What do RoR, APIs, Interactive Media, Mashups, and Product Communities all have in common? Well other than they all make up the bottom row of this year’s Buzzword Bingo card, all five are technologies that you aren’t using but should be.
Here’s a truism – Really good websites create buzz about your product or service. To create that excitement, you have to find a compelling feature, function or attribute that causes a positive reaction. When Macromedia’s Flash first came out, people were unimpressed. So it was a web animation tool for advertisers to make monkeys move really fast back and forth in a banner ad, big deal. It only became a big deal when really talented designers began making sites that generated attention. That attention separated the really good sites from the no talent hack imitators, solidifying their product and/or service in the minds of their viewers. The same can be said for each of the technologies in that list. Used properly and in moderation (as with most things in life) you can create some truly impressive results. Those results, in collaboration with smart marketing, will never fail to deliver the all important buzz.
In what looks to be a longish series of posts, I hope to convince you that one or more of the above can help your business website stand out.
- Ruby on Rails (RoR) thinks it can, and does
- Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) and why they aren’t just for geeks
- Interactive Media talks back
- Mashups = Your chocolate in my Peanut Butter
- You can make a community about anything these days (Product Communities)