General Thoughts

Prince William County is our home, and we love it whenever we get the chance to show off work we’ve done for clients in the area. Today, we’d like to highlight two of our recent projects in more detail: Coles District of Prince William County and Lensis Builders.

Coles District of Prince William County

Coles District is one of the seven magisterial districts of Prince William County. The website features a blue and brown theme uniquely adapted from Prince William County’s official website. The design contextualizes the geographic location of Coles District by subtly incorporating local maps.

Functionally, the site’s content management system streamlines both news and event publishing. The home page features the latest of these two areas, enticing the user to stay abreast of  the district’s happenings. Finally, the website also offers an online means of subscribing to the district’s newsletter and viewing an archive of past editions.

Visit the launched site!

Lensis Builders

Lensis Builders specializes in all aspects of residential home improvement. Lensis needed to re-frame their online content to showcase their work and survey interested home owners. Inspired by the architectural elements of the industry, the website has a vertical navigation and large icon based text links that connect to key conversion opportunities and social network platforms.

Throughout the site, photography from Lensis projects are highlighted above the fold of each page and through section oriented galleries. Several forms were created to empower users to begin thinking about potential projects and share their thoughts with Lensis employees.

The site also features a blog that adds a dynamic layer to the content. With the blog, the site becomes a resource to current and potential clients. It provides a medium for conversation through the comments, an opportunity to share site content to other platforms and new content for search engine crawlers. Behind the scenes, the site is also steeped with organic search engine optimization.

Visit the launched site!

Cavendo & Prince William County

Developing a comprehensive web strategy for our clients is what gives us satisfaction. Headquartered, in a top place for business and job growth, we have projects underway that we cannot wait to share! Stay tuned for our next round of site launch highlights.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, a web browser developed for the release of Windows XP, is now over 10 years old! Microsoft has officially announced that it will discontinue the support of the aged browser in 2014 and is displaying a countdown of the decreasing numbers of users. If the percentage of users falls below 1% before 2014, support will be ended sooner.

Browser iterations improve security, increase functionality and become more standard compliant to ensure a more accurate display. Ultimately, we here at Cavendo want you to experience the best that the web has to offer! Below you’ll find links for the most popular browsers. Please, take a moment and be sure that your browser of choice is up to date!

• Windows Internet Explorer
• Mozilla Firefox
• Google Chrome

Plugins & Browser Related Software

• Adobe Flash Player
• Java

Many browsers by default (or via their settings) have the option to be automatically updated. Unfortunately, every user will not be able to run the latest version of every browser because browser versions are relative to operating systems. However, running the latest version available to you is always a best practice! IE 6 is a huge nuisance for web designers and developers since it doesn’t support a lot of the most modern programming and design approaches. Thankfully a lot of online services and companies are terminating support for IE 6 (we are already up to IE 9 now after all!), so we need to keep the trend going.

Get the most out of your online experience and encourage others to do so as well. Hopefully one day the Internet will be IE6 free!

UPDATE (09/12/2011): Here is my debriefing from my visit to The White House

Everyone seems to have their own interpretation of “how to use Twitter,” but I have one real and very cool personal use: Twitter got me invited to The White House for an official briefing. Thanks to Twitter I’ll be spending all day Friday, September 9, at The White House getting a personal tour and participating in a briefing by White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.

So, how did I pull it off? Earlier this week I noticed a tweet on the official White House twitter account:

Not one to pass up an amazing opportunity like this I quickly went to the website and completed the short and simple form. Aside from name and basic information I had to provide (in 140 characters, no less) a reason why I should be invited. I gave a very simple reason along the lines of being a small business owner and looking forward to the opportunity to bring my concerns directly to the top — those in charge.

Well, late Wednesday afternoon I notice an email pop up in my personal account from an address from the Executive Office of the President. Enclosed?

After submitting the required security information I continued to receive very thorough communications from the White House staff regarding timing, procedures, and what to expect on the briefing day. To my pleasant surprise I was informed to make a day out of it and expect to spend almost the entire day on the grounds at the White House. It seems that the staff is very excited to give us not only a briefing with Press Secretary Jay Carney (@PressSec) but also meet with White House Director of Digital Strategy Macon Phillips (@Macon44) and U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra (@aneeshchopra).

Looking forward to a fun and productive day at The White House! Follow the action on Twitter on the #WHTweetup hashtag or my timeline at @jarehart!

So, if you were thinking about the value of Twitter, here’s one really good example of how Twitter can open doors for you. This experience only reaffirms what I always have thought about Twitter: it’s simply another communications tool, but so much faster than any other method and it gets you straight to the source.

Cavendo is based in Manassas, Virginia, within Prince William County in Northern Virginia. We’re conveniently located just outside Washington, D.C., in the hub of economic growth as part of the National Capital Area and the Northeast Megalopolis.

Why is this important? When I founded the firm in 2000 we started in this area and chose to stay. Two recent reports in the national media only reaffirm this decision and I can personally attest to all of the great things about our community that these reports highlight.

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Since the iPad’s debut over a year ago, and the introduction of the 3G version at the end of April last year, everyone was quick to jump to conclusions one way or the other. I’ve recently been thinking about how the addition of this new little ~$1000 addition to my tech arsenal ($729 for 3G Wi-Fi plus data costs & accessories) has impacted my life since I’ve had it a year this week.

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Edit (04/02/2011): Happy April Fool’s Day!

A lot of people have been asking about my travels lately, especially closer to home where I’ve been spending a lot of time throughout the DC region. The truth is I’ve been working on a new secret project that I couldn’t even tell my closest colleagues and friends about. Well, today the secret is out.

For those not familiar with Northern Virginia, there are effectively three areas: Loudoun County, Fairfax County (and Arlington/Alexandria), and Prince William County. The later county includes various cities and towns like the City of Manassas, City of Manassas Park, Town of Dumfries, and the Town of Haymarket. Most people only relate to Prince William County (PWC) or Manassas. The other municipalities typically get overlooked from a larger regional standpoint just as Leesburg, Middleburg, etc., do within Loudoun County for identification purposes.

Prince William is unique in that the three seats of local government are very close together and the city/county boundaries overlap in many places. It’s not uncommon to see police officers from the county cruising through the city — typically on their way to the courthouse which is within the city. Therein lies the problem and why Cavendo was retained for this secret project. Every organization and especially the governments have an allegiance to either “Prince William” or “Manassas.”

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In meetings and conversations where web design is the focus, someone almost always drops the word “interactivity.” This word used to convey undeniable power, and the mere utterance of “interactivity” or one of its variations meant something.

“Our website needs to be more interactive,” they say.

And we would jump on the bandwagon. “Interactive, you say? Of course! An interactive website is much better than those static presences that sit in the corners of the Internet, gathering dust.”

Unfortunately, though, the word “interactivity” is in danger of succumbing to cliché-status. Think “crowd sourcing” or “social media expert” or, and I shudder to type these words, “thought leadership.” These are frivolous terms put together to form even worse phrases, and like any fad, they achieved a status of stratospheric importance, elevating anyone who used them to pseudo-intellectual stardom.

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Can you believe we’re already at the end of 2009? We’re wrapping up the decade that brought us from the height of the dot-com boom of the late 90s and 2000, through one of the darkest hours in the history of the United States, a grueling recession fueled by the real estate market and now some signs of recovery. Oh, and don’t forget the game changers of the 2000s such as Facebook, YouTube, MySpace (which came and went), and more recently Twitter. Google went mainstream and was propelled to one of the largest companies in the world, in line with Wal-Mart.

This has been one formidable decade of ups and downs, but we have survived, grown, and learned a lot in the process. Can you believe that we started Cavendo in 2000? We’ll be celebrating 10 years in business next March. Our business has largely followed the trends of the past decade with the exception that the later half was incredibly strong for us. We’re ending the year and decade with more momentum than we’ve ever had amidst record growth and profits. The next year will be our most exciting by far as we continue to grow and expand portions of our business such as MyMediaRoom, which has grown from a pet project to a powerful communications platform.

The last few weeks of the year are always my favorite time of the year. It’s a time to reflect on the past and set a course for the next year. You’re surrounded by family and friends and celebrating another year of progress. As we wind down 2009 and the amazing decade that was the 2000s we will be cementing plans for the upcoming year, and hopefully the next decade, to continue growing and improving as Cavendo and making our impact.

We have so many things planned that we will be rolling out and sharing with you over time. One of those plans starts right here with our blog. We have had a strong show of support but we feel we can do even better. Therefore after the New Year we are going to be launching a bigger, better, and massively improved blog. I wouldn’t even call it a blog since it’s going to be so much more. All I can say for now is we want to be a formidable resource to our clients, partners, vendors, and colleagues and that is what we intend to build. Stay tuned.

What are your thoughts on 2009? The past decade? What do you foresee in 2010?

In my world of web creation, there are two broad and simple categories of people: those who can strategically match a web presence to their organizational goals and those who want a web site for the sake of having one.

There are some unique and obvious differences in these two groups. And of course, being "broad" and "simple", these groups do not represent every situation. I use them as general guidelines in judging projects.

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How important is a good email address to your organization? Obviously, the email service must be reliable and provide relatively good junk filters. But for some reason many people don’t consider a “good” email address as being branded to their organization’s web presence. This means saying goodbye to AOL, Earthlink, Comcast, so on and so forth. If you’re the Smith Agency and you have www.smithagency.com, then why are you still using smithagencyrules@aol.com? Not only are you giving AOL some free advertising, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

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