Xeno Media is a full-service Web consultancy located just west of Chicago in Oakbrook Terrace, IL. We’re looking for an intelligent, hands-on web developer to join our expanding team.

This is an exceptional opportunity to get good, real-world experience developing cutting-edge open source tools and custom web applications. We’ve got a really interesting and diverse client base, with industries spanning fashion to physics, and just about everything in between.

We’re a small shop and that means finding the right personality is probably more important to us than finding the perfect resume. The ideal candidate will be smart, eager and have a few years experience in web application development. The successful candidate will have the ability to develop high-quality code, love solving complex problems, and provide a voice in product design and direction. Overall, the successful candidate understands what impact technology can have in developing successful businesses online and must be comfortable collaborating with cross-functional teams (i.e. pesky project managers).

Excellent salary and benefits – and we even buy you lunch on Fridays. What’s not to like about that? If you’re interested, see below…

What you’ll be doing:

• Developing Drupal, Wordpress and custom CMS websites and web applications
• Participating in daily meetings and regular planning and review sessions
• Interacting with cross-functional teams to ensure complete delivery of web applications
• Providing documentation as required and participating in code reviews, planning sessions and routine status stand-ups
• Providing accurate level of effort time estimates and providing recommendations for feature prioritization
• Assisting in release/deployment planning and execution activities in a fast-pace agile environment

What you’ve got to have:

• PHP5, MySQL (PostGreSQL a plus), HTML/CSS/AJAX/JavaScript
• Working knowledge of Web servers (Apache, IIS)
• Content Management System implementation
• Ambition, flexibility and understanding of the varied demands of a small shop
• Excellent verbal/written communication skills and strong time management and analytical/problem solving abilities

Pretty awesome if you also had:

• 2+ years experience in web application development
• Advanced experience with Drupal architecture, best practices, and coding standards
• Familiarity with versioning management systems such as SVN and source control/deployment methodology
• Experience with Java or C/C++
• Experience with object-oriented design and data modeling
• Familiarity with user experience design principles and processes
• Experience with third-party applications/tools and integration
• Social media or user generated content experience highly desired

*** To apply, send your resume to resumes@xenomedia.com along with a brief introduction explaining why you are a good fit. This job requires you to be onsite – local candidates only please. ***

But today I’d like to talk about the Frequently Asked Questions section of your web site.

Be honest with me, are those really your most frequently asked questions?

Too often, FAQ pages are put together before a site even launches, with questions the site’s owner thinks people might have. But even after the site has been up for a year and hundreds of customer emails have come in, that page is never updated with the questions people really do have.

Worse is when the Frequently Asked Questions page is turned into a marketing channel, with contrived questions like “are your products really made from animal-free sources” and long-winded, buzzword-filled responses.

This is certainly good for SEO, right? I mean, who can resist the chance to work keywords like “animal-friendly” and “cruelty-free” onto a page in their web site if that’s the market they’re after?

The problem is that people turn to FAQ pages as their last resort. They’re looking for help because they can’t navigate your site, or they have a question about your policies that’s not addressed anywhere else.  Chances are, they already know they want your product or service and they really do believe you when you say it’s made from animal-free materials. They just have a question before they complete their transaction.

If you can’t answer their question in the site’s content or the FAQ page, there’s a slight chance they’ll email or call you. But, there’s an even better chance they’ll leave your site and head over to one of your competitors’. Take the time to make your FAQ page an honest, up-to-date resource. Your users will appreciate it, and you’ll find yourself spending less time answering those really frequently asked questions.

Your mom was right, though: you can have too much of a good thing. Flash has a great set of features. But just like how too many sweets will give you a tummyache, too much Flash will make your content hard to digest.

Flash slows things down

Flash is notorious among technophiles for its poor performance on Macs and Linux. In addition, Flash files often pull in images and movies after they load, leading many of them to display a loading animation after the rest of the page is displayed (for an example, try the different tabs on Nissan Motors’ features gallery).

Each second spent watching a loading animation is a second they’re not looking at your content. It’s another lost opportunity for a connection with your brand, and another chance they’ll leave your site to check out your competitor’s.

These delays can be overcome by serving Flash content using Content Delivery Networks, who use super-fast internet connections to serve people data from servers in the nearest major city. But this powerful hosting comes at a cost. It’s only an option if you can afford two hosting bills every month.

You can’t ignore your mobile users

Adobe claims that Flash is on “99% of Internet-enabled desktops in mature markets” (U.S., Canada, U.K., France, Germany, Japan, Australia, New Zealand). The story is markedly different in the mobile space, though. Adobe offers Flash Lite, which runs on quite a few mobile platforms. But, it isn’t available for devices from two of the biggest handset makers out there: RIM (Blackberry) and Apple.

Wikipedia claims that Apple sold 42.48 million iPhones as of Q1 2010 (source), not counting iPod Touch handhelds and the 300,000 iPads sold in the first weekend. Even that number is surely dwarfed by the number of BlackBerry devices out there. We’re talking about at least a hundred million devices that won’t be able to view your Flash content. Worse still, they’ll probably see a big blank square with a lego brick or some other indicator that something is missing. They won’t be cursing the phone they shelled out $300 or more for. In their eyes, it’s your site that’s broken for not working on their device.

(Update: During the iPhoneOS 4.0 keynote, Steve Jobs announced that Apple has sold over 85 million iPhones and iPod Touches to date)

A note on accessibility

Accessibility is more than a buzzword, and definitely more than a checkbox on a requirements list. Modern operating systems and browsers bring web access to the multitude of people with visual disabilities and other issues viewing content traditionally. There are ways to make Flash content accessible, but only within the Flash file itself. Screen readers, used by many visually impaired users, don’t have access to the text in your Flash content. Can you afford to exclude this part of your audience?

The high cost of edits

Unlike traditional HTML and graphical content, Flash development takes a special tool (Flash Builder) which starts at $700. Flash development is a specialized skill among designers and front-end developers. And Flash’s very nature as an animation platform makes it hard to edit navigation and content. Contrast this with content management systems like Drupal which enable anyone with a web browser to make edits to their site, even from a mobile device.

What about Flash SEO?

Finally, we need to talk about Search Engine Optimization. Adobe and Google put a lot of work into making Flash visible to Google’s crawlers, the autonomous programs that scour the web for content. They consider this a proprietary technique, however, and won’t share their secrets with web developers so we can build something semantically meaningful to Google’s crawler. We don’t know the rules, and they won’t tell us. We just have to guess, and hope they’re interpreting the Flash content in the way we’d like them to.

While this is better than nothing, it’s nowhere near the well-understood rules of writing meaningful, hierarchical HTML that we know Google understands.

So how much Flash is too much?

You should have just enough Flash and not a tiny bit more. Don’t try to force Flash elements onto your site. Definitely don’t do it just because “everybody else is”. But sometimes style really is more important than substance, and Flash’s multimedia and interactivity are a good fit.

One classic example of this is a design portfolio. If you work in a visual medium, a stunning visual presentation is key to getting hired or landing freelance work. And, designers can afford to sacrifice search engine visibility when they’re emailing their portfolio address to specific people and including it on their business card. In this case, a site built largely in Flash is an asset.

An e-commerce site, on the other hand, should be as accessible as possible. It should be viewable on the maximum number of platforms possible to maximize sales. Pizza Hut uses traditional HTML & Javascript for their online ordering interface, reserving Flash for enhancements — an animated preview of your pizza with your choice of toppings, for example.

Too much Flash can hurt your search engine ranking and accessibility. But used judiciously, Flash adds visual appeal to otherwise static content. Like many things in life, it’s important to find a balance you can live with.

Wired arrived on the scene in 1993, before Internet was a household word. Geeks were just starting to imagine the promising future the Information Superhighway was going to bring us, and Wired capitalized on that. Their first issue explored the world of computerized filmmaking two years before Toy Story. And, they introduced a generation of young computer geeks to a word that would bring them both pride and shame for years to come: otaku.

Wired Reread, the blog, has ads clipped from 1990s Wired and links to classic Wired articles. Sure, it’s easy to look back and chuckle at Geocities, the Newton, and a CD changer endorsed by Alice Cooper…and his mother. The ad for Personal Journal seems quaint ten years later, when we routinely get news from the Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sources well before it “hits the streets”. It’s easy to laugh. It’s ok to laugh, really. But we can’t forget that ten years from now people will be laughing at our gadgets and web 2.0, too.

A lot of the ideas Wired has hyped over the years – virtual reality springs to mind – have fizzled. A lot of the companies promoted on their pages died in the dot-com bust. The technologies we drool over in science fiction stories still fall under the laws of consumer demand and the fickle forces behind stock markets. That hasn’t stopped Wired from continuing to promote a better tomorrow through technology. They’ve just toned down the wild-eyed futurism a notch.

Here at Xeno Media, we’re still wild about our networked tomorrow. We love our laptops, our smartphones and our single-cup coffeemaker-of-the-future. But we try to stay grounded in the here-and-now, at least a little.

Here are the highlights from the numerous changes that went into this release:

1. “Trash” status: No longer worry about accidentally deleting your posts, pages, and comments. The “delete” links have been changed to “trash”, and new screens let you restore trashed content or delete it permanently. Think of it as your computer’s Recycling Bin, but for your blog.

2. Image editor: A built-in image editor let’s you crop, rotate, and resize your pictures right from inside WordPress.

3. Post thumbnails: WordPress now lets you attach a small picture to your posts. Just upload your image, and WordPress takes care of resizing and cropping it to a standard size, then displaying it with your content. A few changes are needed to enable this feature in your blog theme. Clients should contact their Xeno Media project managers to arrange this modification.

4. Canonical tags: The new version of WordPress generates these new HTML tags automatically, pointing search engines to the “official” URLs of your posts and pages, avoiding “duplicate content” penalties that might harm your search engine rankings.

In addition, the WordPress developers have started building the framework that will let WordPress 3 (expected 2nd quarter 2010) go beyond pages and posts, and support a variety of custom content types.

Version 2.9.1 came out last week to fix a few bugs in the initial release, and we’re confident it’s safe to upgrade your blogs and take advantage of these exciting new features.

Beyond icons of mugs, squirrels, cartoon characters, etc. (keep in mind most fathomable subject matter hadn’t been covered at this point), some designers branched into releasing sets intended to replace the stock system-level Mac OS icons (hard drive, folders, CD, trash, etc.). Designing a system icon suite forces you to think completely conceptually. I found getting into this branch of iconography particularly interesting as being more a graphic design exercise, than in creating object or character-based icons. Some examples of my stuff circa 1998:

During those days of experimentation in system-level icon design, there were three steps that served every set:

1. Define the theme
2. Establish the overall aesthetic
3. Maintain the style across the entire suite of icons

Point three gets extra emphasis; the vitalness of consistency can’t be underestimated. In web site design, after the overall look-and-feel is nailed down, I’ll work out specific UI elements (icons, controls, widgets). Maintaining clarity of purpose and consistency with the overarching interface are paramount concerns. I’ve found while working through the project, sometimes an idea comes up for a control or icon that I’ll work out and implement; on second look later, however, it doesn’t fit in with the larger established suite of design elements. Most times the overall look-and-feel will (and should) organically mold the “hey let’s add…” -type controls — but it’s always worth a double and triple check on overall consistency at regular intervals.

Back to system icons; with massive canvases, zillions of colors, and advance rendering mechanisms available for today’s designer, present OS/system icons are a far cry from their humble beginnings. The graphic style of system icons for Mac OS X, throughout its various iterations and upgrades, has permeated icon design across innumerable platforms and media. The iconfactory’s work in this design type over the years has always set the standard for style and consistency spanning hundreds of system icons (like the entire Vista OS, for example). Their approach is defined by the brand, and their authorship is perpetually transparent.

Search start-ups such as Collecta, Scoopler, OneRiot and Yauba (to name a few) aggregate content being shared on the internet as it happens by continually indexing updates on sites such as Twitter, Digg, Facebook and more. In fact, Microsoft just announced that they’ve integrated Twitter and Facebook posts into Bing search results as they take their first step into real-time search.

As interesting as real-time search promises to be, I’m curious how it will handle how to accurately rank (does it appear in spot 1 or 100) a piece of content that has just been added to the internet. How do we know that the results real-time search serves up are relevant to what we are searching for, other than having a related keyword in the search query? Traditional methods of ranking search results such as link authority (whether or not trusted links are pointing to this content) won’t really work with real-time search, as content just added to the web is not going to have inbound links from trusted sources.

One of Bing’s approaches to ranking real-time search results (at least for Twitter) is to assign higher value to longer tweets, those that contain added information and links, and tweets from users with many followers. While that approach sounds good in theory, it seems like something that could be manipulated fairly easily.

It’s pretty exciting to see how real-time search continues to unfold. What effects do you think it will have on how we search for things online?

You can do a few things on the site: 1) upload an image to test or 2) participate in tests.

I participated in a handful of tests and they are pretty addictive. You’re shown an image for 5 seconds and then must write down 5 things you remember seeing. Or, on some images, you are told to click on the things that stand out and then identify what those things are. I didn’t try uploading an image for feedback, but will plan to in the future.

It’s amazing how an effective page design will help a user remember key elements in a short span of time. I looked at some images and 5 seconds later couldn’t remember a thing. On others, I could clearly recall things like a call to action to sign up for a newsletter or search or even what the Unique Value Proposition on that page was.

This is a great tool for a designer looking for objective UI feedback on a new comp or for someone that wants quick, raw feedback on a page that might not be converting very well.

Give it a try!

That got me thinking – how far off are we from seeing an influx of 3rd party mobile app checkouts that organizations can utilize on their own websites?

While iTunes, Verizon and a few others have a proven infrastructure for accepting app payments, there’s an incredible amount of value to keeping a current customer on your website and allowing them to checkout with their mobile app purchase right there.

How long until we see a Google or PayPal mobile checkout to pop-up?

“Who put 2 gigs of files on the dev server?!”, Mike would yell from his office. Our VXAtape system used 20GB tapes that cost $30 each. Realistically, that works out to around 30GB of storage with compression. We could have upgraded to the next level of this tape technology, with tapes costing twice as much but doubling the storage. But, that also would have required a pricy new tape drive. That investment would only buy us maybe a year of growth anyway, before we started yearning for even more space.

After listening to Scott Bourne rave about Data Robotics’ Drobo, I looked into getting a couple for backup—but that’s not going to happen until Kevin & Alex buy that winning lottery ticket. That got Mike and I thinking about hard drives as backup, though, and it got Mike to break out the sacred Xeno Media credit card. The next day, we had a pair of 500GB hard drives ($120 each) and a USB hard drive dock. One drive was for even days, and the other for odd. A script on our main Linux server copied 65GB of data to the disk every night, and all we had to do was swap between even & odd while waiting for our morning coffee.

We ran like this for six months, and found it a fast, reliable way to back up all of our important records. Still, having only two drives meant we’d be without monthly and weekly backups. It also made offsite backups a pain, because who wants to carry a 3.5” hard drive back and forth to work?

The other day, a courier dropped off phase 2 of our cunning plan: sixteen portable USB hard drives—eight terabytes of storage in a small pile on Mike’s desk. Each drive enclosure is barely bigger than the 2.5” wide, 9.5mm high drive inside, and we treat these pocket-sized disks like tapes.

These drives cost three times as much as our old tapes, but hold twelve times as much. Their MTBF is measured in tens of thousands of hours, and they’re only getting an hour of use a day. They should be long obsolete before we start seeing problems.