RD2 recently worked with StoneGate Senior Care on a content management solution requiring many websites to be deployed within one master website. The challenge, all of them need to have autonomy while using the same system for publishing and maintaining content.

We’ve done this sort of thing before, but for very large companies, developing within “enterprise-class software” rather than leveraging the power of open source. StoneGate wanted to be able to scale beyond 50 websites with one content publishing system. Drupal is a perfect fit – except for one important thing – There was no available mechanism for deploying multiple sites within one system that is managed and maintained from one central source. So, we built one…

Now, StoneGate Senior Care is creating new websites quickly and easily using one system with “single sign-on.” New facility websites will be a popular thing for StoneGate. We received accolades from StoneGate’s marketing communications manager and the VP of StoneGate’s development arm for how easy it is to deploy and manage these websites.

Very soon we (StoneGate Senior Care and RD2, inc.) will be giving back to the Drupal community by making our Multi-Site Management module available for use with any Drupal 5.6 and 5.7 website. We’ve seen some great things happening in this community and very soon we can share more…

Today we are releasing a series of screencasts that introduce the Villages of Jackson Creek web site and the Multi-Site management module. We will be adding more screencasts each week to showcase the many features of Drupal that were implemented and customized for StoneGate.
Many thanks to StoneGate Senior Care for their support and many thanks to Ryan at Slant for a great user interface to make this come together.

With no further ado:

• Villages of Jackson Creek Tour
• Drupal Dashboard
• Introducing Multi-Site Management
• Single Site Setup
• Website Creation

Analysts are estimating that Apple has sold 700,000 iPhones in the U.S. According to Nielsen//NetRatings, there were about 209 million U.S. Internet users as of March/07, 69.2% of the nation’s population. Making the reasonable assumption that the 700,000 iPhones sold were to people who already regularly use the Internet, that means 0.25% of Internet users in the U.S. will occasionally be using the Mobile Safari browser on their iPhones to visit your web presence, and that’s after the first four days of sales. Does that make you warm and fuzzy, or send a chill down your spine? At RD2, we couldn’t be happier.

Which Web?

The iPhone falls squarely in a facet of the web that has been growing for some time now, a sort of limbo between the “desktop web” and the “mobile web.” Apple recently posted their Development Guidelines for the iPhone which “read like a love-letter to standards-based design” as our local Adam Keys puts it.

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I’m on a shuttle at just before 5:00 am. We are driving from the Sonoma Fairmont Mission to the San Francisco airport and it’s still dark, so we won’t be seeing much of the Golden Gate in daylight. As usual, I am checking my blackberry for messages that might have come through at night. I see an automated message from our blog, “awaiting moderation.”. It seems that our spam filter is learning and evolving on it’s own. It senses there might be something we don’t want to allow through, so our spam plugin in WordPress is kind enough to ask me to check this message out.

Just yesterday I found myself evangelizing the importance of taking handhelds into consideration when designing interfaces. This is something we talk about all the time. Having never actually looked at our blog console from my blackberry before, I had nothing better to do than follow the link. I admit that to my surprise, the handheld interface in WordPress is incredibly useful.

Very easily and very quickly I am able to follow the link from the WordPress notification email directly into the management console. Upon login, I am presented with all of the information I would normally see in my FireFox browser. Front and center, I am presented with items that WordPress suspects might be spam, and I easily navigate to the recent items and either verify whether spam or not. In noticing how easy and FAST this user experience is, I tried out most of the functionality on our blog console. Remember that it is 5am now and I am sitting on a bus driving through the rain. OK, I am a nerd….however, even this post was written from my blackberry. It’s easy to select or even create tags for my post. I can save and review later, edit my time stamp, add custom fields and I even have full access to the code shortcuts that allow me to insert HTML code snippets if I wish to use them.

This simple and fast user experience really validates for me the importance of developing web content with hand held consideration in mind. I rarely surf the web on my blackberry. Maybe because my expectations are low since so many sites have such horrible user experiences for “little screens.”. Maybe we would all be going to our blackberries or other hand held devices more often if our expectations were higher…and if we could count on very simple, direct and highly usable user experiences. Afterall, I would not want to just browse the web for hours on end with my blackberry, but there are so many areas that could be improved that could heighten our expectations for these simple things we need to do online.

Immediately after selecting “publish,” I’ll be adding my wordpress console to my blackberry shortcuts.

OK, I’ve threatened to do this for a long time (old blog entry about Customer Service Guy www.kurtfisher.com/5.html )- time to act.

I invite all to share their customer experiences - both Good and Bad! We will start a new category for this blog called ‘Customer Experience’ and I invite posts and comments related to your experiences. Let us know about companies that provide exceptional customer experiences and ones that miss the mark. It is not important to tell us the name of the company - what is important is to explain what was good or bad about the experience so we can all expand our consciousness about what affects customer experiences.

This awareness will make us better marketing mangers, strategists, designers and developers. Plus, it will be fun hearing the horror stories – some are pretty funny once you get over the urge to throw your computer out the window.

Remember – no company bashing, just sharing of constructive observations.

OK, here’s my latest: I ordered tickets online this morning for a play. I was offered a seating chart to select my seats – Area 1 or area 2. I asked for best available and during checkout was told I was in Section D. ???? What happened to Area 1 and 2? Why wasn’t Section D on the map? I went back to the seating chart to see if I could figure it out - I have no idea where my seats are but because I have been to this play before I will chance it – others might bail on checking out and pick up the phone instead – there go service costs; or worse, lost revenue.

But it is frustrating when labels are not consistent from page to page and step to step. Unfortunately this is a common theme in user experience.

Atta Boy, Blake. You have attracted the attention of WaSP and they posted a nice interview with you. LOVE IT!

“As a student of Interactive Media Design at the Art Institute of Dallas, Texas, Blake Elshire learned CSS as part of his course, then discovered that not all students were quite as charmed by the technology as he was. He shares his thoughts and insights with WaSP EduTF.

At the time of year where many schools are starting a new term, some teachers are still demanding archaic Web practices as part of their syllabi. Whether Web standards is taught at educational institutions is an issue that is no longer new. And yet, it is not uncommon for a student to be penalized for using modern Web techniques. Factors contributing to why we are not yet seeing more valid university Web sites, or why fresh graduates are not more knowledgeable in Web standards, still constitute a multi-faceted problem.

Blake Elshire first caught the attention of EduTF via his comment to our Buzz On Quality Education. We invited him to tell us a little more about his experience as a student in interactive media design. Read the interview“

Well, it’s been a busy couple of weeks for RD2’s resident Flash designer.

Verizon Superpages requested a PowerPoint-like sales presentation, but with a little extra jazz. Enter Flash. With Flash’s ability to read Text and XML files, I was able to build an animated, easy to navigate, and even easier to update flash presentation, using Text files that can be read and edited on all computers running anything from OS X, Windows 95-XP, and everything in between.

The benefits of this system? Anyone with a personal computer can update the presentation just by changing a text file — no knowledge of the underlying technology is required. You don’t have to know PowerPoint or Flash, you don’t even have to have the programs installed on your computer to make changes. The benefit of this is that each sales rep. can customize a presentation based on his or her personal figures and presentation style.

Another benefit of using Text files is the ability to set and remove pauses in the presentation itself. Instead of a sales rep. having to press a button every time they want to move to the next item, they can set a delay using a text file, and the presentation moves to the rep.’s own personal speed.

Data, bar graphs, and percentages can also be dynamically created. Using a system of math and a bit of formating, it’s possible to make a series of bar graphs that actually grow to the appropriate sizes, even if the numbers change. This gives the sales rep. the ability to change the sizes of bar graphs simply by inserting new sales figures, or other information.

Flash is an excellent tool for corporate presentations, and further research and plain old elbow grease have given me insights that will streamline the process for future flash presentations.

Have you ever witnessed someone surfing the web with images turned off? There’s a setting to let you surf the web with images turned off, at least, last I checked (about five years ago). Even years ago, I would notice friends and acquaintances who would do just that. As if to create a more scannable and easy to understand web experience. From a design perspective, I was just shocked…
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