I was just excited because I just found a clip on YouTube of my cousin
Mike Aitken at the Mountain Dew Tour. We just recently had a family reunion and it was the first time I was able to see him live. It was pretty impressive and I can see why so many fans turn out to watch these guys jump. Mike took third place in the BMX dirt finals.

I happened to check out Cameron Moll’s site and he had a link to an article that I found completely astounding. He quotes an article from Comscore. The article states that there are nearly as many web users on telephones as there are on home based computers in Japan.

The study estimated that 53.6 million people are using a mobile device to access the Internet, a figure nearly equaling the 53.7 million who accessed the Internet from either a home or a work computer in June 2007.

This along with the phenomenal amount of iPhone sales makes me really rethink the emphasis on developing sites for mobile browsers. How many people are trying to access your site with mobile browsers? Are you developing for them?

San Diego is a lovely place to take the family with the beaches and access to places like Sea World, Disneyland, Lego Land, all the zoo’s and much more. Here in Utah the schools have time off for UEA (Utah Education Association), however it’s also been called Utahan’s Entering Anaheim as so many people invade California’s hot spots during this time.

I shopped around a lot and there are many great places in and near San Diego but we finally chose the Bahia Resort Hotel for many reasons.
The first is that it’s a hop, skip and a jump away from Sea World which is our primary target for this sortie.
The Bahia also has it’s own beach and pool and has many attractions for the kids.

I’m hoping that the Bahia hotel doesn’t need a face-lift as bad as their web site does. Their site at first glance seems professionally done, but after a few minutes of using the site you can become frustrated with the navigation. I just come away with the feeling of not ever really finding what I was looking for and once I did find something I couldn’t find how to get back to that spot easily.

The days of the Flash intro have come and gone. There is no sense of wasting a click with a time and bandwidth sucking Flash intro that provides me no real data. The site needs a complete overhaul from the code to graphics and layout to the whole structure of the site. So many travel web sites forget what people want to see. We want to kick the proverbial tires a bit. Give us a great photo gallery. Every hotel should have a link with possibly one or two shots from their main page. We want to see what the rooms look like in greater detail, let us see every angle of the pool. This is one of the major ways many people choose a site or a place to stay. What does it look like. Many times we hundreds if not thousands of miles away and we need some visual assurance that if we lay down our hard earned cash that we’re going to get something of value for it.

Now this doesn’t mean some gaudy and in your face Flash movie from the beginning. It means spend the time and money to get a professional image gallery created as this is what draws people to your site and business.

As I said, we looked around for many different deals and finally went withhttp://www.getawaytoday.com/. They were cheaper on many of the hotels than their own sites with better deals. I would recommend them to friend and foe.

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down. — Hector Berlioz

I don’t know how many times I’ve been waking up in the morning, driving home from work or otherwise disposed when I’ve had what I thought was a ground breaking idea. We’ve all been through this before, whether we had a great idea to help Dan Rather with his newscasts or a new way to produce ice in Alaska, we’ve all kicked ourselves for not remembering something we thought was a great idea.

To combat this I’ve started keeping a notepad by the side of my bed to write down any idea I may have.
Got any other suggestions?

What can I say about Bald Head Island, it’s one of those places where if you could take a month off of life and go somewhere this is one of the places I’d like to go.

I’m almost weeping as I sit here typing away at my keyboard thinking about the days spent laying on the beach watching the sun rise, listening to the waves wash up on shore. I’d take a late breakfast, sit on the front porch of my beach home and read a book as I smell the cool eastern breeze. Breath deeply and then sigh. Then I’d wander over to my hammock and take a well-deserved nap. I can almost feel time standing still.

There are numerous activities to take part in on Bald Head. If you think the worst day fishing is better than the best day at work you can go surfcasting along the shores or drop a line into one of the tidal creeks or Cape Fear River.

If your one who’d rather be on the water Bald Head has a great marina that can get you up and going with a small boat, canoe or kayak.

If you are a bit more active you can walk, run or cycle one of the many forest paths or comb a piece of the 14 mile beach.

As for the Bald Head Island web site, it’s hard to snap back to reality and give them a fair critique, but on I trudge. The site is visually appealing at first glance but can be a bit cluttered in areas.
The navigation can also be a bit confusing at there seems to be multiple navbars. There is a top navbar and a left-hand side navbar that contain some of the same content.

As for the code I guess time has stood still for their developers also as a quick review of the source shows font tags, javascript rollovers and table-based layout. Quickly running an evaluation of the home page code there were 98 errors and the accessibility showed 4 errors and 14 warnings.

Overall the site is pretty nice but beginning to show it’s age.

While searching for the website of The Homestead Hotel here in Utah I came across a much older and elegant establishment. The Homestead in Virginia dates back to 1766. One look at this grand old building takes you back to colonial times of yesteryear.

The web site greets you with some lower quality images of the surrounding that I’m sure don’t do them justice.
Then right below that is their booking engine, kudos for getting this right. It’s amazing how many reservation system web sites make you click multiple times to try to find out if there is availability.

While the code and the look and feel of the site is a bit out-dated, the site is fairly easy to use and find everything you need.
One suggestion would to make the photo gallery more apparent and use the actual images to draw people in. Like many people I choose a place to stay based on the charm and intrigue of a site. I don’t usually pick a destination and then find lodging, it’s quite the other way around. I find a place of lodging and then see what there is to offer around there. That’s one reason why frequent stay cards with national chain hotels don’t really work for me. While I love Marriott hotels when I’m away on business, I don’t tend to find all the different Marriott’s and go there on vacation.

A good example is when I was thinking of somewhere to take my wife for our tenth wedding anniversary. I thought of something meaningful (we watched Somewhere in Time on our honeymoon) and then researched to find out where that hotel was. Again when I saw a fairy tale like castle on a television program I researched and found the Fairmont at Banff Springs.

The Homestead runs along this same vain, while searching for another site the images of this grand old building and it’s surroundings drew me in. One look at the history of this place makes you feel like your sleeping where presidents and royalty have slept. It’s apropos that it should do this as that is just the case. It wouldn’t seem a bit out of place to walk down the halls and see powdered wigs atop distinguished gentlemen and ladies in large evening gowns.

The Homestead brings back a taste of sophistication that is so absent in todays society. You would feel out of place to show up to dinner in a t-shirt and flip-flops. It’s much more exhilarating to show up to dinner in formal dress to enhance the illusion of a more proper and gentile day and time.

At the same time you can feel at home as you wander the grounds which are nestled in the Allegheny Mountains of Virginia. Whether you take a hike amongst the trees and waterfalls or play a few rounds of golf, you can rest and relax just the way you want.

This picturesque palace is sure to capture your imagination and leave you wanting to come back again and again.

For years the Carolinas have been calling to me to visit. Watching movies set on the coast and reading Nicholas Sparks books have weaved a tapestry of incredible sights, sounds, smells and tastes.

Ever since I saw the movie, To Gillian on Her 21st Birthday with scenes of sand dunes with wavy white picket fences lined by beach grass with the ocean undulating in the background I’ve wanted to visit their sandy beaches.

One of the places I’ve considered staying is the Kiawah Island Golf Resort. While I’m not a big golfer, this resort draws me in with the numerous high-quality photos in a Flash video. The site is laid out rather nicely making good use of the space.

Clicking on the accommodations tab transports me to another place and time. You’ve welcomed with crisp linens adorned with calming green colored pillows. Out the double door sit two rod-ironed chairs perched atop a roomy balcony that overlooks the lush greenery that’s met by the silky sandy beaches that finally plunge into the azure blue Atlantic waters.

Kiawah Island is… Ten miles of wide, immaculate, ocean beach on which one - or two - might walk or cycle for hours and hours without interruption. Soothing by day, utterly romantic by night, the beach is complemented by the island’s river, meandering lagoons, and pristine marshlands, and closes each sun washed day safe beneath its own star studded southern sky. -Kiawah Island Resort.com

Check out their Fall 2007 newsletter.

While I usually hate Flash videos they are used sparingly on the site and include great photographs that draw you in and whether it’s view of the accommodations, recreation or dining you just can’t look away.

One of the drawbacks of the site is that it’s too difficult to make an actual booking. You have three clicks before you can make a reservation at what appears to be some third-party booking engine. It appears detached from the site and a bit clunky.

Any travel web site whether it be a hotel, car rental, airline or what have you should have the search form directly on the main page. While I do love the beautiful images on the main page, smaller images could be used to make room for a search form.

Regardless of the few drawbacks of the site it’s all I can do to keep from hopping on an airplane right now to go soak my toes and listen to the waves while I soak up the sun and beauty of South Carolina.

For years I’ve maintained that I hate Flash. It is aptly named and I have can’t stand it. Too many times it is just simple fluff and is never worth the model it breaks. Think about it, once you enter a site with flash and use it’s usually clunky navigation, you’re stuck. You can’t use your browsers back and forward buttons to traverse the site, you can’t bookmark a certain location within the animation. While it has it’s place for flashy animations for artistic sites, I would never use it for my navigation or for anything of importance on my site. In my book it’s just another way to break your site!

Apparently the people at Apple feel the same at least for their new iPhones. The Safari browser for iPhone does not display Flash videos. Kudos to Apple!

Here is a list of the areas to watch out for when developing for the iPhone.

• Validate your HTML and CSS
• Don’t use Flash, Look at QuickTime instead
• Watch you widths and sizes, look at using relative sizing
• Look at using new viewport meta tag
• Integrating with Google Maps is a bit different
• Automatic phone number links
• Use XHTML/HTML and CSS to keep page sizes to a minimum
• Keep number of CSS rules to a minimum.
• Use iPhone CSS to load lower resolution images
• Be conservative with JavaScript
• Create different content for desktop and iPhone browsers
• Don’t reinvent the iWheel

Read more at A List Apart Article

How do you manage a company that grew by more than 3,400 percent from 2003 to the end of last year?
A big part of the answer is looking inward for talented leaders instead of bringing outsiders into the company, says Brad Stone, chief executive officer of Heritage Web Solutions, a Provo Web site design and programming business.
Heritage’s revenue reached $8.2 million last year after growing by 3,443 percent over the four-year period. The blistering pace put Heritage near the top of Inc. magazine’s latest inventory of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States. The list, which usually catalogs 500 companies, was expanded to 5,000 this year.
“It’s been a home-grown group of leaders. We’ve not hired anyone from the outside to our leadership,” said Stone, ticking off a list of managers who started at the bottom of the company and worked their way into executive jobs.
The vice president of sales and marketing began as a telemarketer. The vice president of accounting doesn’t have an accounting degree; he was hired to compile statistics the company thought it should track. The manager in charge of Web design started as a designer, Stone said.
“I think coming up through the ranks is key for them to think as we think and to make decision the way we would make decisions. You bring someone in from the outside, they have their own style and sometimes baggage that’s really not conducive to how we do things.”
Heritage got started in 2001. Today the company has about 190 employees. The number moves up and down because Heritage regularly hires - and fires - workers in order to sift out marginal employees.
Heritage first spread the word about its services primarily through direct mail and telemarketing. Today, the company has shifted to the Web, spending about $100,000 a month on a pay-per-click sales campaign. The value of Inc.’s list is difficult to pin down since companies nominate themselves for consideration. The magazine says the list is a roster of the most innovative businesses in the country.

Salt Lake Tribune Article