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Posted 6/26/2009 by TomB, Acct Mgr
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I am proud and pleased to announce the launch of CruiseNow.com. Working with John Keen and his staff was such a pleasure and we look forward in working with him again in the future.
In this video, we take a quick look at CrusieNow.com, a site we just launched where users can search and book cruises. The site is unique in the amount of quality video describing everything from the destinations to the cruise ships themselves, as well as weekly webisodes.
CruiseNow.com is the next generation in online cruise travel companies. We pride ourselves on our ability to combine the latest in technology with good old fashioned customer service. It’s important to us that our customers realize that while we utilize the most modern online systems like CruiseText, CruiseReviews and Edutainment Videos we are still a business dedicated to that person to person contact and customer service. We encourage our customers to call our reservation center and work with our Personal Cruise Guides. They really are the best cruise agents in the country!
As you can see in the image above the company was founded by two industry veterans, John Keen and Jeff Nickerson. Both men work every day in the business and are intimately involved in its ongoing success. John Keen is a pioneer in the online cruise industry, having cofounded Cruise Outlet which was one of the very first national cruise companies to start doing business on the internet in the mid 1990’s. He later founded CruiseDeals.com which quickly became one of the fastest growing travel businesses on the internet. He sold that business to the Carlson Company, which is one of the largest privately held companies in the United States. Some of their brands include Friday’s restaurants, Regent hotels and Carlson Wagonlit Travel. Jeff Nickerson is also an industry veteran having worked as a sales manager with Royal Caribbean and also with CruisesOnly in the development of their travel technology. He later joined CruiseDeals.com and was the driving force behind its meteoric growth. They took their knowledge and experience and started a new breed of online cruise companies, CruiseNow.com!
CruiseNow.com is founded on many of the same guiding principles as the past, but this time they improved on them! Those principals are as follows:
Incredible staff - CruiseNow.com only hires the best of the best. Our Personal Cruise Guides and Care Guides are focused on you. We make sure that you are satisfied from pre booking until you return home from your vacation. We treat our staff like family members and expect them to treat our customers the same.
Amazing Cruise Values - Because of our size and reputation, CruiseNow.com has access to the absolute best cruise values in the industry. We make sure our customers get the best deal on their vacation. The bottom line is nobody gets a better deal than we do.
Faith – Both cofounders are men of faith and it’s important to us to make sure we operate our business in an ethical manner that honors God. We also try and follow that golden rule. Do unto others……
Customer Focused – We understand that no business is successful without taking care of their customers. We are knowledgeable about the industry and provide our clients the best advice and best price. In addition we are here for you – before, during and after your cruise.
Innovative – The team here at CruiseNow.com is committed to stay ahead of the technology curve. We are constantly improving our website and internal processes to make your experience more enjoyable and productive. We understand that using technology to educate and inform our customers will only make their experience with us more rewarding.
Have Fun – We sell cruises! What’s not to love about this job? Our goal here at CruiseNow.com is to make sure our employees have fun working here AND customers enjoy working with us. We take what we do very seriously, but always want to make sure everyone (including you) is having a good time! Life’s too short. ;-)
Thanks for taking the time to learn a little more about us here at CruiseNow.com. We always promise to treat you like family!
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Posted 3/5/2008 by PeterV, VP, Marketing
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MIX 08 kicked off this morning here in Las Vegas, and that meant a keynote with a ton of announcements. I'll leave the Silverlight chatter to the developers, but there was one part of the keynote I found especially interesting. Dean Hachamovitch, the IE group's general manager, followed Scott Guthrie on stage to show off the first release of Microsoft's IE8 browser.
While ie7 has some great features to compete with Firefox and others on UI, it's always been a bit of a thorn in the side of WEb developers. Dean echoed this, showing an example site in safari and Firefox, and then the broken version in ie7. Well ie8 seems to address those issues, with a real focus on interoperability and compatibility. But don't think all the time you've spent getting a site to work in ie7 was for not: the new version has an ie7 emulator mode, and the developer dictates which version is seen. Pretty cool.
Two other features really caught my eye. The first is the "WebSlice" functionality. Kinda like an RSS feed for pages where there is no RSS feed. I'll just use the example from the keynote. When you log in to facebook, you get a list of recent activity from your friends. With ie8, you can take a slice of the page and add it to a special favorites area on the browser's task bar. Just mouse over it for a quick capture of the latest updates. What's cool is it's not just text like with an RSS feed. The slice is designed to match the theme and brand of the site in question. Other uses include watching ebay searches, news, stocks, weather (shown below)...really anything that updates periodically. Just another way to save a few clicks. More on that here.
The second cool thing is the activities functionality. Just think how many times you look at a Web page for a store location, then have to copy the address and paste it in to a search or map tool to find. ie8 takes a "smart tag" approach to recognize these things in a site's content. hover over the address, and an activity icon appears. Click it for a list of options, including a map that hovers right there over the page. Very cool. There are a ton of business applications to this presently swirling through my head. More on that, including a list of available activities, here.
More knowledge to come as it's given to me. Enjoy! And if you're ready to download the beta, you can get it here.
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Posted 2/12/2008 by PeterV, VP, Marketing
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As far as I can tell, the real problem with developing sites for mobile devices is the lack of standards. Just as browsers have fought out the competition (RIP, Netscape), this will eventually happen on phones and PDA's. But if you need to program a site for mobile devices, you're best bet is plain text. Even though many browsers for devices like blackberrys, palm, windows mobile, etc will accommodate other things, you don't want to limit your audience. The result is boring experiences.
DotMobi, an industry group that registers domain names for the mobile Web, launched a database of cellphone specifications on Tuesday to help software developers better design Web sites for mobile phones. Read the full article here.
One sentence that caught my eye from that article, "DotMobi has sold more than 850,000 domain names ending in ."mobi"."
My first thought was, why four letters? That's dumb. My second thought was, who would want a .mob extension? I'm dumb.
Last thing on this topic...Mobi's site has a mobile browser emulator, so you can see what your site looks like on common mobile devices. Our site? Not so optimized so much. In fact, it didn't come up at all. But I know it works on my blackberry. But alas, they are trying to sell you a .mobi domain.
So I checked our site on the Opera mobile emulater. Seems to provide and iPhone-esque experience, with a few hiccups. I'll give it a shot:
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Posted 12/20/2007 by Brandon, Designer
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IE8 passes Acid2 Test
In what can be see as something close to hell freezing over, apparently the latest IE8 build passes the Acid 2 Test.
Without trying to rephrase everything the article states, here is a snippet:
"With respect to standards and interoperability, our goal in
developing Internet Explorer 8 is to support the right set of standards
with excellent implementations and do so without breaking the existing
web. This second goal refers to the lessons we learned during IE 7.
IE7’s CSS improvements
made IE more compliant with some standards and less compatible with
some sites on the web as they were coded. Many sites and developers
have done special work to work well with IE6, mostly as a result of the
evolution of the web and standards since 2001 and the level of support
in the various versions of IE that pre-date many standards. We have a
responsibility to respect the work that sites have already done to work
with IE. We must deliver improved standards support and backwards
compatibility so that IE8 (1) continues to work with the billions of
pages on the web today that already work in IE6 and IE7 and (2) makes
the development of the next billion pages, in an interoperable way,
much easier. We’ll blog more, and learn more, about this during the IE8
beta cycle.
Now, with all that context, I’m delighted to tell you that on
Wednesday, December 12, Internet Explorer correctly rendered the Acid2
page in IE8 standards mode. While supporting the features tested in
Acid2 is important for many reasons, it is just one of several
milestones for the interoperability, standards compliance, and
backwards compatibility that we’re committed to for this release. We
will blog more on these topics. Here’s a relevant video."
Now its obviously too early to pass judgement, but if this holds true for the final release (hopefully before Hell actually does freeze over) then we as web developers may find ourselves breathing a sigh of relief when we go to code a page for both FireFox and IE.
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Posted 10/18/2007 by Declan, Acct Mgr
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Looks like our California clients might be in touch soon, or we could give them a shout and update them on this possible new ruling. I just read a blog post on tech-crunch about the case of the National Federation of the Blind vs Target. Visually impaired users couldn't fully use the site because Target didn't offer accessibility tags on its images, keyboard options for navigation and missing navigation headers.
you can read the full story here
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Posted 10/18/2007 by Brandon, Designer
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At the beginning of this month, Adobe launched SHARE. The service looks to allow design professionals (us) transfer large files, documents, etc... without using email attachments. All you need is an Adobe ID (free) to try out the beta.
The site can be found here: https://share.adobe.com/adc/login.do
While I haven't personally uploaded anything, the interface is slick and the possibilities of search a service, which probably will not stay free in the future, are endless.
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Posted 10/18/2007 by Declan, Acct Mgr
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An Event Apart conducted a survey of 33,000 web professionals and asked them 37 questions,
It shows some really interesting data you can see it at this link
Survey results scroll down to the big blue button.
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Posted 7/30/2007 by Declan, Acct Mgr
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I'm currently writing a proposal, however upon reading the clients requirements brief, one section jumped out at me, not many … actually none of all the briefs I have read in my time with 352 Media Group had this info ....
"The site must provide the same level of service to individuals with visual, hearing, motor or cognitive disability as to the general public, pursuant to the Americans with Disabilities Act. All proposals must be Sec 508 ADA compliant and include the utilization of W3C Content Accessibility Guidelines with the website development. Respondents are requested to offer suggestions regarding accessibility. "
This site has some good info on Cognitive Disabilities . To my knowledge for a site to be 508 compliant with a CMS is difficult, mainly when you build a site it can be fully 508 compliant but when you start entering new content if not done correctly e.g. leaving out alt tags etc. It will make all the hard work you just did making the site compliant null and void and your users with certain disabilities are back to square one.
These folks XStandard reckon they have a tool for the job "The editor generates clean XHTML Strict or 1.1, and uses CSS for formatting, to ensure the clean separation of content from presentation. The editor is keyboard accessible, and markup generated by XStandard meets the most demanding accessibility requirements."
Is this the direction that companies should be taking not just catering to the alleged “normal’s” they’re lots of sites out there that are just not accessible or friendly for one reason or another. Small or hard to read text is a pet hate of mine. Im personally a webpage scanner if I can’t see the info I need. Pretty much immediately I click back and go to your competitors website.
If you think your company should take this direction and Develop a Web Accessibility Business Case for Your Organization , so that your not turning people away from your site. Most brick and mortar businesses have wheel chair accessibility. Check out the figures Americans with Disabilities Act: July 26 , they're staggering and some these people may not be able physically make it to your place of business, so they need to use your website. Think of the spending power of these people, think of the word of mouth advertising your website could get from particular groups because they had a pleasant experience on your site.
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