Many of us will be heading to Concord NH tonight to attend the initial meeting of the NH Drupal User Group.

Lucidus is excited to become a more active member in the Drupal community and supporting this user group is just one of the ways we will be doing that in 2009.

While the user groups tend to cater to a technical crowd, we also hope to have some "Lunch and Learn" events at our office where our customer can hear about the latest news impacting their websites and share best practices amongst themselves

So I've been digging into the Context and Spaces modules from Development Seed. These are two FANTASTIC modules that essentially, when combined, allow a developer to create a web site "feature" that can be essentially packaged for easily installation and use on multiple websites. For example, we're creating a project collaboration site to be used for our client projects that might include things like messages, files, site documentation, chat, support tasks, etc. The challenge thusfar is that the documentation is rather sparse but there are some great videos that show how to get started.

Someone asked me this morning about business/motivational books that I've read recently so I thought I'd put together a quick list of the books I like and the ones I intend to read soon.

Here's my book hall of fame:

It seems that every time I speak at a conference, I'm amazed when I ask for a show of hands of people who use version control software in their projects. The number is ridiculously low. Then we spend 10 minutes of the presentation going through why you would use it and how it works. I found a great visual intro to version control that's worth noting. (I'm a guy who likes pictures).

So we've been talking for several months about the next phase of our lucidus.net site. It had been around for more than  a year and was looking a bit long in the tooth. Moreover, it was on Drupal 5 and needed to be brought current. However, as with every cobbler, our children were not getting new shoes when customers were ready to pay.

My mom used to say that you could tell a lot about the person from the company they keep. (Usually it was to encourage me to find new friends). Today I'm pretty proud of of the company we (Lucidus) keeps at Clark Mortenson Agency. They are a client and our insurance company and they just won BusinessNH Magazine's "Best Company to Work For" award for 2008.

So I took my car to the dealership yesterday for service and took the shuttle back to work. Riding in the shuttle reminded me of one of the best examples of disregarding user's expectations regarding navigation.

Interesting article in Information Week touting Drupal that states "Drupal is conquering new territory as companies look to build Web sites designed from the ground up to support social interaction." It's great to see the product get the attention it deserves. It seems more an more that the conversation in the open source world has moved from Joomla to Drupal and Alfresco. (Guess we picked the right horse).

You want a website. You want a website that reaches your unique audience. In this post I want to give you a list of the top ways to help your visitors find your website. We'll cover some search engine technical talk, but I want to keep it at a minimum. This list is about reaching your target audience. With the tips below I want to help you with that, and tell you what really matters.

Simply defined, the URL is the entire address of what you are viewing in your web browser. It is found in your browser's address bar. It is important to your developer because it helps them to know precisely where you are encountering an issue or problem on your website, and it also helps point the developer in the direction of how they can solve the problem for you.

Let's look at an image of a website in a browser to see what we're talking about.