Many people tend to get bent out of shape every time Facebook changes anything. I wasn’t in that camp until Facebook Timeline hit.

As a Web developer, I appreciate that Facebook successfully manages a community with more than 800 million users, which offers them a bit of forgiveness for little interface issues. Beyond that, I bet if the people complaining about new interfaces went back three months later, they wouldn’t even recognize the old one and would agree that things had, in fact, improved.

As a Web-savvy individual, I don’t have any great love for Facebook’s approach to privacy settings.

I find them cumbersome and imagine a lot of users don’t take the time to navigate, therefore leaving their accounts wide open for perusing. I periodically check on my settings to make sure everything looks good, even logging out and Googling myself to see what other people see.

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Andy Swindler Categories: ePiphany, Social Media, The Web

As the Web world continues to evolve every day, Astek moves right along with it. While we offer a wealth of services related to newer Web strategies and tools such as social media, good old fashioned websites are still alive and strong.

Sometimes it can be hard to know where to begin if you’ve been given the task of redesigning your company’s website. Having been through this process numerous times, I’ve shared some of my own thoughts and good articles I’ve read recently that can help you through the earliest stages of redesigning your website.

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Andy Swindler Categories: The Web

2011 was an amazing year of learning and growing at Astek. In our industry things change pretty much daily, even hourly. We are lucky to work with so many forward-thinking clients and partners who understand that building real success in this market takes time, discipline, and communication. Oh yeah, and we think life’s too short not to have a little fun along the way.

Early in the year, Rachel and I attended SXSW Interactive, a top-tier conference for all things Web, mobile and social in Austin, TX. One of our top goals was to find the ideal social media management/monitoring/analytics platform with enterprise capabilities and agency pricing. We’ve met some talented people along the way with some pretty cool products, but there is a lot of room for growth in this space. We’ll be rolling out a new social media event product of our own in the coming weeks — stay tuned!

Supporting an ongoing effort to get more social at Astek, we started video recording the strange and mystical things that happen at Astek staff meetings. Here’s a glimpse:

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Andy Swindler Categories: ePiphany, Social Media