Blogs

The last blog I wrote was about the nuts and bolts of setting up a contact management database..a real snorer.

I would like to talk today about Intellectual Property. All companies have trade secrets, how your widgets are made, the recipe that goes into your candy, the programing done to develop a piece of software.... Would you let someone walk away with those secrets after working for you for five years? Of course not!

Restaurants, dry cleaners, apartment management companies,

When I need quick facts on Internet usage and how the Web is shaping our world, I turn to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. An initiative of the Pew Research Center, Pew Internet explores the "impact of the internet on children, families, communities, the work place, schools, health care and civic/political life."

Pew Internet Project reports are primarily based on national telephone surveys but also draw from qualitative research methods and data shared by their research partners.

Reports and Presentation topics include:

As a Web designer, I like to approach the design of any site as efficiently as possible. Long before I even became interested in Web design, I stumbled upon the art of information architecture, which is basically a complex map of information. As a primarily visual learner, I took information architecture to the next level by expressing information visually as opposed to textually. My fascination with mapping led me to what I consider my primary source of inspiration: maps!

Repeat after me…“Form follows function.” “Form follows function.”

I will admit my ego and “creative” thinking does not always like to use this principle for design. But I will continue to fight through these growing pains by repeating and understanding this principle “Form follows function.” “Form follows function.”

While there are 4 project life cycles adopted for software and web development, LevelTen primarily works within the Waterfall (also known as Serial) and Iterative cycles. While all project life cycles provide advantages and disadvantages, these two have been widely accepted and adopted by software, IT, and web companies alike.

For those of you familiar with a traditional project management process, you’re probably familiar with a typical project lifecycle- plan, budget, design, develop, test and release. You may be less familiar with the percentage of projects that utilize this management process, yet fail to stay within the project’s intended timeline, budget and scope.

According to the “Chaos Report”, a project management study on software development companies:

LevelTen utilizes a coaching model to organize its internal business processes. The process evolved from a traditional chain-of-command approach seeking a more efficient way to work with independent-minded, creative employees – strategists, researchers, designers, programmers, planners. LevelTen’s model recognizes that true creativity and inspiration can only be encouraged and directed; it can’t be specified, ordered, or demanded.

By the late 1990s the Web craze hit the world like Beatle mania. During the Superbowl, the alcoholic beverage industry was overshadowed by dot-com commercials depicting successful e-commerce startups and the idea that everyone could own a successful web business. Someone needed to fulfill the huge influx of web sites that needed to be created and anyone who owned a computer and could learn HTML and create graphics was suddenly a self proclaimed Web expert.

The idea of a home-based global information system dates back at least as far as 1959 as depicted in Isaac Asimov’s short story “Anniversary”, in which characters look up information on a home computer connected to a “planet wide network of circuits”.

Interestingly enough, it was 1990 before Tim Berners-Lee, “the father of the world wide web”, an independent contractor at CERN, Switzerland, completed all the tools necessary for a working web – the first browser, the first web server, and the first web pages that described the project itself.