So yesterday we were on digg for our recent launch of client site SimplyFired.com. Obviously we are really proud of the work we did for them and don’t mind the attention, but what is with the Digg user base? Don’t get me wrong, it is nice to see that some people actually read our little article and hopefully other small design and development firms can take something away from it, but the vast majority of comments seem to be from people that don’t even click over to read.

I suppose this is all due to use of social voting that was implemented into the site via Pligg, but that is only a small part of the site as a whole. What about the design, the blog, the implementation of code and project management? In reality, that was the point of article which apparently went unnoticed. I also wonder how much of a fuss would have been thrown if users had no idea it was pligg. I suspect there still would have been some groans, but nothing to the degree of some users we saw.

(more…)

So today the Media Crumb team, with the help of Simply Hired’s Ops team, launched Simply Fired.com into the wide open space of the web. It was a two month long process for MC and something we really enjoyed working on. It is not often that a design & development firm can say they have worked for truly helpful and forward thinking clients such as Simply Hired so we thought it would a perfect case study for the new MC site and blog. So if you ever wanted to know what is takes a small company like ours to build a “web 2.0″ (what ever that means) type site, check out or little case study of Simply Fired.

(more…)

For a small startup company like, TechDiversions.com, we’ve learned something immensely useful - it’s not always wise to mimic your competition when designing a front-page layout for your website. This is especially true when your competition is highly brick & morter based while you’re purely an online entity.

For instance, a few of our competing sites have very un-friendly front page designs when it comes to looking at the site from the perspective of a google, yahoo or msn web crawler. Yet, they have a high page rank! Why? Because gamers around the world link to them because they know the name, the company and might even be in an affiliate program with them.

(more…)

After working on the Pligg CMS and experimenting with the Drupal “Vote” modules I’m no longer torn between which management system is the best. What makes one better than the other? Well, Pligg looks, feels and acts much like digg.com so utilizing Pligg gives the developer a direct focus on the goals: a digg clone.

Drupal, however, has modules which handle thousands of unique designs and feature sets. With a few modules you can simulate that of “digg” (or pligg) with a little point and click integration. The difference, working Drupal to look like digg/pligg is a bit more effort; this may or may not be your goal.

What if your goal is to build a vote site that has the scheme of digg but you want to expand it or support it with other engineering efforts such as blogging, aggrigating news, RSS, e-commerce and more? Pligg won’t work in this manner.

What I’ve found is that Pligg’s strong points are for sites that want to adopt the digg concept. For instance: www.plugim.com a site dedicated to copying digg with a focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and not technology news. They do it well and it’s very simple. If you want to expand your site in the future you may want to think about using something like Drupal.

Other big features, based on my own experiences, between the two content management systems (CMS) supportability, security and stability. Drupal is solid, well tested, developers are very reactive to bugs and patches and security notifications are sent when issues are found (in core and sub-modules). This is important to me.

I’ve found pligg doesn’t really have the same level of development and stability as Drupal. Perhaps this is because Drupal is maintained by a very picky set of developers that choose what goes in and what doesn’t go into the Drupal core. In any case, the fact is, developing for Drupal takes me less time than fixing the issues in Pligg that managed to escape testing. I’ve been working with Drupal long enough now to jump into developing my own modules and features quickly.
The downside? Drupal requires learning, experience and clean PHP development. You don’t just install Drupal and start coding, however you can install Drupal (as a designer or non-programmer) and have a feature rich site in under an hour.

Which is better? For me, I’m leaning towards Drupal.