Blogs

Through the years I’ve noticed a trend that more experienced, senior designers are much more productive than junior level designers. I first noticed this when LevelTen would hire junior-level designers based on a great portfolio, but ultimately get less productivity from them because it took twice, sometimes three times as long for them to create a site design comparable to a senior designer’s.

From a business perspective, this inefficiency not only causes bottlenecks in production and budget increases, but also can harm moral of the team.

LevelTen has been practicing Scrum, mixed with other agile practices, for about a year and a half now. While we have solved plenty of challenges this past year on figuring out how to use the Scrum framework to fit our company, we still have a lot to learn on how to be truly agile. The challenges we face were really brought to light during Mike Cohn's ScrumMaster Certification course I took early this week.

Selecting the best solution for website design and online marketing is one of the most complex tasks a business must undertake. Putting together a website design RFP can be a nightmare. There are literally thousands of options from free-lance designers, to large national ad agencies and IT consultancies. Development processes range from a few hours putting together sites of amateur quality to projects by an organization with a proven and refined process for crafting a world-class web presence. Costs range from virtually free to millions of dollars - and every web developer is marketing their offering as a complete “results driven” solution.

With W3C Validator module, you can validate markup on all nodes and views in a Drupal site.

I have been on the lookout for several years now for a good tool to validate markup across an entire site. The Drupal module w3c_validator does almost exactly what I want.

Prior to discovering this tool, the extent of my use of markup validation was to pass URLs to the the official W3C validator or open one of several validator plugins for various browsers.

Despite being a major marketing tactic for well over a decade, it's amazing what some people try to pass off as Internet marketing skills. The next time you're out hiring an Internet marketing agency, be sure to watch for these six warning signs.

1. They only report on keyword rankings

Imagine standing in the center of the highway with an 18 wheeler barreling directly towards you at 70 miles per hour; would covering your eyes and acting as though you where impervious make the truck go away? Of course not; in-fact, you'd be steam rolled and blasted all over the highway.

For those of you who woke up to a flurry of frustrated customers or shocked that your website images were not displaying...Some shared hosting companies including Hostmonster and Bluehost have disabled symlinks (symbolic links) used by Drupal and other content management systems to display images. Hosting companies choosing to disallow symbolic links have changed the .htaccess file, which ultimately breaks your linking structures.

Check out our interview with Social Media Club of Dallas President, Mike Merrill. For this interview, we leveraged the collaborative features found in Google Wave. You can follow the interview on the Wave embed, or see the transcript below.

Note: You will need to be logged into Wave to see the embed. Need a wave invite? Leave a comment with your e-mail address and I'll get one to you soon.

Over the last year, LevelTen has had the distinct pleasure of working with Dallas' North Texas Super Bowl Host Committee (NTSB). For those who aren't die hard football fans, Dallas will be home to the Super Bowl in 2011. As part of their promotional efforts, NTSB will be broadcasting live and on location from Super Bowl 44 in South Florida.