ExpressionEngine 2.0

The long-awaited, next major version of ExpressionEngine, v2.0, will be officially released on December 1, 2009. This is huge news. EE 2.0 has been in development for a very, very long time. The team resisted rushing against a promised date and focused instead on working toward a thoroughly complete, worthwhile release. We've had access to, and installed, the beta and can say that it shows. The platform has been reworked and built off of EllisLab's CodeIgniter framework, which we've used in the past for custom application development. For our clients & end-users, ExpressionEngine 2.0 means:

• An enhanced Control Panel with quicker access to most-used functions and features
• More robust entry & editing tools, including a system-wide File Manager and robust image editing tools
• CodeIgniter at the core, enhancing our ability to deliver custom solutions for you
• Integration of powerful components, like Brandon Kelly's FieldFrame extension

Pricing

We've always touted ExpressionEngine's license fee as quite reasonable for the value it delivers, and that continues to be true. EE 2.0 comes with a modest price bump ($299 vs. $249, $149 vs. $99 for non-profits*) that is fully justifiable.

What about current ExpressionEngine sites?

Your site is probably running ExpressionEngine v1.6.x, which EllisLab will continue to support and release patches and updates for as necessary. If we're building your site with EE 1.6.8 right now, we can upgrade your site down the road for the EE upgrade fee ($50) and time spent. As we've been saying through the EE 2.0 development cycle, ExpressionEngine 1.6.8 is an incredibly solid and robust solution and we're comfortable deploying our clients' sites on it. If your site is about to launch, short of EE 2.0's release, you're still in a great place with a great product.

If you're coming on board with a new site after December 1, we'll be ready to work with you using the latest & greatest ExpressionEngine release.

* Prices are for 1 ExpressionEngine license. Yearly subscriptions are available for access to the latest updates and releases, though we don't always find those necessary. Find out more in the ExpressionEngine Store.

You need outside perspective. That's where an agency like Slim Kiwi comes in.

A Fast Company blog post, Are You Building a Consumer-Facing Company?, addressed this subject last week:

Design agencies, on the other hand, are born to think outside-looking-in. Not only do design agencies bring together radical talent and methodology that's difficult to maintain in a closed corporate environment, they have another advantage that's seldom talked about: Their ability to reflect across industries and companies and to form their opinion based on such experience. They have a role in creating many products, join many different teams, and can reflect, in hindsight, about the success or failure of certain ideas. That agency worldview cannot be counted in sketches, models or dollars--it is an invaluable trove of experience that is underutilized by both the agencies and their clients.

Our job goes beyond just executing a design. We're hired to provide critical insight and to evaluate your business and marketing efforts, provide you feedback, help you incorporate that feedback into your strategy, and then execute based on that strategy.

That might be a lot to sign onto. In the coming weeks, we'll be announcing a new service that will allow you to get an idea of what steps you should take and where we can contribute: Usability & Marketing Analysis Reports. You point us to your web site, pick a level of review to engage us on, and we provide you a report on what's working, what isn't, and what it would take for us to get you where you should be. Our goal is to give you a taste of our value, shake things up a bit and empower you to make an informed decision on the direction of your efforts without the big upfront commitment.

Outside looking in. Whether you're the corporate team that needs reinvigoration or just looking for expertise that isn't practical to maintain in-house, we're at our best when we're charged with bringing our outside perspective and our unique blend of expertise across industries, from consumer to business-to-business channels, for companies large and small, to the table to provide you fresh ideas. With this new offering, our goal is to let you opt for a first date rather than jumping into a relationship, while identifying where your organization can grow and optimize your efforts.

• In October, 2008, 37signals, provider of products such as Basecamp, which we use for project management, ceased supporting IE6.
• Shortly after that, Sifter, a web-based bug tracking application, released a redesign which broke in IE6, to our client’s disappointment.
• YouTube & Digg recently announced that they would soon be dropping IE6 support.

What does dropping IE6 support even mean? Well, it means that they’ll stop checking their web sites in IE6 to make sure they look good. When we launch a web site, we check it in a broad sampling of browsers: Safari 3, Safari 4, Firefox 3 and up, IE7, IE8 and, to our frequent dismay, IE6. Each of those browsers interpret how HTML should display in subtly different ways, and we need to adjust your web site’s code so that pages match the designs you approve in all those browsers. You’re paying for your designs and content to reach users regardless of their choice of platform and we support that.

But IE6? Well, two versions and ages old in internet years, it’s broken. To some extent, Microsoft ignored important trends and standards when building IE6, that the web development community and other browsers adopted, so it requires extra elbow grease to make sites work the same there as they do everywhere else. In the majority of cases, IE6 users are fringe users, less than 5%, and the costs of accommodating them outweigh the benefits, leading large web sites to announce they’re dropping support, in part to encourage users to upgrade, move on and get on the same page as everyone else. Web design firms announce new policies that they will no longer support IE6, or that doing so will incur an additional fee.

There are a few reasons IE6 hasn’t withered and vanished yet. The predominant reason is corporate IT departments. Some of them insist upon users staying with IE6 because years ago they built very expensive internal web sites that only work in that browser. Upgrading the browser on everyone’s computer would incur costs in redeveloping those sites. Others, like a financial services client we work for, stick with a specific IE6 release because a significant portion of their corporate security policy is based upon it.

Another client will soon be launching a site that may be accessed in Internet cafes anywhere in the world. We’re not entirely sure what browser might be installed there, so it’s a good idea to stick with supporting IE6 until we see some stats come in.

For now, we won’t be dropping IE6 support. We would certainly, for the sake of the web, appreciate it if you would drop IE6. We will continue to assume that we’re supporting IE6 in our work, but for those clients who feel it’s not worth the effort, we’ll discount the project commensurately and include a message on your site letting IE6 users know that a better experience awaits them in another browser. For the most part, those sites will work fine for those users and they’ll still get to the content. The design might come through a little rough, but we’ll collectively be doing our part for a better web by kindly requesting those users join us in the future.

We had many animated discussions with Zeo about their online strategy and design at myZeo.com. It was clear to us that they were carefully contemplating our advice and we made it clear to them (we hope) that we had a great amount of respect for the work they had done up to this point. We love the type of client relationships that we have with Zeo, where even amongst different opinions about strategy they can see we are more interested in their long-term success than their immediate happiness. We think the end result accomplished our task and plays a part in Zeo’s ongoing success, delivering a site that serves as their single largest point of sale for a new product that has achieved national attention.