Recently, I was introduced to the viral new movement of Pecha Kucha Night. In essence, Pecha Kucha is based on delivering a presentation of 20 slides for no more then 20 seconds a slide for a total presentation time of 6 minutes and 40 seconds. The quick pace keeps viewers interested, alert and engaged; a far cry from typical presentations. I love the conecpt, the energy and the simplicity of Pecha Kucha and if anyone is interested in starting a Denver / Boulder Pecha Kucha group I’d be happy to take that lead.

In the last year I’ve seen an increasing number of websites using what I’ve dubbed as the “Content Footer.” These are exaggerated website text footers which serve the dual purpose of better search engine optimization and increased usability. To help frame the discussion, let’s look at what I think is the best example of a Content Footer, MarthaStewart.com.

Rather then trying to list everything in the main navigation the Content Footer helps organize additional content in similar buckets. This methodology also serves as a micro-sitemap of second tier navigation. From a search engine optimization perspective, Content Footers help re-enforce keyword rich terminology without spamming the search engines.

MarthaStewart.com

Apple uses the Content Footer in the same way as MarthaStewart.com however they’ve opted for a vertical arrangement and they are capping what items are listed in this area. If you look at the applications listed in the Content Footer you’ll see they’ve limited the selection to their top applications. Apple isn’t interested in showing you everything they sell, just what is most popular and relevant.

Apple.com

From a design perspective the argument could be made that Content Footers clutter up the layout, this could be the reason that Apple doesn’t show the Content Footer until the subpage level. Personally, I feel the Content Footer pros outweigh the cons and I think we’ll start seeing more sites designed with this feature in the future.

A few weeks back I received an invite to check out JumpChart.com, a tool designed for the quick gathering, editing and deployment of web content. Ironically, we’ve discussed building a tool very much like JumpChart; to assist us with our client content gathering woes. JumpChart beat us to the punch and they did a great job executing the overall application.

Imulus is just like every other agency / development house out there who is frustrated with trying to gather client content for web projects. Typically we start with a timeline which is dead-on and very achievable, yet the project gets delayed because client has under-estimate the amount of work which goes into content writing, gathering and editing. The second part of that problem is the client’s inability to visualize the content they are tossing over the fence in Word, Excel, and PDF format.

JumpChart goes a long way toward solving these problems. The interface is intuitive and extremely useful for quickly building web structures. It took me 10 minutes to layout the structures of a 30 page site. And it took me another 15 minutes to copy & paste in all the client’s content. The resulting effort produced a clickable website skeleton which was publicly accessible by the client. It quickly became apparent to the client that there was much work which needed to be completed before the site could go live. By stripping out information architecture and content from the actual design, it forces the client to evaluate their content structures, page lengths and overall voice before that content is formated and embedded in the website.

Once the client has signed-off on the JumpChart content you can export all the goods in CSS / HTML which can later be imported into your favorite content management system.

To really do this service justice I suggest visiting their website and looking at the video tours. http://www.jumpchart.com/video-tour/

I’m a sucker for heatmaps. I guess I watched the Predator too many times as a child. Map of the Markets gives visitors a heatmap view of the hottest / coolest market sectors, along with the largest movers of the sector pie.

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