Matrix Group International

Author: Joanna Pineda

  • ECFC Web Site Redesign and MatrixMaxx Implementation

    ECFC Web Site Redesign and MatrixMaxx Implementation

    Matrix Group International collaborated with Employers Council on Flexible Compensation (ECFC), an association that supports private employee benefits amongst working families.  The goal of the site was to create a new Web Site that increased ECFC’s online presence, but more importantly, streamlined their processes.

    Our work includes:

    • A new design that promotes ECFC’s online presence, and marketing initiatives.
    • Integration of ExpressionEngine Content Management System to help ECFC staff update meeting information and manage member news and updates.
    • MatrixMaxx implementation, integrating ECFC’s Web site and back-end membership database, finance and meeting/event registration.

    Visit the the Employers Council on Flexible Compensation (ECFC)

  • Is Cloud Computing In Your Future?

    Is Cloud Computing In Your Future?

    Cloud ComputingCloud computing is hot, hot, hot.  Early this year,  PC World predicted that cloud computing would shape up as a big trend in 2009.  We all know Amazon as a giant Internet retailer, but its newest business is cloud computing; you can now buy processing power and storage from Amazon!  Last year, Google launched Google App Engine, a service that lets developers write applications and host them on Google infrastructure.  SalesForce has a similar cloud that lets developers build and host systems on top of the SalesForce engine.

    But what exactly is cloud computing and why does it matter?

    Wikipedia defines cloud computing as “a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet.”  Whatis says that cloud computing is different from traditional hosting in three ways:

    • It is sold on demand, typically by the hour (this is why cloud computing is often called utility computing)
    • A user can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any given time
    • The service is fully managed by the provider (the consumer needs nothing but a PC and Internet access).

    Just imagine this: your organization has 1,000 boxes of documents to scan and OCR and you need to get the work done in one week.  By hosting your application on the cloud, you could have as much processing power as you need. Hundreds of servers could be deployed to your project at once.  When the work is done, your hosting obligations go to zero.
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  • My Favorite Twitter Visualization Sites

    My Favorite Twitter Visualization Sites

    Twitter logoI love Twitter.  Yes,  it’s information overload and there’s a lot of noise, but I love the commentary and the interesting links.  I also appreciate the updates from friends and family.  More recently, I am loving the Twitter visualization sites that are popping up everywhere.

    So, what the heck is a Twitter visualization?  If you’re on Twitter, you know that there are millions of individual posts, replies, and discussions every day.  Figuring that people out there would want to do things with this flowing data, Twitter publishes an API (application programming interface) that lets developers have real-time access to tweets and some user information.  The result is hundreds (thousands?) of sites that let you search, map and analyze tweets, relationships between users, and topics.  Here are some of my favorite Twitter visualization sites.

    • Twistori is my favorite.    Click on the words love, hate, think, believe, feel, wish and see a real-time stream of posts that contain these words in the tweet.
    • WeFeelFine is a visualization of not just tweets, but blog posts and images as well.  Explore Murmurs and see a flood of tweets with the words “I feel” in them.
    • Twittervision shows tweets from around the world, overlaid on a world map so you know where the tweet are coming from.  Twittervision is even available in 3D.
    • Having an event?  PepsicoZeitgeist shows real-time tweets about Internet Week in New York City.  I especially love the top words from IWNY tweets.
    • TweetStats lets you enter your Twitter username and see a bunch of statistics about your tweets, including when you tweet, average daily tweets, who you tend to retweet, etc..  Did you know all this about yourself?
    • Twitter Friends Network Browser lets you see your Twitter network and click and drag to do fun things.
    • Hashtags shows you the top hash tags on Twitter right now.
    • MyTweetMap lets you see tweets from the people you are following, overlaid on a map.
    • Dipity let you explore tweets in a timeline format but the site has since gone dark. Here’s a blog post that explores what happened to Dipity.

    What’s fascinating to me is how Web designers and developers have found countless ways to transform the universe of Twitter data in new and different ways.  Each site introduces me to new people to follow and gives me insight on new topics.

    How about you?  What are your favorite Twitter visualization sites?

  • Big Shed’s Place+Memory Project Web Site

    Big Shed’s Place+Memory Project Web Site

    Matrix Group International collaborated with production company Big Shed, to design a Web site that celebrates places we love that no longer exist. The Place+Memory Project Web site invites visitors to post their stories in the form of photos, videos, audio recordings and text stories at

    Our Work Involved:

    • 100% user-generated Place+Memory Web site, designed on a WikiMedia platform to engage visitors to post their lost place
    • Logo design
    • Integration with Google Maps so visitors can tag the exact location of their lost place, and see where others have posted

    Visit the Place and Memory Project and Post Your Favorite Lost Place

  • The Browser Wars Are Not Over – Web Standards Are More Important Than Ever

    The Browser Wars Are Not Over – Web Standards Are More Important Than Ever

    Web Standards Project logoIn reviewing the usage reports for this blog a couple of weeks ago, I realized something startling: the majority of visitors are NOT using Internet Explorer. Check it out:  since January of this year, 46% of all visitors use Firefox, 40% use Internet Explorer, 9% use Safari, and 3% are on Chrome.  In the last 30 days, Safari users were 11% of all traffic, while IE users went down to 39%.  Yeah, okay, this traffic is probably skewed because of the audience, but I’ve got Google Analytics configured to block traffic from the Matrix Group office where most of us use Firefox as our primary browser.

    An analysis of traffic on Matrix Group client sites shows that IE is still the primary browser but Firefox, Safari and Chrome are gaining ground.  For nearly all clients, IE commands no more than 75% of the total audience; this is still a dominant number, but it means that 1 in 4 users is not using IE.  Sorry Microsoft, but the browser wars are far from over and any giant can be toppled (that means you, too, Firefox!).

    All of this makes me thankful that my staff, many years ago, convinced me that Matrix Group should not be an IE-only shop. I still remember the staff retreat when the staff had a heated discussion about Web standards.  A few of us argued that writing standards-compliant code was expensive because the dominant browser, Internet Explorer, was mostly not compliant, which meant we had to do double html work to make sure our sites behaved properly in IE, Netscape, Mozilla, etc.  But the vast majority of the staff rightly argued that standards compliance was the right thing to do, it would give us a competitive advantage, our sites would stand the test of time better, and someday, Microsoft would come around.
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  • Why Won’t My Boss Make That Decision?

    Why Won’t My Boss Make That Decision?

    Boss unable to make a decisionI hear it all the time from clients and prospects.  “My boss isn’t ready to make a decision and I don’t know why.”  “We are delaying our decision-making.”  “We are not ready to move forward and don’t have a timeframe.”  “We’re just gathering information, we don’t have a timetable.”

    At first blush, it just doesn’t make any sense:  organizations expend time and effort needed to put out an RFP (request for proposal), participate in meetings and demos, review proposals, check references, yada, yada — and then sit and don’t make a decision. 

    So why doesn’t the CEO just make the decision? After many years of selling to organizations of all sizes, in all industries, here’s why I think  CEOs don’t/won’t make a decision their staff is dying for them to make.

    The initiative doesn’t have support from the top. Sometimes, the initiative to redesign a Web site or put in a new back office has a lot of middle management support, but not top support.  Middle management has the okay to research and evaluate but no commitment from the top that resources will ultimately be made available.  So if you’re asking your boss if it’s okay to research new phone systems, you need to know that your boss believes a new phone system is needed, has money in the budget and will make a decision.  Otherwise, he’s just humoring you when he blesses the research effort.

    The CEO doesn’t think he needs to make the decision right now. This is a tricky one.  Your CEO might believe with all her heart that you need a new membership database, but she isn’t convinced that the issue is urgent, which means she can delay a decision.  You need to make the case that a decision is urgent and necessary.  Prepare a cost-benefit analysis, point to pain points, and illuminate the work arounds you’re living with.
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  • Get Your Vanity URL on Facebook On June 13, 12:01am

    Get Your Vanity URL on Facebook On June 13, 12:01am

    Facebook logoWhenever I sign up for something, I try to get jpineda@matrixgroup.net as my username and jmpineda as the account name. I’m jmpineda on Twitter, Yahoo!, Delicious, FoodBuzz, FriendFeed, etc.  For example, you can browse my Delicious account by going to http://delicious.com/jmpineda.  You can follow me on Twitter by going to http://twitter.com/jmpineda.

    But on Facebook, currently I’m http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=716098588.  Ugh.  Not exactly a memorable URL.  But all this is changing at 12:01am this Saturday, June 13.  At that time, you’ll be able to create a vanity URL for your profile.  You guessed it; I’m hoping very much to be http://www.facebook.com/jmpineda.  Perhaps more importantly, I want a vanity URL for the Matrix Group fan page, which is currently at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Matrix-Group-International-Inc/48658676723.  (The Matrix Group Facebook fan URL is so long and unfriendly that I have to access my bookmarks to share it with others.)

    Vanity URLs, also known as addressable identities, will sure make it easy for all of us to share our Facebook profiles with others and encourage friending and fanning (are friending and fanning real verbs these days?)
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  • Dog on Roof: How Social Networking Has Changed The Speed of News and Information

    Dog on Roof: How Social Networking Has Changed The Speed of News and Information

    Dog on RoofIt wasn’t a call I get every day.  Last week, my nanny called to say that two neighbors had knocked on our door to report that there was a dog on our roof. Yes, a dog, not a cat.  And since it was pouring rain, she wondered if I could come home and help out the poor dog.

    The first thing I did was call my husband to see if he could deal with the dog on the roof.  The second thing I did was tweet about the dog on the roof. The third thing I did was contact a few neighbors to try and figure out who the dog might belong to.  By the time I figured out which neighbor had left his 4th floor balcony door open, Maki had coaxed the dog (his name is Kerbie) down from the roof, brought him into our house and dried him off.  Within an hour, dog and owner were reunited.  I duly tweeted the happy news to my Twitter followers.

    Why does this dog on roof story matter? It matters because:

    • My dog on roof story became news to my community – my staff, my neighbors and my online network.  Within minutes of tweeting about the dog on my roof, I got tons of tweets about said dog on roof.
    • Kerbie’s story reached hundreds of people within minutes. Remember the plane crash in the Hudson?  Janis Krums posted the first photo of the crash on Twitter.  Within minutes and hours, the news was all over Twitter and the blogs.  By the time the 6 o’clock news covered the story, it felt like ancient news.
    • I bet that if I had asked for help, I would have received a dozen offers within minutes. People would have tweeted and retweeted until I got the right resource to solve my problem.

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  • Web Conventions We Can Do Away With – The Fold and Not Linking to Outside Sites

    Web Conventions We Can Do Away With – The Fold and Not Linking to Outside Sites

    I was in a Web design review meeting the other day and the client remarked that he wanted to make sure “all the important content was above the fold.”  My initial reaction was to agree but one of the Matrix Group Front-End developers challenged this notion.  The fold, he told me, no longer exists and is a myth that limits our design horizons.  The fold is gone?  What other Web conventions can we/should we do away with?

    In Blasting the Myth of the Fold, Milissa Tarquini argues that the myth that users “won’t scroll to see anything below the fold – is doing everyone a great disservice, most of all our users.” Moreover, the fold doesn’t even exist anymore because monitor sizes and  screen resolutions are all over the map these days.  When we refer to the fold, are we referring to the top portion of the page on my little Sony VAIO, or the 21-inch monitor on a programmer’s desk?  And btw, what about people who work on multiple monitors and never maximize their browsers?

    I resisted the notion that the fold is gone, but I am finally a convert. That’s it.  The fold is gone.  This does not mean that Information Architects and Web Designers should go nuts and create sites that scroll forever, but I believe we can reasonably expect that users will experience our sites differently and that all of them are okay with scrolling.
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  • Who Do You Believe? National Media, Local Media, Bloggers, or Peer Reviewers?

    Who Do You Believe? National Media, Local Media, Bloggers, or Peer Reviewers?

    Online NewsI just got back from a week in Mexico. Despite the dire warnings from the national media, my family attended a wedding and vacationed in Playa del Carmen on the Riviera Maya.  Were we nuts to travel to Mexico, home of the dreaded H1N1virus?

    If you read The Washington Post, you’ll think we were insane to go. The Post has stories about swine flu pretty much every day.  I count no less than 10 stories that feature or mention swine flu in today’s online edition of the Post.  The Post also tells me that the World Health Organization is set to declare swine flu a global pandemic.

    So why did we decide to go?  First of all, what was not widely reported was that the CDC downgraded its travel advisory from a recommendation against non-essential travel to a travel health precaution.  Second, reviews from bloggers in the US and Mexico assured us that Playa del Carmen and the Yucatan Peninsula were safe, having pretty much zero cases of swine flu.  This, despite, the news media reporting that swine flu was all over Mexico.  I found this blog post by Toni and Cheri useful, TripAdvisor (one of my favorite sites for travel and restaurant reviews) had a whole forum devoted to swine flu and Playa del Carmen, and a Google map of swine flu cases around the world showed no confirmed or reported cases close to where we were going.  All of this information, together, reassured me that I would not be putting my family’s health in jeopardy by going on this trip.
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