Jerry Richardson <p>I am an unbridled digital optimist. The upside of our society's digital metamorphosis will be manifested in making us more charitable, more reasonable, more educated, wiser, more empathetic, and more expressive.</p> true 2009-09-08T10:51:56-04:00 <p>Common sense tells us that this expansion of expression will exclude the written word, as traditional written forms are crowded out of the marketplace of ideas by blogs, tweets and text messages. </p> <p>Fortunately, this is another case where common sense is not to be trusted. In a Wired commentary "<a href="http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-09/st_thompson">The New Literacy</a>", Clive Thompson argues that student writing is being appreciably improved by the proliferation of digital expression. </p> 12 2009-09-08T10:42:00-04:00 2009-09-08T10:52:46-04:00 1 Jerry Richardson <p>Disruptive Ventures, Inc. has collaborated with The Vera Bradley Foundation for Breast Cancer to redesign VeraBradley.org. The new web site, launched on April 15, 2009, consolidates the foundation’s social media efforts, providing a centerpiece for their communications with donors and volunteers.</p> false 2009-05-15T12:37:17-04:00 <p>Visitors to VeraBradley.org can now donate to the foundation, catch up on Foundation news, link to the Foundation as a friend on Facebook, view blog entries and Twitter postings from Development Ambassador Heidi Floyd, or view photos from foundation events.</p> <p>"Social media is the new buzzword in marketing and fundraising. We’re proud to be cutting edge," says Catherine Hill, Vera Bradley Foundation for Breast Cancer Executive Director.</p> <p>According to Vera Bradley Interactive Media Producer Steve Salcedo, collaboration between the company’s in-house design team and Disruptive Ventures Chief Technologist Jerry Richardson expedited the deployment.</p> <p>"I designed the site and wrote the CSS, and Jerry plugged in the Rails framework – in an amazingly fast turn-around time. Once the framework was complete, Jerry provided training to my team and myself, and also continued to support us until the site launched in April 2009," said Salcedo.</p> 11 2009-05-15T12:36:00-04:00 2009-05-15T12:38:04-04:00 1 Jerry Richardson <p>When a true friend must undertake the unenviable task of bearing grooming tips, they often do so in the form of a leading question, such as "Have you thought about going back to the standard multi-eyebrow configuration?" <p>It is in the same spirit of friendship that we sometimes have to ask, "Is it time for a new web site?"</p> false 2009-04-11T12:55:45-04:00 <p><br><img src="http://disruptiveventures.com/images/postcard_clipped_432_288.jpg"></p> <p>Certainly that flash intro page (with music and animation) was the right move for your site 10 years ago. That was cutting-edge stuff, at the time.</p> <p>"Call us for a Quote" was a reasonable call to action in 2000, but today's visitors expect immediate service. They want to configure, order and track their purchase without leaving the site.</p> <p>Those banner ads you tried in 2001 to boost traffic - they felt a little overpriced, but did they work? Without accurate statistics of your site's traffic and sales, you were unable to calculate your return on investment, so you stopped trying to boost traffic.</p> <p>Over the past five years, the tools to create trackable online marketing have fallen into place. Now is the time to redouble your online efforts - tie in your social-internet presence, work in a blog, add a map to your location and measure every bit of usage.</p> 10 2009-04-11T12:33:00-04:00 2009-04-11T12:55:45-04:00 1 Jerry Richardson Disruptive Ventures, Inc. has launched <a href="http://TriKappaBingo.com">TriKappaBingo.com</a>. The web site, developed over a two-week period in March, enables online public ticket sales for Tri Kappa’s 2009 Baskets & Bags Bingo event. Visitors can also access information about prizes, raffle items and sponsorship. This year’s expanded bingo event will be held on Saturday, April 18. false 2009-04-10T13:59:36-04:00 <p><br/><img src="http://disruptiveventures.com/pr/trikappabingo.jpg"></p> <p>For the convenience of out-of-town attendees, the site presents the location for the event, the Orthopedic Capital Center, and the location for ticket pick-up, Rockhill Pinnick LLC, using interactive maps powered by Google Maps. Ticket sales utilize PayPal for processing of payments, including all major credit cards.</p> <p>Disruptive Ventures provided a complete site-development solution including graphic design, analytics, programming, testing, deployment, hosting and project management services.</p> <p><strong>About Disruptive Ventures, Inc.</strong><br/> Disruptive Ventures, Inc., based in Warsaw, Indiana, specializes in building deeply-integrated data-driven interactive applications for the world wide web. The company builds custom websites and helps savvy marketers maximize their advertising return on investment utilizing web-based advertising, email marketing and list management. Companies interested in "disrupting" their industries should contact Jerry Richardson at 574.306.0668 or visit <a href="http://disruptiveventures.com">disruptiveventures.com</a> for more information. </p> <p>CONTACT: Jerry Richardson, Chief Technologist, Disruptive Ventures, Inc. via phone at 574-306-0668 or 260-249-8980, or via <a href="mailto:jerry@disruptiveventures.com">email</a></p> <p>EDITORS: A print-quality screenshot of the TriKappaBingo.com home page is available <a href="http://disruptiveventures.com/pr/trikappabingo.png">here</a>. This press release is available in .pdf format <a href="http://disruptiveventures.com/pr/trikappabingo.pdf">here</a>.</p> 9 2009-04-10T13:56:00-04:00 2009-04-10T14:30:36-04:00 1 Jerry Richardson I am not entirely sure why my "Selected Sessions from RailsConf 2007" slides have been viewed more than 100,000 times on SlideShare. Here they are, for your perusal. <div style="width:425px;text-align:left" id="__ss_57359"><a style="font:14px Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif;display:block;margin:12px 0 3px 0;text-decoration:underline;" href="http://www.slideshare.net/miraclebaby/selected-sessions-from-railsconf-2007?type=presentation" title="Selected Sessions from RailsConf 2007">Selected Sessions from RailsConf 2007</a><object style="margin:0px" width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=selected-sessions-from-railsconf-2007-12960&rel=0&stripped_title=selected-sessions-from-railsconf-2007" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"/><embed src="http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=selected-sessions-from-railsconf-2007-12960&rel=0&stripped_title=selected-sessions-from-railsconf-2007" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="355"></embed></object><div style="font-size:11px;font-family:tahoma,arial;height:26px;padding-top:2px;">View more <a style="text-decoration:underline;" href="http://www.slideshare.net/">presentations</a> from <a style="text-decoration:underline;" href="http://www.slideshare.net/miraclebaby">miraclebaby</a>.</div></div> false 2009-04-01T10:26:50-04:00 8 2009-04-01T10:24:00-04:00 2009-04-01T10:26:50-04:00 1 Jerry Richardson <p>After a 1-year absence, I'll be headed to RailsConf at the Las Vegas Hilton in May. You won't have any problem picking me out of the crowd - I'll be the nerdy guy with the MacBook. But seriously, look me up on <a href="http://twitter.com/jerry">Twitter</a> and we can hit the tables.</p> <p><a href="http://www.railsconf.com"> <img src="http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/24/rails2009_210x60.jpg" width="210" height="60" border="0" alt="RailsConf 2009" title="RailsConf 2009" /> </a></p> false 2009-03-20T19:17:08-04:00 7 2009-03-20T19:11:00-04:00 2009-03-20T19:18:02-04:00 1 Sarah Richardson <p>Disruptive Ventures, Inc. is excited to announce that we will be attending Future of Web Apps 2009! FOWA will once again be in Miami on February 23-24, 2009. Look us up if you will be there too. We'll have a frosty beverage together!</p> <p><a href="http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2009/miami"><IMG SRC="/images/event_badge_02.jpg"></a></p> <p>For more info on FOWA 2009, visit <a href="http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2009/miami">http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2009/miami</a>.</p> true 2009-02-13T11:55:50-05:00 6 2009-02-13T11:47:00-05:00 2009-02-13T15:49:23-05:00 2 Jerry W. Richardson <p>A decade has passed since a web site became an essential tool for sharing information about your company&rsquo;s products and services. The next logical step to pursue is customer engagement, building the relationships between individuals using web technology. Disruptive Ventures recommends embracing the second decade of the internet with an eye on seven points of emphasis isolated for their impact on customer engagement.</p> false 2009-01-28T11:15:59-05:00 <div id="pdf_download"><a href="http://media.disruptiveventures.com.s3.amazonaws.com/2009WebToolkit.pdf"><img src="http://disruptiveventures.com/images/bound_toolkit.png" border="0" alt="Bound Toolkit" width="105" height="125" align="right" /></a><h3>Download the Printable .PDF</h3><p>Store them, print them, tape them to your wall. Download the Seven Points as a <a href="http://media.disruptiveventures.com.s3.amazonaws.com/2009WebToolkit.pdf">handy .pdf file</a>.</p></div><ol id="points"><li>Measure Everything</li><p>Before investing the first dime in new functionality or promotion to enhance engagement, getting a realistic picture of current site traffic is a must. Site analytics, captured using the free Google Analytics service or a paid package, will yield both raw data about the number of visitors to the site and insights into how those visitors found the site. With an established traffic and lead-generation baseline to work from, only then may measurable improvements be made to your web presence.</p><li>Be Search-Engine Friendly</li><p>Unless it can be indexed by the most popular search engines, even the most impressive, useful and well-promoted content will never achieve maximum impact. Visitors being directed to the site from search engines often comprise the single most efficient means businesses have for generating new sales. By following the advice of the major search engines, content can be made easier to index. Useful content that is well-indexed leads to increased visibility in organic search results.</p><h3>Targeted Meta Keywords and Page Descriptions</h3> <p>Individual web pages in the site should be customized with keyword and description meta tags that reflect the content of the pages.</p> <h3>Standards-Adherent Page Design</h3> <p>Invalid page code can make the job of indexing site content more difficult for search engine spiders. By adhering to web standards, content can also be translated between browsers and platforms more easily, for example if you want to create a &ldquo;mobile-phone friendly&rdquo; version of the site for mobile phone users.</p> <h3>Sitemaps</h3> <p>Sitemaps inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a sitemap is a specially-formatted file that lists page addresses for a site along with data about each page (including when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.</p> <h3>Active Submission</h3> <p>Using tools provided by the major search engines, site pages can be submitted for indexing.</p> <p class="emp">A Note about &ldquo;SEO&rdquo; - Disruptive Ventures does not advocate &ldquo;search engine optimization&rdquo; (SEO) that goes outside the public recommendations of the search providers being targeted. While temporary gains may be achievable using SEO tricks, the long-term risk of being banned from a search engine altogether outweighs any short-term bounce in ranking.</p> <li>Keep it Fresh</li> <p>Fresh content gets more response from site visitors. Keeping content fresh has gotten easier in the past 3 years with the widespread deployment of personal publishing tools.</p> <h3>Blog</h3> <p>A blog adds personality and a consistently fresh source of content to your home page. Updates from the field can be posted to your blog from your laptop or even via mobile phone. Allowing comments from site users on your blog posts turns a 1-way medium into a conversation.</p> <h3>Video beyond YouTube</h3> <p>Internet video enables one-to-many communications with verbal and visual cues that previously only inhabited interpersonal interactions. Your voice and your face are the fundamental currency of trust and engagement.</p> <h3>Facebook</h3><p>Create a facebook page which include a feed of information you want to feature. Online &ldquo;friends&rdquo; will have immediate access your latest news.</p> <h3>User Accounts</h3> <p>Site visitors should have the option to create an account to manage contact and site preferences.</p> <h3>E-Mail Newsletter</h3> <p>A well-managed e-mail newsletter can keep your most valuable users in the loop on new products and services that you offer. Opt for a template that replicates stylistic elements from your site to reiterate branding cues with recipients.</p> <li>Maximize Availability</li> <p>An inaccessible site gathers no traffic.</p> <h3>Staging Site</h3> <p>After site code is created and tested but before it is made public, we&rsquo;ll place it on a private staging site for your review and approval.</p> <h3>Production Site</h3> <p>Sites produced by Disruptive Ventures can be hosted on our Virtual Private Servers in Missouri, fastidiously maintained by our staff. For the security and privacy of our clients, we will not host un-audited code from other providers on our servers.</p> <h3>Offsite Backups</h3> <p>Backups of the site&rsquo;s underlying source code and production database should be made regularly (at least daily) and stored off the main server, at another physical site for continuity in the event of issues at the main server site.</p> <h3>Proactive Monitoring</h3> <p>By proactively monitoring the site using external tools, site issues can be detected and resolved before they impact real-world users.</p> <li>Accessibility and Usability</li> <h3>Accessibility for the Physically Challenged</h3> <p>Guidelines for site accessibility for physically challenges users are widely available. Most importantly identify the content of images using the &ldquo;ALT&rdquo; tag and don&rsquo;t over-specify font sizes.</p> <h3>Platform Independence</h3> <p>Avoid platform-specific features that alienate users of alternate technologies or browsers - meet users on their turf. Use flash only for video. Site designs should work cleanly on all post-&ldquo;Internet Explorer 6&rdquo; browsers (IE 7 &amp; 8, Firefox 2 &amp; 3, Opera 9, etc.) and on PC&rsquo;s, Macintoshes and Linux-based systems.</p> <p>Due to constraints on bandwidth, screen-size and functionality on most mobile platforms, the iPhone is the only mobile environment currently worth targeting with specialized designs or functionality.</p> <h3>Designing with Usability as a primary goal</h3> <p>Identify desired user activities and, as necessary, conduct usability testing with live test subjects</p> <li>Find Proactive Pay-Per-Click Terms</li> <p>Pay-Per-Click Advertising programs on Google, Yahoo, Microsoft LiveSearch and Facebook must be managed to find efficient bidding combinations to direct qualified users to a web site. Spending must be aggressively monitored and tracked, especially once users are on the site to find out which inbound keywords and referring sites generate actual &ldquo;in-real-life&rdquo; prospects. Once effective keywords are identified, spending can be scaled up to increase the number of new users.</p> <li>Manage User Confidence</li> <h3>Have a Reasonable Domain Name</h3> <p>For &ldquo;for profit&rdquo; ventures, go for a &ldquo;.com&rdquo; address even if it means adding an additional descriptive phrase or number to your company name. Stay away from &ldquo;.info&rdquo; and &ldquo;.biz&rdquo; addresses - they&rsquo;ve become notorious for attracting spammers and scammers.</p> <h3>Use an SSL Certificate for Transactions</h3> <p>If you expect to handle sensitive customer information (such as credit card numbers), make sure and encrypt the information being transmitted using SSL. The latest web browsers check SSL Certificate information closely and help users identify improper configurations to reduce online fraud.</p> <h3>Publish Testimonials</h3> <p>Real-world stories of your prowess shared by actual customers (preferably on video) are a knockout.</p> <h3>Post and Follow a Privacy Policy</h3> <p>Have a specific and restrictive privacy policy and follow it to the letter.</p> <h3>Promote Professional Associations and Certifications</h3> <p>Make note of any that you have.</p></ol> 5 2008-08-07T11:02:00-04:00 2009-04-10T14:31:48-04:00 1 Jerry W. Richardson <p>While at Hand Industries, Inc., I had the opportunity to develop an online apparel design application for their Custom Print, LLC division. This video walkthrough highlights some of the interesting functionality therein.</p> 2009-01-28T11:15:59-05:00 <p><object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="400" height="302" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="src" value="http://www.vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1438266&amp;server=www.vimeo.com&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=1&amp;color=01AAEA&amp;fullscreen=1" /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400" height="302" src="http://www.vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1438266&amp;server=www.vimeo.com&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=1&amp;color=01AAEA&amp;fullscreen=1" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object><br /><a href="http://www.vimeo.com/1438266?pg=embed&amp;sec=1438266">iBlinkink Designer Walk-Through</a> from <a href="http://www.vimeo.com/jwr?pg=embed&amp;sec=1438266">jerry richardson</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com?pg=embed&amp;sec=1438266">Vimeo</a>.</p> 4 2008-08-01T11:27:00-04:00 2009-01-28T11:15:59-05:00 1 Jerry W. Richardson I was interviewed for an article about social networks for investors in last week's U.S. News & World Report. After a 15 minute phone interview and a four-hour photo shoot, they ended up using a cool picture of me with my 4-year-old daughter. 2009-01-28T11:15:59-05:00 3 2008-07-16T17:26:00-04:00 2009-01-28T11:15:59-05:00 1 Jerry W. Richardson Today, I am celebrating my independence from the corporate world of work alongside our family celebration of our nation's independence. Keep visiting disruptiveventures.com to see what's next. false 2009-01-28T11:15:59-05:00 1 2008-07-04T12:43:02-04:00 2009-01-28T11:15:59-05:00 1 Jerry W. Richardson Disrupt your industry with a rapidly-deployed game-changing web site from Disruptive Ventures, Inc. Big ideas mate with unparalleled attention to detail to create uniquely effective web sites. false 2009-01-28T11:15:59-05:00 2 2008-07-01T05:12:00-04:00 2009-01-28T11:15:59-05:00 1