I’ve heard it said that 1 hour of planning saves 3 hours of execution. With regards to web development, I would suggest that the savings of planning is closer to a 1:30 ratio. Building a website is alot like building a home. It’s rather difficult to add a basement to a home, after the fact. The same goes for web development. Adding features and content, which was not planned for prior to project inception can be time consuming and costly.

As more and more companies go offshore for their development needs, it is important to understand how that effects the communication and execution of a project. I’ve had the opportunity to work with staff from India, the Philippines, the Ukraine, Russia and Estonia. While there are cultural differences, which need to be addressed there are things that can be done to grease the wheels of communication and turn out successful projects when going offshore. (more…)

As of July, 2006, browser usage is following the same trend it has been for the past year*. With the entrance of Firefox to the market in late 2004, Internet Explorer is still loosing market share, although at a slower rate than in 2005. In addition, the average user is viewing at a higher screen resolution than in years past (1024×798 pixels) and a color depth of 65k colors or higher. Added to this, consider that broadband usage by US households jumped 36 percent in 2004, increasing to an estimated 70 percent of US home users. The news offshore is even more promising, given that broadband proliferation worldwide increased approximately 50 percent between 2004 and 2005. (more…)

The proliferation of P2P (Peer-to-Peer) file sharing networks and increased acceptance of home broadband Internet connections has brought the sharing of Digital Content (audio and video) into the mainstream. In fact, the traffic generated by P2P during the evening accounts for nearly double the traffic produced for normal HTTP (Web) requests.

The State of Digital Content Delivery
Until recently, the mechanisms to deliver digital content were largely based on the “honor system”. Users purchase a file license or subscribe to a provider’s site, agree to membership or license conditions which require that the user not redistribute the content, and download any or all files on the site.

However, there are no controls, which enforce the license agreement. The user will in most cases, freely and intentionally distribute the downloaded audio/video on a P2P network or simply store the file on their computer in a folder that is shared with their P2P network. (more…)

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As a webmaster, the above message should bring a chill to your bones, and have you reaching for your security blanket. Yet, on August 28th, 2004, thousands of webmasters woke to find this message glaring back at them from their computer screens. (more…)