Five Technology has been inspired by the government attempt to improve our environment and stimulate the economy with the Cash For Clunkers program to get outdated, inefficient cars off the road.

We’ve noticed the same problem with clunker websites.  They are inefficient, hog bandwidth, slow the Internet, have designs that hurt your eyes and rattle a user’s mental health.  We want to put an end to it.

Trade In Your Clunker Website
We’re offering $500 to anyone wanting to trade in their clunker website for a brand new, efficient, scalable, CMS powered, search engine optimized Five Technology web design.

• Get started with a new website now!

If your site resembles the clunker website below or falls short of your needs, we can help.

So do the right thing, improve the Internet, make your customers and prospects happier and trade in your clunker website.  We’ll give you $500 off of your web design proposal for being so smart.

• Start the Cash For Clunker Websites process now

The Big Omaha Conference roared to a start Thursday night in downtown Omaha, Nebraska.  I tip my hat to the minds that pulled together a great new web, creative and entrepreneur conference in the Midwest and sold out it’s 300 attendee spots. Those great and creative minds are Jeff Slobotski and Dusty Davidson.

You are missing out if you’re not in Omaha. I made the voyage down from Minneapolis to check it all out. I’m a big fan of people taking ideas and working them to reality like Jeff and Dusty did.  That’s real inspiration to me.

Local web talent What Cheer and marketing mix Secret Penguin hosted an open house that got the evening started.  Things shifted around the corner at 7:30pm to Slowdown, where Gary Vaynerchuk got things up another level by doing his Wine Library TV episode LIVE to a packed house.  Gary will be presenting Friday at Big Omaha as well.

Here are a few photos and video to give you a taste of the night.

Gary Vaynerchuk doing his Wine Library show LIVE at Big Omaha

Big Omaha Conference Kick-off With Gary Vaynerchuk from Five Technology on Vimeo.

Big Omaha co-creator Jeff Slobotski at the kick-off event with me

Badges?  You better believe Big Omaha has some stinkin’ badges!

It was a great night to catch up with some great web design and marketing minds I have connected with in person and online. Drinks and dialogue with Eric Downs, Steve Gordon Jr., Jeff Slobotski,  Robert Murphy, Michael Kelley, Brad Wisler, Chris Burns, Nathan T. Wright and a slew of others.

Things get even better tomorrow with a line-up of great speakers.  I’m pretty excited to hear from Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame.

If you’re not here in Omaha, you can tune it to the chatter  http://twitter.bigomaha.com.  Holler at me tomorrow if you are here and I’ll be recapping Friday and the whole weekend next week.

– Post written by Five Technology web programmer Brad Greenwald

During the last decade, millions of websites were released year after year.  In a great trend for all involved, user experience became the dominant focus. Social media is now skyrocketing in nearly every sector for every audience. Websites are now being used on mobile phones and devices. Desktop applications are interacting with websites. Businesses are integrating a large amount of their operations into web-based platforms.

The trend in web design during the last decade resembles that of the 1960s and 70s in the advertising industry, often referred to as “The Golden Age of Advertising”. A time when great, original ideas were continuously rolling off the tables at agencies, and new technologies had enabled conceptual wizards to push the envelope with out-of-the-box ideas. Like then, we have had agencies and individuals all over the world pushing the envelope for the last decade to make the internet the best it can be.

Has anyone considered we may be in the golden age of web design? Some observations I have on this are below:

• Larger companies are re-investing in great design and technology regularly to retain and attract users. Smaller companies are biting off as much website as they can chew when facing overhauls and brand updates. Most companies are representing a growing interest in SEO, analytics, social media, marketing strategies and usability.
• Advancement of web application technologies – Web 2.0 methodology and technologies have swept the premium web marketplace and is here to stay.
• A threshold in interactive web design. While interactive & animation technologies continue heavy development, the majority of websites stay relatively limited with those features – particularly utilizing Adobe Flash, embedded video and JavaScript frameworks lightly.
• There has been an unprecedented drop in the releases of base website languages. From 1995 to 2001 there were 6 official version releases of HTML in 5 1/2 years. From 1996 to 1998 two versions of CSS were released. Now we stand around 10 years later with the next generations of each still pending – which are XHTML 2.0,  CSS 3, and XHTML/HTML 5.0.

Summing it all up:
Utilizing the tools we have today, web designers and developers have not required major advancements in technology to pump out robust, user-oriented, interactive websites. As much as anything, the ideas and approach has evolved.

The marketplace has also shifted to deliver stronger websites to smaller businesses at lower costs. In addition many businesses are going green and utilizing web technologies as cost-efficient marketing channels. Wikipedia is now the local library for many average citizens; Facebook, the schoolyard; Google, the everything.

We know it will continue to get better from here, but what I’m getting at is where we may be on the web technology curve.

Sounds like the golden age of web design to me.

If you could only visit one website for the rest of the year, or just use one website the rest of your life, what website would it be?

This interesting question came from my wife this weekend as she exclaimed her love for AllRecipes.com. She commented that if she could only visit one website, it would be AllRecipes.com for all of the cooking ideas she gets from it.

This question really got me thinking about the value a website can have. That value is it’s content. Do you have the kind of value to be the only site a person would visit in your industry?

So how about you? If restricted to just one website, which one would it be? A news website? A sports website? A resource website?

Please comment and share your one website you can’t live without. Search engines don’t qualify so please don’t answer Google. If you want you can break down a site for each category or news, life, work.

My one website: I guess I would go with USAtoday.com

I look forward to your comments!

It’s fun to see glimpses of where things are heading for how we consume video.  Last night was a reminder of this for me.  The Thursday night NFL game was only on the NFL Network and as a cable subscriber I was out of luck to watch it.  But where TV failed me, the Internet and my phone came to the rescue.

I was able to watch the Broncos come back on the Browns for a victory online as well as my phone.  Just a fun glimpse into the future of more media consumption online and mobile … with the TV fading away.  Think it won’t?

The only bad news was that Broncos QB Jake Cutler had a monster night in Fantasy Football … and of course I’m playing the team in my league that has him at QB.

Do you have anything to share on your transition to web or mobile from the tube?