David Norris

Offsite Disaster Recovery Made Cheap and Easy Backing up important data has always been one of those things most people don’t think about until it’s needed and too late. Any good network admin will consider this an important area to address, but are often given insufficient funds. In the end, backups are like security – [...]

Search Dominance in Your Grandma’s Internet For almost as long as I’ve been aware there was a Google, I’ve heard people foretelling its imminent demise. Historically this is a smart bet when it comes to search engines – Over the short lifetime of the World Wide Web, quite a few search engines have come and [...]

One of the more annoying features of Netsuite is the inability to get rid of their name & branding from a Netsuite-hosted e-commerce web site. The shortcut icon (that little graphic that shows up next to the site title when you create a bookmark) Shortcut Icon defaults to a Netsuite ‘N’ graphic. I’ll show you [...]

I remember the first time I heard this phrase – I was in fourth grade and one of the older classes in my school put on a play that in retrospect was completely ridiculous and silly, but I wasn’t quite as critical when I was 9. It was a series of scenes designed to exemplify [...]

As a Netsuite customer and consultant, I’m surprised that I’ve never heard talk of Netsuite’s IPO plans. In all the usergroup posts and official Netsuite notifications, nothing has ever been mentioned, which strikes me as strange. Maybe it’s not, who knows. At any rate, it seems like more than a possibility at this point. A [...]

One of the best features of having a database-driven e-commerce site is that there is one centralized place to store all your product information. You can then manipulate the data in all sorts of ways, and all of these applications can be updated in more or less automated fashions, integrating all the changes you’ve made [...]

In previous articles, I introduced important IA concepts and covered the first steps involved in organizing your site’s information. All the steps and preparation have led to this final stage, where it’s time to implement all those ideas and concepts and create a site map. If you’ve been following the steps from part 1, you [...]

So what is information architecture and why should you care about it? In simple terms, it’s the way you organize the information on your web site. The decisions you make when deciding how your users will navigation your site have far-reaching effects, including SEO, usability, and conversion rate. I’ve written a lengthy introduction to information [...]

One of my favorite topics in web site design is information architecture. That’s a fancy term that basically corresponds to how you organize the content and navigation for your site. In other words, the method by which you put your content into groups or categories, and thereby build the site’s navigation structure. It’s a question [...]