The 2009 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES®), the world’s largest tradeshow for consumer technology, wrapped up over the weekend in Las Vegas. Anything and everything new for the Web was there. Gadgets for the geeks in all of us. True, attendance was a smaller this year – but the event still attracted 2,700 exhibitors, including 300 new technology companies.

So, as your Uncle Fred always liked to say, what’s the one big thing that happened there? What themes and trends and might-be-someday-soon’s really got everyone’s attention? Hard to say. There was a lot of buzz and PR-speak about “personalization meets content” technology and the “automobile’s convergence with consumer electronics” (don’t yawn just yet).

But it livened up a bit with product debuts early in the show that included a wireless wristwatch phone from LG with video chat and text messaging capabilities and from NETGEAR, which introduced an Internet TV player and a 3G Mobile Broadband router. Web TV, a product not quite ready for primetime only a few years ago, was again in the spotlight this year according to The Rebirth of “Web TV” from Sarah Perez in ReadWriteWeb. And blogger Tech-Evangelist was especially interested in the 3D Home Theater Technology at 2009 Consumer Electronics Show.

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Finding the right web designer sounds like it is an insurmountable task—it is not. There are resources online that can help you, these are known as design auction blocks. These auction blocks are also your best friend. Some of the best places to find a “cheap” designer is to go to eLance or 99designs. (more…)

By way of introduction, I’m pleased to be one of the newest members of the Aplus.net team. Like millions of others, my life and my livelihood depends on staying connected – wired or wireless – to the world around me: for news, weather, banking, shopping, entertainment, education, you name it. It’s how I express myself and how I stay in touch. I use Twitter. I sometimes sell on eBay, I have Facebook and LinkedIn pages, and I regularly upload photos to Flickr and video to YouTube. I have two blogs, and I write for two others – no, make that three others now.

Yes, I do remember a time before the World Wide Web – a time before MMORPG, SSL, RSS, CMS, FTP and even IM. Before ‘google’ was a verb. Before podcasting and wikis and streaming video so good that you wonder why TV and high speed Internet didn’t merge sooner. (more…)

The elements of a great website are basic and common sense when you think of your website the same way as you would your brick and mortar store. You need to make a good impression and inspire confidence in your customers with visually appealing and easy to use navigation. On the Internet, you don’t have a sales person to help your customer through your online store, so you need to give your customers the tools they need to navigate your website. (more…)

Hi everyone, my name is Jeff Parker and I developed the backend for the Aplus.net website. I thought I would share some thoughts and experiences as this may help those of you working to develop your own online presence.

Our goal was to develop a standards-compliant XHTML/CSS site that incorporates as many best practices as possible. This included testing compatibility with various browsers, implementing unobtrusive javascript (when possible) and ensuring we have friendly, descriptive URL’s. Like many of you, we had a very tight time schedule and wanted to deploy the most effective site we could in this timeframe.

Our work began by first building an affinity diagram of our old site to see exactly where we were at. We did this with two goals in mind:

1. Find how many clicks it takes to get to content
2. Discover extraneous pages

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