The Chicago Sun Times has always included a lot of advertising on its front page. Interesting today: the background for the front page is an ad for GM’s Live Green Go Yellow site. (It promotes ethanol as the way out of the energy crisis.)

That’s a pretty big change from the banner, the skyscraper, the text ad–very interesting.

One thing it does is provide an interesting rationale for keeping your text narrow–760px–so visitors can see the background.

One other interesting side effect is that you can’t click a background. If you can’t click the background, you can’t get response metrics, which side steps the whole PPC question.

Neat.

We just helped a local Army Navy surplus store launch their military t-shirt site, MilitaryT.com. They have a variety of t-shirts dealing with Marine, Army, Navy, Air Force and Chicago Police Department logos on them. Check ‘em out.

Meta: This is a Cube Cart installation. It includes custom payment handling, entry validation and shipping cost determination. If you’re interested in something similar, contact us any time.

One of my customers is having us do some work on a custom admin module he’s used with his site for several years. We’ve been going back and forth about custom scripts. Here’s an excerpt from this morning’s email that’s applicable to the vast mojority of custom website scripts.

One of the realities of having a custom script is that it requires continued care and feeding which all requires money. Custom scripts are a great way to get you exactly what you want but with that you also get restrictions and risks. Moving to a new server and changing a domain name, for example, can have a variety of side effects.

One question worth asking, that you may have already asked and answered, is whether or not the custom admin module is still providing real business value in terms of how the site operates. And, if it is, is it providing more business value than a good canned script would provide? You will have ongoing expenses with a custom admin module like this as long as you have it, and those costs are likely to go up over time, possibly in a very dramatic way. (This is actually a very well defined pattern in software engineering. Cost of change rises until the software is no longer maintainable. There are ways around this, but not with most PHP scripts.)

If you switch to more of a canned script, you may give up little touches here and there, but you’ll usually gain portability, support and new features that you didn’t have to pay for.

This is an excerpt from “Three Internet Trends To Watch in 2006″. Visit The Business Ledger to read the whole article.

Hopefully you’ve already heard of blogs, short for “weblogs,” the do-it-yourself Web publishing platform that has been gaining traction for the last few years. They’ve been around long enough that I’m sick of talking about them. However, as they age, blogs are pointing to some interesting possibilities.

The first is that blog software is becoming more like content management software. More and more companies use blogs not just to post their latest thoughts about their products or industry (both of which are still good ideas), but to manage their entire Web site, both static and dynamic content.

Most blog software makes this trivial and automatically includes advanced features like comment management and user registration right out of the box. All you do is create a template and add content.

The second is RSS feeds. RSS, standing for “Really Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary,” provides a way for visitors to subscribe to your site with very little effort. Modern browsers (like Firefox) have sophisticated support for RSS built-in. You can visit a site, subscribe to its feeds with a couple of clicks and then see a list of recently added content whenever you want. Blog software handles all of this in the background—no special programming required.

Join the evolution!

Most of what happens on the Internet is touted as revolutionary but is, in reality, evolutionary. Spend some time outside your Web comfort zone. Use Firefox for a couple of days. Subscribe to Del.icio.us’s “Popular Links” RSS feed. Map your competition or customers using Google. You might be surprised at how the world looks when you’re a few steps ahead.

This is an excerpt from “Three Internet Trends To Watch in 2006″. Visit The Business Ledger to read the whole article.

Everything old is new again. “Web 2.0” is no exception. Web 2.0 is a collection of ideas about how to build Web sites and make them better for users, including improved user interface technologies and better user interaction capabilities. (More about Web 2.0 here and here.)

If the goal of this sounds eerily familiar, it is. It’s all about getting people to your site and keeping them there. So what makes Web 2.0 interesting?

The best way to find out is to look at some leading examples:

•Google Maps (http://maps.google.com) illustrates one example of an improved user interface. Note how you can drag the map around without having to go back to the server and reload a new image like MapQuest and other 1.0 sites. The technology behind that is known as “Ajax.” While not new, Google Maps harnessed Ajax in a new way and is gaining market share by offering a better, smoother user experience.

•Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us) is a great example of how to improve user interaction, aka “community.” Del.icio.us helps users manage, share and organize bookmarks. Managing is no big deal—it’s similar to the way you manage bookmarks in your browser. Sharing and organizing is built around a feature called “social tagging.” Users bookmark something and give it a label or tag meaningful to them. Other users can search by tag for links and see what other people are tagging that they might also be interested in. Search for the tag “marketing” and you’ll get a big picture view of what’s going on in marketing on the Web today.

•Flickr (http://www.flickr.com) is a great example of giving people a compelling reason to come back. Sure, it uses Ajax and tags, but the real reason people go there is to look at pictures: yours, your friends’ or someone else’s. You can create prints, posters or post a photo to your blog. Flickr is creating an extensive, unique and difficult-to-replace data store of something people really want—their memories—and that makes Flickr very, very Web 2.0.

Finally, an important part of Web 2.0 is the ability for users to extend an application for their own purposes. You can visit any of these sites and, with a little bit of skill, harness them for your own purposes.