At Clockwork, I’m privileged to have been a part of many, many site launches—hundreds—each with their own share of excitement.  It’s a special thing to release something you and your colleagues have labored over for weeks or months (sometimes years!).  However, launching a new or replacement website is a ton of work up until that magical, happy moment I’m thinking about right now.  Timing is a simple but critical factor for a successful site launch.  After years of experience, I want to make one, simple recommendation: launch your website after lunch on a business day.

The three words in the title above are well-understood but often misused. When it comes to business and the web specifically, there is a lot of confusion about these three little words and how they relate. Let me try to clear it up.

For many people SEO is a subject that is shrouded in mystery, but it is one of the leading factors in having a successful website presence. Making things more complicated is the fact that the SEO landscape is littered with shady providers, which can make it a difficult task to tackle well. Still, there are a lot of things you can test for, and best practices to help guide you.

Testing interactive design is one of the most difficult and challenging assignments for a Quality Assurance team.  Interactive is a mashup of beautiful design, user experience layouts, carefully constructed semantic markup, clear and powerful client content, branding, relationships with other websites and (usually) a solid amount of custom back-end programming and database design.  Part of my role at Clockwork is building testcases and testplans, which both capture the subtleties that define a great user experience (and a successful website launch) and ensure we can reliably repeat that success for all clients.  This series of posts gives you a glimpse at some of the things that a solid test plan must address. Many of these are things people never remember to ask for, but require careful consideration.

Yeah, you heard me. Kiss ‘em! Don’t get me wrong – I love apps. But, too many marketers are mistaking "There's an app for that" for a true mobile marketing strategy.

The emergence and rapid adoption of apps have given mobile the attention that it deserves, but overall they’ve given marketers and brands the wrong impression when it comes to mobile strategy.

Have you ever seen what you thought was a bar code but didn't quite look like a traditional bar code? You may have been looking at a QR code.

QR codes haven't made many appearances in the US yet but they are gaining momentum. A fellow Clockworker spotted one on a movie poster in Minneapolis this past summer. QR codes are widely popular in Japan and Europe, and are used in a variety of ways from advertising to restaurant menus.