ENTERMEDIA cofounder Ethan Worrel and our Head Drupal Chef Nick Lewis will be the speakers tonight at the July meeting of the Austin Drupal Meetup on the interrelated topics of UX, The Client, The Project, and Drupal.

The meetup will run from 7-10p and held at UT’s ACTLab (4th Floor CMB, Studio B, corner of Guadalupe and Dean Keeton).  Ethan and Nick will take turns presenting their brief remarks and then open the floor for questions and comments.

Without giving too much away, here’s a sampling of what you can expect to hear tonight from two of our own most thoroughly enlightening and well-mannered professionals:

UX:

• Fully leverage everything the user already knows
• Display the most valuable data…let users dig for the fine detail
• Make decisions so your users don’t have to

The Client:

• Guide them to think in terms of page types
• Demand supporting content early and often
• Most of the time, you are the client

The Project:

• Making tough choices that pay off in the long run for both parties
• How to use the Website Price Estimator 5000
  

Drupal:

• Clients can figure out how taxonomy works well enough, but how taxonomy fits into the concept of view arguments?  That’s a different story…
• [pause for laughter...the audience will think its funny...]

We’ve known for some time now that the aggrieved local taxpayer and Austin web professional community’s outcry over reported plans to outsource the City of Austin website redesign to a Californian firm did not fall on deaf ears. Kudos to Austin officials for listening to concerned locals and resetting the project.

Austin Chronicle reporter Wells Dunbar delivers a thorough rundown of the project’s history, priorities, and current trajectory in this week’s issue.  It’s a good read, and the stuff about “crowdsourcing” is just plain cool.  Who knows?  Maybe there’s a scenario where we’d do work on the project, if stars align.

Whatever final form the website redesign takes, it will certainly be an improvement not only over the existing portal but also over what the city was mulling just a few months ago. The balance the city faces is in designing a site that can satisfy not only the tech-savvy crowds of OpenAustin, who have vastly invigorated public discussion of the site, but also the average visitor looking to contact her council member. (As Web tools like social networking, blogging, and the like become more ubiquitous, this gap is already shrinking.) Another component that shouldn’t be overlooked is the original impetus behind the redesign, the push for greater transparency and accountability; the city could get the slickest website in Cyberspace, resplendent with Web 2.0 doodads, but if it isn’t fed more information on permitting, development, and budgeting, it would still be an epic failure.

Read the full article here!

People often ask us to explain the pros and cons between CMS platforms…why we prefer and often recommend Drupal for many of our client’s website projects.  While we acknowledge there’s more than one way to skin a cat, generally speaking we like Drupal because it’s open source, well-supported, highly extensible, popular, and SEO friendly.

What makes Drupal SEO friendly? Features and modules like the following:

• Enable Clean URLs - for instance, turns the awkward www.atlantashoulder.com/?q=/shoulder-treatment into the easy reading www.atlantashoulder.com/shoulder-treatment
• Path Module (or PathAuto Module) - allows you to create URL aliases (either automatically or manually) for your pages, rather than a default string of ugly/crazy letters and symbols (vm&ctl_nbr=2604&cid=TopNav, etc….).  Search engines tend to reward human-friendly URLs–even more so if they include relevant keywords.
• XML Sitemap Module - automatically generates a XML sitemap conforming to the sitemaps.org specification. Google adheres to Sitemap Protocol 0.9 as defined by sitemaps.org.
• Other Drupal modules useful for SEO: MetaTag Module; Custom Breadcrumbs Module; Related Links Module; Alinks Module; Search 404; URL List module; Global Redirects module

To sum up, properly implementing such modules into your site can play an integral role in the organic SEO process and help to automate some of the work and thinking towards getting your site ranked well in the search engine results pages for the keywords you are targeting.

A great collection of interviews from the illuminating Jeffery Zeldman starting with the past, present, and future of web standards (and then on to the history of blogging, open source collaboration, and more).

Friends are telling us that our own Ryan Krouskup has been prominently quoted in the latest issue of the Austin Business Journal. He gave a longish interview about a month ago to an ABJ reporter doing a feature on the rising profile of open source code and it’s impact on business today. You can be sure ENTERMEDIA was humbled to be contacted and glad to offer any and all insight. Unfortunately, haven’t been able to track down a copy yet or find a link on the website–just wanted to share the news.

By the way, we had a great week. Put the finishing touches on a big website we’ve been working on for a while now…landed two exciting new website projects (one an education tool build out coming to us out of Michigan, the other a website redesign for a great local law firm)…but the biggie is that we got official word we are going to be the web team of one of Austin’s finest, most respected, and largest homegrown retail institutions!  More details soon.

Enjoy what’s shaping up to be a beautiful weekend.

We’re big believers in open source code. If you’re not too familiar with what that entails, don’t worry, it’s not hard to understand and even better to use.

According to the Open Source Initiative:

Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.

Mozilla Firefox (web browser), Apache (web server), PHP (web site application language) and PNG (file format) are only a few prominent examples of the open source development model smoothing out online experience–so much better now than only ten years ago when most everyone had to count on Microsoft to play and display nice with others.

We develop using open source programming languages and software packages, in particular Zen Cart (user-friendly ecommerce shopping cart software), the aforementioned PHP (makes web pages dynamic, widely used), MySQL (fast, reliable, easy database used by Google, Yahoo, et.al.), and Drupal (consistently ranked as the very best content management platform).

It was cool to read this article on CNET over the weekend that none other than the U.S. Department of Defense agrees that open source is the hands down best way to go. Apparently the Pentagon is preparing guidelines to leverage even more open source into U.S. defense than they already have.

If there’s anyone left out there who would still tell you open source isn’t safe or advisable for your business because it’s not “protected” or not “legit” enough, what are they going to say when the CTO of a powerful agency within the USDoD declares the following?:

Open source brings to us the ability to have collaborative and agile development environments….Additionally, open source benefits the Department of Defense through…simplified licensing…and security….Security through obscurity just doesn’t work.

As CNET’s Matt Asay puts it, “if your country trusts your physical security to open source, isn’t it time to trust your business’ security to open source?”