A community website is a nuanced and powerful new tool for consumer companies to engage customers. On opposite ends of the spectrum, typical brochure-ware corporate websites offer limited options for two-way interaction and social media presences remain floating communities that lack a sense of brand cohesiveness, impact and depth.

The recent "Net Neutrality" agreement proposed by Google and Verizon has brought this issue back to the forefront. It is the topic at the top of the agenda for "Telco’s" Executives, Tech journalist and 'Free Speech' advocates. What makes this debate so important is that it will decide the future of the Internet. Since its inception the Internet has operated under a common agreement of "Network Neutrality", whose core principal "advocates no restrictions by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and governments on content, sites, platforms, on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and no restrictions on the modes of communication allowed". However, provisions on the Verizon-Google deal and other previous legislative proposals have skewed people’s understanding of how the ‘Open-Internet’ works and why it’s important for it to retain the current principles that have allowed the web to flourish. ISPs are lobbying strongly to remove, or at the very least redefine Net Neutrality in their favour. There are many facts to surrounding this issue but there are five we cannot afford to lose track of.

 When our development team came back from Adobe Max last year with tales of a design/dev hybrid tool called Flash Catalyst, my interest was peaked to say the least. Flash Catalyst seemed like the holy grail of interactive apps, promising a streamlined Photoshop/Illustrator to Flash/Air experience that empowered designers and made developers’ lives easier. After a week of total Catalyst immersion, however, I have a few bones to pick with Adobe.

Every day more and more web traffic originates from mobile devices. The majority of that growth comes from touch-enabled devices like the iPhone and Android. A great deal of the excitement over these two platforms is largely due to the advanced capabilities they deliver through applications and services. Features like touch, tilt, and locations services have made them the hottest platforms around. Most of these technologies, however, are also available through web browsers on theses devices. Incorporating some of these functionalities into your websites will enhance user experience when viewing it on a mobile browser and portray your company as forward-thinking.

For many small B-to-C businesses, the hardest working member of their sales team is their webstore -- working 24 hours a day and seven days a week. As local artisan chocolate makers Taza Chocolate work around the clock to recover from heavy flood damage to their recently renovated factory and brand new retail store, they have enlisted the help of the e-commerce system to do more than just sell products.

As a company with a strong appreciation for web statistics, hosting the Boston pops Fireworks Spectacular website was a great experience. Our servers handled the traffic spike well due to the combination of Common Goal WebManager and page flattening.

Now that our digital devices prominently feature touch interfaces, the ways of interacting with the devices and the content they present have begun to displace the methods of interaction made popular via traditional methods of human-computer interaction, most notably the monitor-mouse-keyboard setup. The interactions that went from physical to digital in the late 70s and early 80s are now merging – tapping, flicking and turning our digital devices allows us to physically interact with our digital content in ways not possible before now. Furthermore, these new levels and forms of interaction allow (and perhaps require) us to re-imagine the way we produce and deliver digital content.

Our everyday conversations contain a lot of terms, acronyms, and ideas that are not always easy to understand – regardless of technical acumen. Consider this blog entry a glossary of key terms to give you (and ourselves) a common foundation

 I recently spoke to our Senior Developer, Jake Story, about the page flattening functionality we have developed for Common Goal WebManager. This functionality is useful on any web site since it virtually eliminates the chance of server side errors, but is especially important for sites expecting a high amount of traffic.

Consumers' abandonment of printed media signals an end of traditional book culture and the rise of a different kind of literary community. E-books account for 10% of Penguin Books total book sales, and are expected to account for 40% of Amazon.com's. These numbers, compounded by consistant Kindle sales and the much-hyped release of the iPad suggest that we are not disengaging from literature itself, but merely its native medium. If print ads are a staple of your marketing budget, if you want to make a splash in the tradeshow space or if you have a stack of novels on your nightstand, read on.

A new approach called ‘Video For Everyone’ now makes it possible to embed your video in different formats, delivering only the version a device supports ensuring that your video reaches your target audience.

The traditional website architecture paradigm in some applications is on the way out. It is less important for content to exist in a strict tree structure or to be found in only one category. Content can be loosely organized in multiple categories providing many logical click-through paths.

Forget favicons. In a world ruled by smart phones, the power of an iPhone website bookmark icon is becoming more recognized and utilized. Custom-designed iPhone icons are a valuable opportunity for brand exposure and a well-designed icon can earn you a coveted top spot in your user's palm. So, don’t have one? Want to make yours better? Here are some ideas.

We make some pretty nice looking websites – our designers are pretty awesome at what they do. They create a plethora of custom art for every site that we the developers have to use to produce the site. Even though high bandwidth connection availability and internet connection speeds have rapidly increased in the last few years, no one wants to wait around for pages to load.

Any need you might have, chances are that ‘there is an app a plug-in for that”.

Actually, its amazing Technicolor radio paper. And after more than a decade in production, we’re finally starting to see some of the results of this ground-breaking technology.

WebAwards from the Web Marketing Association? Sounds official -- it is! Check out what sets Walbridge apart in this review of their win for "Outstanding Website" in this year's judging.

For several years now I've heard web agencies say (usually pretty adamantly) that there's no Content Management System (CMS) for Flash and that all updates are going to have to be done by a programmer. This may be a nice tactic for attracting clients to place money in your outstretched, open palm, but as someone interested in the technology at hand, I beg to differ...

Hue-Saturation-Lightness (HSL) is a newly supported color specification in CSS3. Like RGB, HSL is a numerical representation of color with the use of three distinct values, Hue, Saturation and Lightness.

As promised in my last post I will be discussing the new additions to CSS3 that will not only allow us to manipulate Opacity and Alpha.

The completion of the next implementation of ‘Cascading Style Sheets’, CSS3, by the World Wide Web Consortium is something I, and many people in our field are eagerly looking forward to.

With this code e9bfwpmugv a dub thee, Silverscape, a member of the Technorati Blogosphere!

Two or three years ago, Flash was our go-to technology whenever we needed to achieve really cool or advanced interactivity. More recently, we've really taken a liking to using Ajax to accomplish many of the same tasks.

What up, MTV; welcome to our crib. We’ve done some drastic redecorating, so ditch your shoes and start exploring our new Social-Media-powered digs.

When you care about your work as much as we do here at Silverscape it always feels great to get some kind words from a client about the job we’ve done. Check out what Jen from Walbridge had to say about their new site.

Silverscape is proud to announce our memberships within the Adobe Solutions Network (ASN) Developer Program and the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program.