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Blogs - January 2012

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Below are the blog entries for January 2012

There comes a time during the day, usually shortly after lunch, when I start to feel the afternoon Zzzzz’s creeping up on me. There’s something telling my body that it’s time for a Siesta. Perhaps it’s the digestion process. Perhaps this is when the caffeine injection from the morning wears off. Regardless of the reason, I work in the United States, where mid-workday naps are not looked upon favorably. So instead of giving in to the temptation, I stand up, walk around for a minute, find a brief distraction to wake me up, and then head back to my desk to finish the workday.

In an office full of software developers, you can imagine that the distractions available are quite plentiful, but one of my favorite distractions is a friendly game of rock paper scissors with one or two of my fellow team members. Over the last several weeks, this has evolved into an almost daily ritual, complete with a scoreboard at the desk of Eric, our Spectate Product Manager.

Rock Paper Scissors Shoot!

You’ll notice that Eric’s track record boasts more tally marks than anyone else. There may be a simple explanation for this: Eric is better at Rock Paper Scissors than anyone else. OR maybe... just maybe... there’s another, less obvious explanation. Maybe Eric has just played way more than anyone else. After all, the scoreboard is at his desk. And if you look closely, you can see that only wins are accounted for. There’s absolutely no penalty for losing a game.

This got me thinking. Among other things, Eric is a salesman. In sales, nothing is more important than your number of wins. It doesn’t really matter if your win/loss ratio is poor, so long as you’re winning a good total number of deals. Obviously, there are rewards for winning more often than losing: you can make more money or work fewer hours. But as long as you’re winning a good raw quantity of deals, the success rate is less important. Maybe that’s why Eric created the scoreboard this way, from a sales team-biased perspective.

So, back to Rock Paper Scissors. I've come up with a few strategies to help me beat some of my co-workers. At first, I used to throw people off by calling it Paper Rock Scissor or Scissor Paper Rock. This had people thinking that I had no clue what I was doing and that any wins were just lucky coincidences. However, there were only so many people I could pull that on before I had to “learn” the real name of the game. Next, I started trying to psych people out, talking trash before we played, pointing to my tally section (which has the second highest number of tallies--after Eric’s, of course). This worked too, until people heard me complain about Eric’s record and the fact that losses are not recorded. Turns out this worked against me in the exact same way.

Our Sales Engineer, Charlie, uses a technique where he decides what he’ll play in advance before he sees what his opponent will play. That way, he is unaffected by the mind games of his opponents. (Turns out he pretty much plays Rock, Paper, Scissors, in that order--just about every time.) I’m not convinced of the efficacy of this strategy, though it does seem to be working for Charlie. Alas, other than trying to figure out where my opponents will go after a series of shoots (the "out-wit, out-play, out-last Survivor Strategy"), I am out of ideas.

Does anyone out there have any Paper Rock Scissors tips for me? What strategies do you use? What do y’all think of a Paper Rock Scissors station at the User Conference this year? Please leave your tips and suggestions in the comments section below.

One last thing--if you don't have anyone to play with in your office, there's a very fun, online alternative: Play Rock Paper Scissors with a Robot from the New York Times.

How to Blog for SEO

By Holly Wright

Wednesday, January 25th, 2012 at 10:30am

As a CMS provider, we believe there’s nothing more important than a good content strategy for driving traffic to your website and building credibility with your readers--whether they’re potential students or sales prospects. And an important part of any content strategy is SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Therefore, when you write blog posts for your organization, you should always consider the SEO ramifications, and even plan for them.

Here’s what I’ve learned about how to blog for SEO:

Create a Search Engine-friendly URL

If you’re using Cascade Server, then each page is automatically given a search engine friendly URL. However, you can always improve it. Take out any unnecessary articles in your URL and make sure your keywords are prominent. The part after your domain name is called the Post Slug, and it is one of the most important signals to search engines about the nature of your content.

Choose your Keywords Wisely

When I am hoping to generate new traffic to our website with a particular post (like this one), I use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find the best keywords to emphasize in the post. For this post, I searched for a number of variations on the title before deciding on “How to Blog for SEO”. I chose this of the different options because it had a high search volume and low competition.

How to Blog for SEO

Use Images and Name Them Correctly

One way to emphasize your keywords to search engines without “stuffing” them into the body text is to name your images with your main keywords. Additionally, make sure the title tag and alt tag use the same keywords. If you use multiple images in a post, you can name them different variations of the your keywords, as long as those keywords apply to the images you are using.

Create Both Internal and External Links

This is a two-parter as both are beneficial but in different ways.

1. Internal Links

Within your post, be sure to refer your readers to other posts on your website. This is a good general practice, but it makes even more sense when you are blogging for SEO. You are intentionally trying to drive new traffic to your site. New visitors, by definition, have not seen the rest of the amazing content on your site, so make sure you mention other related posts that might be interesting to your readers. You can also put other internal links at the end of your post in a “Related Content” section, as we’ve done below.

2. External Links

SEO experts argue over whether linking to other credible sites gives your site more credibility from a search engine’s perspective or not, but that does not mean that there are no widely accepted benefits to linking to other sites. For starters, your readers will appreciate it if you refer them to other sites on the web to help them continue learning about the topic they are researching. Additionally, many experts believe that by including your keywords in the anchor text of your external links, you make them even more apparent to search engines. Finally, if you link to other blogs, there is a good chance that those bloggers will see traffic coming from your site, and if they find your content worthwhile, then they may in turn link back to your site.

One important thing I do when linking from a post is to set up my internal links to open within the same window but to set up external links to open in a new window or tab. That way, if a user clicks on a link to another site, they still have my site open when they want to keep reading.

Add Meta Data

Although it is unclear whether search engines still look at meta data to determine rank, it is still important to getting clicks after you appear in the search results. Your meta data is displayed below the link to your site, and it’s the content most searchers scan to decide whether or not to open your site. It should be under 155 characters, include your most important keywords (these appear in bold in the search results when someone searches for you), and entice the searcher to read your full post.

Blogging for Better SEO Results

This was a post written in December about CMS predictions for 2012. One thing I think helped this post reach the top of the search engine results is that we published this post a few days before several other similar posts were published, giving it a leg up in traffic over the others.

Use Headers and Sub-headers Appropriately

Rather than bolding all your headers or simply increasing your font size, use the H2, H3 and H4 tags to distinguish this text as important. Search engines weigh this text more heavily in determining how relevant your content is to searchers, so don’t overlook this important step. If you’re using Cascade Server CMS, then these formatting options should be available within your WYSIWYG editor. Otherwise, you can add these tags directly into the HTML.

Finish with a Call to Action

Calls to action come in many different varieties. One thing we like to do is to invite our readers to give their feedback about the topic in the comments section, because we love to engage with our readers. Other options are to add a button or a form urging readers to subscribe to your newsletter, apply to your university, attend an open house, make a donation or buy basketball tickets today! Adding a call to action may not directly affect your SEO, but providing great content on a regular basis and making it share-able (and shareworthy) will definitely help your SEO.

For more on calls to action, check out this Call-out Crash Course from Spectate. Another great post is 10 Techniques for an Effective Call to Action from boagworld.com.

Questions? Comments?

Have you found these suggestions helpful? What SEO blogging tips have you found that I didn’t include in this post? Please leave questions and comments in the section below and feel free to share this post with others who might find it helpful.

The Publishing Problem Checklist

By Tim Reilly

Friday, January 20th, 2012 at 11:45am

Publishing Problem ChecklistEvery once in a while I’ll have a client or a colleague report to me that they are having difficulty publishing an asset (or assets) from Cascade Server. Given the flexibility of the application, problems like this can stem from a variety of different settings. The next time you attempt to track down a publishing problem for yourself (or one of your Users), step through the following checklist for the best chance of staying sane:

Is the Asset publishable?
This seems like a no-brainer, but you’ve got to start somewhere. Check the System pane and make sure that the option to Include when publishing is selected. When this option is not selected, the User will receive an error message in the interface (but it is up to them as to whether or not they decide to tell you about it). By that same token, make sure that the asset’s parent Folders are publishable as well.

Is the Destination enabled and does the User have access to the Destination?
If you click on a Destination you will see an Activation field in the Properties section. You’ll want to make sure that the field reads Destination is enabled. If it does not, simply edit the Destination and check the corresponding box to enable the Destination.

You should also notice a Groups field which lists the Groups to which the Destination is applicable. If the User having problems is not a member of one of these Groups, either add the User to one of the Groups or edit the Destination and add the User’s Group to the Applicable for Groups field.

Both of these settings will display a message to the User in the interface giving a hint as to what settings need to be modified. Again, it’s a matter of whether or not your User is going to tell you about the error message they received.

Can the Configuration be published?
Each output on a Page has a corresponding Configuration. For each output that is not being published properly, make sure that the Configuration for that output is publishable. This is done at the Configuration level by checking the box labeled Configuration can be published.

Does the Content Type allow for the Configuration to be published?
Clicking on the Content Type for a Page will take you to the Properties screen for that Content Type. Pay careful attention to the Configuration Publishing field as it denotes which Configurations will be published along with to which Destination(s) they will be published (if any). Make sure that the Destinations to which you expect to publish are selected here.

Have you checked the Publish Queue?
This is another fairly obvious item, but occasionally we all get impatient and expect our assets to publish immediately when we tell them to. If there happen to be a lot of concurrent Users in the system publishing - or - there are other large scheduled publish jobs occurring at the time, a User’s publish job could potentially be delayed by several minutes (or possibly longer). So, while each Site can process up to 2 jobs at once, it is always possible that there are still more jobs in the Publish Queue ahead of the job in question. On a related note, if you have the necessary Role ability, it is possible to re-order jobs in the publish queue just in case you have a critical job that needs to be processed ahead of all others.

Have you checked the Publish Message for errors?
Assuming the asset was processed by the Publish Queue, there should be a Publish Message on the Dashboard of the User who published the asset. The message will contain general information about the publish (like how long it took, which assets were published to which Destinations, etc) along with any errors that might have prevented the asset from publishing.

Does the FTP/SFTP or OS user have Write permissions?
Based on past experience, the majority of publishing issues that I see are a result of incorrect web server permissions. When publishing from Cascade Server, the user account supplied at the Transport level (for FTP/SFTP) must have write access to the directories to which Cascade Server is publishing. If you are using a File System publish (or a mapped drive), the OS user that started the Cascade Server process must have write permissions to the publish directories.

We provide an easy way to test these things in the Administration area. If you click on any Transport in the system you will see an option on the left to Test Transport. On a similar note, you’ll see a Test Destination link on the left hand side when viewing a Destination. If either one of these tests fail, you can bet that any publishes using these assets will fail as well. A failed test will provide you with an error message in the interface that you can copy/paste and send to us for further review if needed.

Submit the log file(s) to Hannon Hill for further review
If the publish message doesn’t contain any errors, grab the latest log file (and/or the log file from the day on which the error occurred) and send it to support [at] hannonhill.com along with a brief summary of the problem. The log file(s) can be found on the Administration dashboard under the Logs tab - or - on the application server under the directory \tomcat\logs.

At this point you will probably be saying one of three things:

“Thanks! These steps helped me track down the problem. You are my hero, Tim!”

Great! Glad I could help out. Don’t forget to tell all of your friends about me!

“Well, I found an error...but I have no idea what the error means. Thanks for nothing, Tim.”

I hear you. Since the errors returned could be from a number of different things (the web server OS, the database driver, the FTP/SFTP server, etc), we don’t have much control over the messages themselves. Some of these messages can be very cryptic. If you need help deciphering any of these errors, always feel free to contact us at support [at] hannonhill.com and we’ll be happy to help out.

“I still see no errors and I continue to have problems getting the asset to publish to my web server. Thanks for wasting my time, Tim.”

If this is the case, there is a chance that the asset is publishing to the web server successfully but it is ending up in a place where you aren’t expecting it. If you have access to the web server, try searching for the asset and see if you notice any results that match the name and have a timestamp that coincides with the time at which the asset was published from Cascade Server. An asset in Cascade Server will publish to a directory on the web server in a location which is determined by a combination of the Transport directory, an optional Destination directory, and the Folder hierarchy (in the Home Area).

Of course there is always a chance that you’ve come across the latest and greatest defect. If you believe you’ve stumbled across one, don’t ever hesitate to contact us at support [at] hannonhill.com and we’ll work with you to track down the problem.

Best Practices for Cross-Site Sharing

By Rahul Bhagnari

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012 at 11:00am

So You’re Moving To Sites? Best Practices when Cross-Site Sharing

Cascade Server 6.0 introduced a revolutionary game changer into the content management system: Sites. A unique and efficient way of segmenting, categorizing, and structuring your website. A Site in Cascade Server works as an entity unto itself – complete with its own folder structure and administrative assets. We’re talking wholly unique, completely separated and distinct areas. Mind. Blown. Think of the possibilities at play here – you can have distinct organizations all updating their own sites at the same time within the same system all pushing their pages out to the same server. It’s harmony – it’s like The Police wrote and performed Synchronicity III.

But alas – all is not well – sometimes departments can’t be trusted to have tastefully appropriate web pages. Sometimes, they want a professional page to look like a 14 y/o girl’s Tumblr dashboard. Well, we for the sake of humanity, for the sake of standardization, we just can’t let that happen. So how do we set up someone with their own Site, so that they’re completely insulated and responsible for their own content, without making them responsible for the design or layout? Why cross-site asset sharing and linking of course (like you couldn’t tell from the title of this post)!

So – how does it work? Well I’m glad you asked. I’ve included some useful tidbits of information to help you get started and get going on setting up your cross-site asset sharing experience. This is a useful blog post! Huzzah!

Set up a _common Site. At the end of the day, the majority of your pages are going to look the same – or at the very least – you’re going to want them to look the same. Further, you would also want to keep your administrative files – your CSS, JavaScript, rich media content files – out of the way of some of your users. You know the ones. The ones who delete your folder of images. Setting up a common site provides you with an easy to use area to house all of these assets as opposed to the Global area.
Keep your images together. It sounds odd – maybe you don’t want one of your departments putting up their office Christmas party pictures online. But look at it from the other side – those developers look pretty awesome as Santa’s tipsy elves. Keeping a central repository of images prevents duplicates of random background images and also promotes sharing across departments. Aww!
Keep your page types within each Site. While each of your page types can essentially use the same metadata set, configuration set, and data definition – if you have a copy of these page types on each Site, you can then tie those outputs to your destinations (which are Site-specific). This comes in handy for mobile sites or outputting different layouts of pages to different areas.
Rewrite your links. The best part about Cascade Server is that it keeps track of all the assets in your system. Every asset has its own ID – file, page, block – it doesn’t matter. So why wouldn’t you want to take advantage of this functionality? When uploading a file to Cascade, you have the option to “Rewrite Links in File” – this essentially will rewrite an image or page link to point directly to that asset. So, should you ever move the image or set up a new Site for all of your common elements, your files will always be pointing to the proper location. Nothing goes missing! Ever!
Use the Site name. When cross-site sharing, many users will forget to mention the Site when writing out a path name in their formats or CSS files or templates. Don’t forget this! How is anyone supposed to know what Site these files are coming from? Cascade Server isn’t Hogwarts. This also comes in handy when pulling out node information from your assets. For example, did you know that an asset path will give you the relative path information (specific to that Site) while an asset link will give you the full path? Fascinating, right?

There are lots of different ways to implement a cross-site sharing platform. I’ve provided some general Best Practices cases but for the most part, you can set up the assets in a way that makes the most sense for you. If you don’t want to share images, then you don’t have to. If you do want people to have access to CSS files, then go ahead. The beauty of Cascade Server is that is provides you with several options without explicitly limiting you to any one of these. So give it a shot.

Lastly, check out some of our Knowledge Base articles for more information:

Sites
Cross-site relationships and rules
Site migration wizard – moving from Global to Sites

Social Media Directories

By Holly Wright

Thursday, January 5th, 2012 at 4:00pm

Over the last few years, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn have clearly emerged as the giants of social media. But many of the more specialized and niche social media platforms also have a very large audience, and most social media-embracing organizations have adopted one or more of these non-core social networks.

Last month, hundreds of universities claimed their Google+ brand pages. Last week Emory posted a link to their Pinterest pinboard, complete with student photos, an Emory Christmas ornament, and other interesting finds from around the web. And today, over a dozen of the higher education clients we follow on Twitter posted new photos to their YouTube channels. This enthusiastic adoption of so many different social accounts poses a problem, though. How do your followers know where to look for you?

Cross-socializing, or promoting some of your social accounts on your other social accounts, can be beneficial where it makes sense. Posting a youtube video to Facebook or Google+, linking to your blog from your LinkedIn account, and telling people about your Pinterest board on Twitter all help, to an extent. But I’ve recently noticed another important way to get the word out, especially for those people actively seeking you out: Social Media Directories.

In addition to the primary social media links on most homepages, many colleges and universities have created entire directories for their social media accounts. Take the total number of colleges, sports, clubs and departments at a university and multiply that by the number of different social media channels being used, and you can easily see why a directory is so useful for students, alumni,fans, and all your other stakeholders.

Examples

Thinking about creating a social media directory for your organization? Here are some examples from our client base:

Michigan State Social Media Directory

Michigan State University Social Media Directory

Albright College Social Media Directory

Philadelphia University Social Media Directory

Philadelphia University Social Media Directory

William & Mary Social Media Directory

Emory University Social Media Directory

Many of the others I found are arranged in a grid format like the Emory, Albright and MSU directories above. One style that I find particularly interesting is the William & Mary directory. It's organized into three categories: Official, Official-ish and Unofficial. These categories each have their own page and are easy to navigate and elegant in appearance. One of the other important features that most of the examples include is a link for people to submit other accounts to the directory.

How do you keep your social media accounts organized? We'd love to see your social media directories, so please feel free to share them in the comments area below.

Cross-Browser Javascript Development Lessons and Tips

By Adam Griffis

Friday, January 13th, 2012 at 10:45am

Over the past several months here at Hannon Hill, I’ve gotten to work on more projects to increase my exposure to Javascript development and I've learned some really helpful tips for cross-browser testing. Prior to working here, I worked on a Swing-based thin client, so most of my Javascript exposure was from personal projects. Six months ago, I decided to push myself by volunteering for a Javascript-heavy project: the Twitter Feed Block. After a week of development, testing my prototype in Internet Explorer showed that it didn’t work at all.

Last month, I worked on another Javascript-heavy project, and in addition to normal QA, remembering my past experience, I made sure to make sure that the major features worked in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome. Feeling more confident, I added a small side feature--almost as an afterthought--that broke the whole thing in Internet Explorer. At this early stage of enterprise Javascript development, I’ve learned a few basic lessons that I wanted to share with those of you who are just getting started in Javascript development or having issues with cross-browser testing:

You can’t use browser development tools like true IDE's. I still remember the first time I used an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for development; it was a revelation. The first feature I really appreciated was the ability to stop execution of code and inspect objects. Not only did it give me a better picture of the state of the application at a point in time, but often I could shortcut looking up the API documentation by looking at the methods and member variables in the debugger. The first time I used Firebug, I started back with those old habits, but quickly learned my lesson: Firefox, IE and Chrome implementations of Javascript objects vary widely, so digging through the object for an obscure method that does exactly what you want is begging for trouble.
Use API frameworks as much as possible. This is related to the prior point: since browser implementations of Javascript objects and methods vary, it’s important to use API frameworks like JQuery or Prototype whenever possible to hide these details.
Develop in one environment; test in another. My favorite browser is Chrome, and its development tools are great, so I found myself using it both to develop and QA my work. In retrospect, it’s clear that this is a bad habit, but it’s easy to see how one can fall into this trap. Going forward, I plan to do all my testing in my most troublesome browser: IE.
If something feels like a hack, it’s a great candidate for breaking in some environment. My first iteration of the Twitter Feed Block used what felt like a hack at the time. It added a new script object to the div which would perform a refresh when loaded. It felt like a hack, but I got it from the blog of a guy much smarter than me, so I ran with it--at least for the prototype. Almost immediately, it broke in an older version of IE due to an issue with adding objects to the parent object of a script. When working with finicky environments, good practice is even more important than normal.
BrowserStack is fantastic. BrowserStack is a great tool that allows you to see how your website renders and runs in several different versions of all major browsers in different operating systems. I first used BrowserStack to avoid booting up my virtual machine to do some IE testing on my Macbook, but now I’ve found that it makes it much easier to test your page in multiple browsers quickly and in multiple versions (something essentially impossible with even a few different computers). It even gives access to some development tools, allowing you to debug problems.

Doing this unfamiliar work has certainly been a humbling experience, and I’ve learned a lot from my mistakes, but I’d love to learn from you as well. What are some tools and practices you use to avoid browser issues? What are some more general Javascript best practices?

The Year of Content and Content Strategy

By Kat Liendgens

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012 at 3:00pm

As a CMS provider, our top priority is to empower organizations to create and maintain their websites as easily and efficiently as possible. There is nothing more powerful and effective that you can do to generate more traffic to your site, to engage your target audience, and to increase your web marketing ROI than to provide fresh, relevant, and valuable content that is both shareable and share-worthy. Forbes.com recently labeled the year 2012 “The year of content”. We would like to take it a step further and hope that 2012 will also become the “Year of Content Strategy”.

Why?

You’ve already made an investment in your technical resources (CMS, social media platforms, analytics), as well as in your human resources (web team, content managers, content contributors). So you’re already investing in the framework to support your content. It only makes sense to also invest in the heart of your website - your actual content. Considering that your content is the main reason why people visit your website and interact with your brand online, it’s a worthwhile investment to develop a strategy to ensure that your content maximally supports your goals.

There’s no standard content strategy template. You can make your strategy as elaborate or as simple as you need to. What’s important is that you start working on it. Here are some steps to get started:

Make a list of questions that you want your strategy to answer. This will not only give you an idea of how involved you want your content strategy to be, but also provide you with a starting framework. Some of the obvious questions to be included are, for example, “Who is responsible for which piece of content” or “Where are our content gaps?”. Other points that can really help you optimize your strategy and lead to improvements in your overall message and consistency are “What are the key messages to be delivered?”, “What strategic goals is the content meant to support?”, “What is the purpose for each piece of content?”, and “When and how will each new piece of content be promoted?”. Once you have compiled your list of questions, identify the most effective ways to capture the answers. It can be as simple as a shared Google doc to get started.
Create an editorial calendar. One of the easiest ways to generate momentum for your content strategy is to establish an editorial calendar that captures content assignments, target review and publish dates, and optional additional information, such as keywords and promotion channels. Some of the many benefits of an editorial calendar are that you increase accountability, empower you and your team to be more strategic, and gradually make the creation of fresh content more of a habit. In addition, the by-product of an editorial calendar is a content inventory, which allows you to more easily identify opportunities for content re-purposing. Furthermore, you can look at your website traffic and correlate spikes to specific events on your editorial calendar, so that you can optimize your content based on those findings.
Identify the low hanging fruit and address them first. “Content Strategy” is a term that seems to intimidate managers and content contributors alike, possibly because it sounds like a monolithic project. It doesn’t have to be. The trick is to get started. How about picking the low hanging fruit first? Here are some things that you can do to immediately improve your content:
- Tackle the pain points. If you have any pages on your site that just rub you the wrong way, maybe because the message isn’t clear or the tone is not consistent with the rest of your site? Why not start there? Clearly identify the purpose of the page, as well as the reasons why you don’t currently like its content and start your re-write. You may be surprised how liberating it can be to eliminate a pain point from your site, and how much momentum you can build to further improve your content.
- Revisit your page titles. You may find some opportunities where you can better optimize your page for search engines by either adding a strategic keyword (where it makes sense!), removing words that smell of “keyword stuffing”, or by changing the title to something that’s a little more engaging or catchy. In addition, by looking at your titles with fresh eyes, you are also more likely to spot potential content weaknesses. Are there any discrepancies between what the title promises and the post or page delivers? If so, you have now identified another chance to improve your content.
- Fine tune your most important pages. Which pages do you want your target audience to visit the most? Which pages seem to attract the most visitors? Which pages appear to be typical “entry” or “exit points”? Once you have answered these questions, revisit the content for those pages and identify how you can improve them.
- Ask the value question. Your content strategy not only identifies content to be created, but also tell you which content needs to be eliminated. Ask yourself, “Does this page or post provide value?” and make your content decisions accordingly. Keep in mind that value can take different forms: your content piece can be educational, it may provide answers to your visitors’ questions, it may showcase a special offer or event, or it may be entertaining. The bottom line is that your content has a purpose.

Within the next few days, we will offer a white paper on content strategy considerations for higher education, so stay tuned!

UPDATE: The white paper is out! Download Content Strategy Considerations for Higher Education.

Hannon Hill's Resolutions for 2012

By Kat Liendgens

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012 at 1:18pm

2011 treated us well here at Hannon Hill. We released two major upgrades to Cascade Server, which contained some of the most requested features from our Idea Exchange. We rolled out our new company website, hosted our best user conference to date, welcomed many new clients, and added some great new people to our team. We are thankful for an amazing year, and even more excited about 2012. Some of our resolutions include, but are not limited to:

Get more people trained on Cascade Server. As Penny Harding, our Services Manager, announced, we are determined to expand your training options even further. That’s why we are now offering free monthly Cascade Server Bootcamps. During these two-day trainings, technical users will get a comprehensive overview of the system. Please read Penny’s post for further details.
Cascade Server 7 and beyond. Now that Cascade Server 7 has been out in beta for a couple of weeks, we can’t wait until its official launch. Cascade Server 7 is arguably the most powerful release to date. In addition to the Twitter feed module, deep site copy (my personal favorite), inline regions, and a new and improved asset chooser, brace yourself for a surprise or two! We have big plans for Cascade Server 7 and beyond and cannot wait to reveal them to you. As always, our Idea Exchange is a significant component of our product road map, so let me just say “Thank You” to everybody who continues to submit suggestions and ideas, and to everybody who participates in the discussions and voting. Cascade Server is built for you, which is why your feedback is invaluable to us.
Even better user conference. As smoothly as this year’s Cascade Server user conference went, we always want to go bigger and better next time. It’s going to be hard to top the quality of presentations of the 2011 conference, but I have all the confidence in the world that both our amazing customers and our team will be able to wow participants with examples of how they push the envelop with Cascade. Furthermore, after our first annual Cassie award ceremony, I expect that the competition to win one of these highly prestigious trophies will be even more fierce in 2012.
Help web contributors get more out of their content. You’ve probably heard the phrase “Content is king” many times by now. It’s simple. There is nothing better that you can do for website’s SEO and for your inbound marketing than to provide fresh, quality content. After all, your content is the main reason why people come to your site in the first place. We’ve been advocates of content marketing for a long time, and we strive to find ways to help you not only manage your content, but also empower you to optimally leverage your content. Stay tuned as we reveal more information over the next few months!
Grow the community. Most of you already know that we are all about fostering community, as evidenced by the fact that we are so open and transparent that everybody has access to our knowledge base, our help forum, our user conference videos, and even our GITHUB code repository. It is our intention to provide even more resources next year. We have already identified two major projects from which our customers would be able to benefit immensely.
Continue to provide a wide spectrum of valuable content. As I mentioned above, we are firm believers in the “content is king” philosophy, which is why we provide what we hope to be valuable content to you on a regular basis. For instance, you may have noticed that team members from all of our departments contribute to our regular blog posts to ensure that you receive a wide spectrum of content, ranging from highly technical concepts to strategic best practices, from unique insights into the Hannon Hill culture to tips for administrative users. It’s important to us to deliver quality and diverse content to you, and we are determined to take it up another notch in 2012. Watch out for new white papers, frequent webinars (both hosted by the HH team and, as always, by our customers), and presentations and talks at various conferences (at this point, I’d like to take a moment for shameless self promotion and invite those of you who will be at the Sungard Summit in March to come see my discussion on agile strategies on March 27, 2012).

Thank you to all of our customers, competitors, and team members for helping us push Hannon Hill and Cascade Server to the next level. I wish you all a happy, healthy, and successful 2012.

Hannon Hill Corporation

Blogs - January 2012

By Holly Wright

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012 at 10:00am

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By Holly Wright

Wednesday, January 25th, 2012 at 10:30am

Create a Search Engine-friendly URL

Choose your Keywords Wisely

Use Images and Name Them Correctly

Create Both Internal and External Links

1. Internal Links

2. External Links

Add Meta Data

Use Headers and Sub-headers Appropriately

Finish with a Call to Action

Questions? Comments?

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By Tim Reilly

Friday, January 20th, 2012 at 11:45am

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By Rahul Bhagnari

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012 at 11:00am

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By Holly Wright

Thursday, January 5th, 2012 at 4:00pm

Examples

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By Adam Griffis

Friday, January 13th, 2012 at 10:45am

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By Kat Liendgens

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012 at 3:00pm

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By Kat Liendgens

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012 at 1:18pm

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