Olympic Perspective

Technology has grown by leaps and bounds over the last twenty years.  In 1992, you couldn't follow the Olympics online.  Tim Berners Lee who invented the HTML was still pioneering ideas which today we take for granted.  If you even knew what on-line was back then you had to settle for Prodigy service on a 1300 baud modem or if you were lucky on 2600.  Gosh how times have changed with live feeds from NBC, the BBC and countless tweets and updates over the web it was difficult to escape the Olympics.

These changes took place because of the hard work of countless engineers, scientists and shulbs like me who spend their lives creating and taming the digital wilderness.  The change is moving faster all the time and the next great frontier is going to be mobile devices.  What hammered that point home for me was an article my friend posted on Google plus.  He mentions that over 5% of web traffic comes from iPhones and another 3% comes from Android phones.  This is doubling the web traffic of this same time last year.  I anticipate as this trend continues that by the Olympics in Rio in 2016 those figures will be about 25% for the iPhone and 15% for the Android system.  I also think that Microsoft is going to be a huge player with Windows 8 but I just don't know where they are going to fit into this growth. 

All of us at E₃ systems are excited to ride this wave of innovation and have written programs which work on PC's, tablet computers and mobile devices.  We are particularly proud of how we use the Microsoft Tag technology to get your mobile device to communicate with plain pieces of paper to bridge the gap between the digital world and the real one.  Our Sully Inventory Management system makes that possible and you can find out more clicking here.

I can't wait for the next twenty years and what we are going to accomplish.  I hope you will be along for the ride. 

Until next time.

Our New Website

Dude Nice looking website.

Rebuilding a web site is a big deal.  It is not undertaken lightly and usually includes a committee of people attempting to be creative.  I hate redesigning web sites because everyone seems to know how a web site should look but many people do not understand how to make it happen.  This leaves me confronted with power point slides and Photoshop graphics with marketing people telling me that it should look exactly like the file they sent me.  Thoughts about cross browser compatibility and how the site should look on a mobile phone seem like secondary considerations.  It was a website redesign which finally pushed me over the edge and convinced me that I should be an entrepreneur.

It has been almost a year since I formally founded E₃ systems.  When I did I had a clean and easy to understand website which leveraged the latest web technologies and looked good on all the major browsers.  I decided to ignore IE6 because Google and Yahoo decided to. I was pretty proud of it but I knew as we were reaching our one year anniversary we needed a refresh. 

I took inspiration from Microsoft's MSDN website.  The good folks at Redmond are getting ready for the fall release of Windows 8 and are slowly changing over their web sites to have a more metro look and feel.  I decided that I should do the same.  This biggest challenge was finding an easy way to create the tiles and icons used in a Metro layout.  Searching around Microsoft's blog network, I was pointed toward a company called Syncfusion and they had a tool which manufactured Metro style tiles.  Armed with this tool I began the site redesign. 

To avoid making the swap too jarring, I decided that I would only change the front page of the web site and keep the remaining pages in the same format with Metro style flourishes.  I also wanted to make sure that users of the web site had access to all of our social media venues including our YouTube channel.  I also wanted to see if I could leverage the grid 960 css frameworks.  It was like putting together a complicated puzzle which would better appeal to our customers. 

The results speak for themselves.  The landing page contains all the information which old landing page did.  The social media icons are not as distracting.  Users do not have to scroll through the page to digest all the content.  It also looks good on tablet computers and PC's. 

Look over our web site and let us know what you think.

Until next time.