Checking Out Ecommerce

Everyone has been stuck in an extremely long line at a grocery store or mall at one point or another.  No matter how good the shopping experience, getting stuck at the checkout is going to be what ruins your day.

While turning to the internet for most purchases can help you avoid the pitfalls of shopping centers, a poorly designed or unsecured online checkout can be much worse than standing in line all day.

Every ecommerce site should pay close attention to its shopping cart and checkout functions, and with tons of open source and subscription options available, there’s no reason to ever have a problem checking out online.

Newest Team Talent

NEW ORLEANS – Full-service interactive agency Mudbug Media has added two new employees to its staff of marketing and design professionals. The company has rapidly expanded in the past 18 months to meet the needs of existing and new clients. “We had a employee growth rate last year above 50 percent,” said Mudbug Media president Scott Zeitzer. “And based on current business demands, I anticipate that to continue throughout 2010,” he added.

FBT Tuition Lending

First Bank and Trust has reshaped the way parents apply for and pay for tuition loans online with the help of local interactive agency Mudbug Media.

Understanding the Cloud

Cloud computing is nothing new.  The concept of relying on a grid or network of online resources for computing needs has been around for decades without becoming mainstream because clouds are expensive to build and maintain.

The cloud movement gained serious traction this week as Netflix announced it will move most of its online resources to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, or S3.

In Netflix’s case, user queues and a massive movie library will be moved over to Amazon’s servers for storage.  When you download a movie from Netflix, you will actually be receiving the information from an Amazon S3 server.

With such a high profile web-based business turning to a cloud for storage, what does this mean for the future of cloud computing?

Email Marketing Deliverability

When it comes to mass communication techniques, getting the word out is only half the battle.  You also have to make sure people are getting the message.

That’s why television networks live and die by their ratings.  It’s simply not enough to broadcast a show to 3 million homes nationwide, people have to actually turn on their TVs and watch the program.

In the same way, focusing only on the number of emails sent out during an email marketing campaign is missing the most important part – whether or not the emails actually got to the intended inboxes.

There are several steps that can be taken to make sure an email marketing campaign isn’t derailed by emails that are lost or flagged as spam, and it takes a concerted effort to achieve a successful deliverability rate.