parkwestgallery.com/index.htm)

Park West has three separate collections of Dali’s works: the Biblia Sacra, The Divine Comedy and Albaretto Editions.  Each collection was created at different parts of the famed surrealist’s career, and is housed at and purchasable from Park West.

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Design, content and functionality are to many, the major components of building and launching a website. But then you notice links aren’t working properly, the contact form isn’t sending to your email address and the main video on the homepage won’t play. Then you figured out the one critical step you missed - testing.

Manual testing of a site can be both daunting and time consuming, but in order for a site to be successful, some kind of testing needs to be done.

What if there was a kind of testing that could automatically check whether your website is functioning properly?

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We’ve all done it. You don’t have to feel ashamed to admit to that moment of intrigue while staring at that famous little search box.  Recently, however, the act of “Googling” yourself or someone else has just gotten just a little bit more interesting. Let’s face it: curiosity has gotten the best of most of us at one time or another as we type our name into Google just to see how many results come back.
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With all the advances of the Internet and the hype for social networking it’s easy to forget some of the original online marketing methods. Email gets a bad rap sometimes because of aggressive spammers and over-zealous product advocates who constantly attack your inbox. But in today’s economy email marketing can be extremely effective if done right – it’s cost effective, targeted, has a great reach for potential customers and current ones, and can even help establish your company as an expert in your industry.

Email marketing techniques

We all get tons of email every day, so it’s important to take a second and consider what has worked in your own inbox to pull you in. The source and reason of the email plays an important role in deciding if it gets opened or sent to the spam folder. You will have to think like a marketer and try to understand what your customers are looking for and unify that with the goals of your email campaign.

Here are 6 email marketing strategies to keep in mind:
• Start with a strong subject line. If you can’t capture your reader’s attention in an interesting subject line then they they probably will not go any further when viewing your e-newsletter. You have just a few words to grab their attention and ensure they continue reading.
• Two most important words: Design and Content. Is your design user-friendly? Does it encourage your reader’s eye to move down the page? Does it take into account different email viewing platforms and image filters? Once you get over the visual hurdles, remember that your content is responsible for engaging people and giving them a reason to keep reading.
• Include a call-to-action. Whether you want readers to visit the website, pass on information or download a whitepaper, make sure your email has a purpose. Even consider offering a promotion to your subscribers. It shows you appreciate their readership, and will encourage them to keep reading and forward your email to their friends and family.
• Make sure the links work. This seems basic, but your audience can’t pass on your great deals and stellar product message if they can’t forward your email or connect to your website.
• Respect your readers. This one can come in many forms. It might seem easy to skip a couple of these tips to increase email list volume, but remember that finding new members is much harder than keeping current ones:
  - Don’t sell their email addresses
  - Don’t bomb them with emails that are not relevant to them
  - Don’t assume everyone views their email the same – account for smart phones and PDAs
  - Don’t make the unsubscribe process more complicated than necessary
• Set goals and track results. It’s hard to see if you’ve made progress if you don’t know where you started or what you’re reaching for. You also can’t tell what works if you can’t see where your users are clicking.

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In the upcoming months, thousands of college graduates in Michigan will be starting their careers and a new life outside of college, yet nearly half of those graduates will be leaving Michigan.

“Michigan has some of the best academic institutions in the nation, yet many of the students graduating from those colleges and universities are moving away and not returning until 5-10 years later,” said Antoine Dubeauclard, president of Media Genesis. “We are losing the creativity and ambitious flare these recent graduates have to offer. Michigan needed a solution that would bridge the gap and make students aware that there are job opportunities here in Michigan.”

In efforts to help rebuild Michigan’s economy and keep recent graduates in the state, Media Genesis, a Troy web development company, teamed up with the Detroit Regional Chamber, West Michigan Strategic Alliance, Presidents Council for State Universities of Michigan, Digerati, Issue Media Group and many others to develop a website that would promote internships in Michigan.

The objective of the website, www.InternInMichigan.com, is to match students from Michigan’s many colleges and universities with internships at in-state companies. The site also gives advice for students on how to obtain an internship and to employers on how to have an internship program that is cost effective.

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Trolls can be scary. Not necessarily in the “What are you doing under my bridge, and why did you eat my goat?” sense of the word, but trolls can make deciding how you and your company are going to interact online a scarier thing.

If you’re still not sure what a troll is, allow a little help from Wikipedia:
An Internet troll, or simply troll in Internet slang, is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion.

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