Al Ramadan is executive vice president of marketing at Macromedia.
Progress Report 6
Beta 6 Report
We really appreciate all the feedback we have been receiving. We take your comments seriously and continue to work on making the macromedia.com experience better. Here is an update on our progress:
Browser Compatibility
Over the past month, we worked closely with Apple on the Safari browser issue. We are delighted that the macromedia.com website is now compatible with the latest beta release of the Apple Safari browser. We also updated the style sheets for our site to better render content for Safari users. The Safari Beta 2 release gives users a great experience on macromedia.com, so we strongly recommend users upgrade to Safari Beta 2, which you can download from Apple now.
We've also been working with Opera to address issues that make certain portions of macromedia.com incompatible with its browser. Together, we've solved many of the issues, and are very optimistic that Opera users will be able to experience all of macromedia.com in the very near future.
But our focus on browser compatibility goes beyond Safari and Opera. Please help us to continue to improve our site by reporting any browser incompatibility issues you find with any browsers.
Accessibility Update
Accessibility is taken very seriously at Macromedia. We ensure our products can author accessible content, and we strive to make macromedia.com as accessible as possible. We also offer an HTML version of the site, which is targeted at individuals with special needs. The majority of macromedia.com is available in this accessible version and can be accessed through the "Accessibility" link at the footer of every page.
Certain portions of the site are not available in this HTML version, such as the exchanges. The web team has been working closely with Bob Regan, senior product manager of accessibility at Macromedia, to improve the accessibility of these sections authored entirely with Macromedia Flash. This work has also been channeled towards the creation of accessible Macromedia Flash components. We are very excited by the prospects.
Keep an eye out for an upcoming in-depth article on accessibility and macromedia.com from Bob Regan.
Update from the Web Team
This week I wanted to introduce you to three people who are central to the new macromedia.com. Matt Belkin is our web analytics guru. He has wired our website with special tags that measure almost every interaction. It's a real pleasure sitting down and talking with Matt about the site and how our customers feel about it. I asked him to share some of his thoughts with you this week.
Customer Feedback Presentation
In addition, I asked Tony Lopez, the executive producer for the new macromedia.com, to give you an overview of the changes we have made to global navigation. I thought you would be interested in hearing the rationale and challenges straight from the horse's mouth-so to speak.
We continue to receive great feedback regarding our "Under the Hood" articles, so this week I asked Brandon Purcell to write a piece that gives his unique insight into how we applied real-time load testing to macromedia.com. Brandon is one of our senior product support engineers for ColdFusion and JRun.
I am also interested in hearing your feedback on this week's Breeze presentations. This is an experiment and I value any feedback you have.
Until next time…
Al
