But what we quickly realized was that not many of the plethora of restaurants surrounding us were good, nor were they cheap.  Also being a technology company, we quickly realized that most of the restaurants did not have a strong digital footprint…or even weak digital footprint for that matter.

So as a side project, we at OAK decided to launch a mini-project.  The premise was simple; we wanted to identify the best affordable restaurants in the market for lunch.  We wanted to share this knowledge with others.  We wanted to increase the digital footprint of these restaurants.  We wanted to test our assumptions of why these restaurants do not have or are not interested in a strong digital presence.  And we wanted to experiment with video blogging, as that medium is not being used in the Ottawa foodie blogosphere.  To do this we developed Byward Eats, a food blog focusing on eateries in the Byward Market, and through this blog we will reveal our top 10 lunches for under $15.

The process is as follows:  we created a master list of great restaurants composed of our personal favorites, those highly reviewed on Ottawa Foodies, and the highest ranking restaurants on UrbanSpoon.  Then we had the “tough” job of lunching at these places, meeting with the owners to test our assumptions, vlogging & blogging on BywardEats, and ranking our top 10 restaurants.

Our top 10 will be revealed, one rank at a time, starting today.  At the end of the project, we will recap our lessons learned and share them with you.  It should be interesting, and the process will definitely be delicious.

Note:  OAK Computing has partnered with Apt613 to create their new website.  Sonia Riahi and Ashima Kudaisya of OAK Compting will also be guest blogging about the Byward Eats Project on Apt613.

Sonia & Ashima

Note:  Article originally posted on Apt613 on October 21, 2011.

Post by Sonia and Ashima, from OAK Computing. Apt613 has partnered with OAK to create a new website that is set to come out in a few months. Throughout the year, folks from OAK will be guest blogging on Apt613.

A young startup with a new office in the market – of course our first reaction to the move was mmm mmmmm, the food. With lots of restaurants and lots of choice, the entrepreneurs at OAK Computing got ready for a particularly delicious summer (and shopped for pants with elastic waistbands to counter any forth coming damage).

But sadly, reality didn’t live up to expectation. True, there was a lot of choice, but not all the food was good, and not all the food was affordable for daily lunches.

And so we, the good folks at OAK (led by the always hungry Ashima & Sonia) took it upon ourselves to identify the top ten lunch eats under $15 in the Byward Market. The process was simple – create a master list of great restaurants from their list of personal faves, Ottawa Foodies, and the highest ranking restaurants on UrbanSpoon. Then we had the “tough” job of lunching at these places, vlogging & blogging about it on BywardEats, and ranking our top 10 (being techies, we wanted to increase the digital footprint of the places we loved).

And who are we at OAK computing? Food critics? No. Professional chefs? No. We’re just a young, fun busy tech startup that loves our food, loves our coffee, and definitely knows what tastes good.

Our top 10 will be revealed, one rank at a time, starting next Monday. In the mean time we’re still reviewing, still tasting, (still wearing stretch pants) and would love to hear from you of any faves that we might have overlooked.

See our case study for more information on the project: WCI Case Study

We’d also like to make give a shout out to the amazing project management from the WCI end from Meyer Burnstein and Victoria Esses.  Our design, creative and technical processes were only strengthened by working with clients who have a strong management structure & process on their end.   It was an absolute pleasure to work with them!

Welcoming Community Initiative (WCI)
Victoria M. Esses, Co-Chair WCI
Meyer Burnstein, Senior Fellow and Director of Policy and Planning  

Type of Project

Enterprise Software Development, CMS

The Problem

 WCIs former website and management solution no longer fit their needs.

• Complicated back end – difficult to navigate, update resources, manage content, make changes, and train new users using the old platform.
• Limited display – different types of content (reports, events, e-bulletins video) could not be published in a suitable format.
• User Access – there was little control over user governance; members and editors had similar access to the website.
• Branding – the visuals of the old site did little to enforce the WCI brand.

Old site front end

Limited ability to display information

The Solution

OAK built a custom CMS tailored to WCI’s needs.

Platform

We built a custom wordpress platform.  Why wordpress?  Because a wordpress platform allows our clients:

• comprehensive media integration;
• a simple but robust organization of several different types of content, allowing them to be shared in multiple categories;
• complete control over user access to the back-end of the solution (e.g. John can publish e-bulletins, Amy can publish e-bulletins and events);
• collaboration on content by multiple users; and
• the ability to quickly and efficiently make changes to these site.

All without breaking the bank.  And how long did it take to train users on the new solution?  Just one short morning session. Elegant and simple.

Simple to use customized back end

Design

Functionality is only fun if it looks good.  So the OAK team collaborated with our in-resident designer to design a site that is:

• easy to navigate;
• shows off different types of content to their potential (reports, e-bulletins, events, links, database of resources, etc.);
• colourful and eye-catching, with the WCI brand being a focus; and
• easy to work with, with a customized back end design that looks as good as the front end.

Different content displayed in different formats

Libary design for easy retrieval of information

About WCI

The Welcoming Communities Initiative (WCI) is a multidisciplinary alliance of universities, colleges, and community organizations dedicated to promoting the integration of immigrants and minorities across Ontario.

Compatible with iPhone, iPad and iTouch, OneTouchRecycle will help Ottawa residents locate the nearest location to recycle. Whether you need to recycle a bottle of juice you just finished enjoying, or an invitation card that has already served its purpose or motor oil that you no longer want to drain down your toilet or rechargeable batteries/paint that you know will cause havoc for generations to come OneTouchRecycle will connect you with real, local options. Local businesses or organizations can opt in through an easy to access web and mobile interface, or an end user can add a location through their mobile device on the go to add to a database that will also be made public to create more possibilities around open data. One of the challenges currently with building such an application is the current lack of open data in this domain. It is our hope that this application would allow us to create a local comprehensive database of recycling and proper disposal locations for multiple products at the touch of a button. Even if you are eco-savvy and you want to recycle, often while you are out and about you find yourself asking, “Am I able to recycle this? If so…who around here will take it it?” It will be kind of cool that your phone will be able to answer that for you. The app will tell you not only what and where, but even the hours of operation of the location/facilities and directions on how to get there.

Mobile phone apps that help consumers make more eco-friendly choices are coming out right and left, but this application will fill a little niche that is currently unaddressed. Not only will it empower the citizens, but it will also provide a platform for local businesses and organizations that are recycling friendly to be profiled and noticed. Businesses that choose to opt in and open their recycling for folks to walk in and use will be prominently featured on the accompanying website, and will also be profiled through the mobile app. And finally, as highlighted above, the app will create another open data source that will be released to the computing fraternity in Ottawa to build better more powerful tools/products to support our city wide recycling efforts. The power of the proposed idea/solution lies in the fact that anyone in Ottawa – an individual, an organization, a business – with any kind of recycling support can open their doors to a noble endeavor. So even if you are not able to recycle at your point of purchase or the point of consumption, your ability to walk down the street and step into a location that welcomes you to recycle would open a box of choices for folks who really do not want to be limited in their recycling choices.

The idea is currently under development at OAK Computing (www.oakcomputing.com), and post its launch in Ottawa the complete solution – in the spirit of open data and open solutions – would be made available for deployment (free of cost) to any other city across the world to borrow/share.

Check out the entry on the Apps4Ottawa website: http://apps4ottawa.ca/en/ideas/108 and yes, do not forget to vote for our idea.

This was a significant project for us, not just because OCRI is such a big name in Ottawa but also because OCRI’s web needs were distinctively unique. OCRI’s reason for migrating to WordPress was to leverage WordPress’s powerful CMS abilities to pull information from its many different web presences representing different OCRI initiatives while presenting it all in a clean, organized, and highly automated fashion. 

OCRI needed an enterprise solution that would give its web marketing executives the ability to aggregate and conslolidate the OCRI web presences around a CMS platform while providing customized web layouts to each department and each individual departmental page having its own customized sidebar. Each department had very specific and different needs, from different banner images and colour schemes, to custom widgets and feeds on their sidebars and hence the scope of the project from a design and layout point of view was immense. Each department’s landing pages had different content requirements and multiple content sources – for example community event feeds, internal articles, external blogs, identified syndicated feeds, partner and stakeholder websites etc. 

The bulk of the OCRI solution is highly customized and leverages WordPress 3.0 capabilities. The solution leverages the core capabilities of WordPress such custom fields, custom tags etc and it is also supported by a couple of custom plugins that were specifically coded to address identified needs. These include the calendar in the sidebars, the events calendar, and custom plugins that import events from identified feeds after parsing the feed. On top, the solution has a hige number of custom widgets that were created to replicate the key elements of look and feel of the old OCRI website. Besides, the solution is rich in its Social Media capabilities and any article while being published can be pushed to twitter while assigning hashtags from within the backend. Standard Social Media capabilities such as on the fly video, flickr feeds, RSS aggregators etc can all be easily employed from within the system and can be employed in multiple different ways to keep the look and feel of the solution. This high level of customization is a requirement, since each department needed the ability to customize their pages on the fly, without having to go beyond the basic WordPress backend.

In summary, the four month project while being demanding was well worth the effort put into it. We learnt a lot, and we are very proud of the end result. Dave Hunt from OAK was the principal architect and developer on this project, and he worked closely with Jeff Elyea from OCRI who provided all the design directives and project management as well as stellar testing and deployment support from within OCRI. This was a big endeavour, and we look forward to re-creating this magic for another organization like OCRI.

I heard someone at a local dev event making this comment today and it immediately got me thinking. True, I do not spend as much time as I used to – oh the good old days – worrying about meta tagging. But are meta tags really irrelevant? This introspection set into motion an evening of soul searching and web research, followed by this blog entry.

The truth of the matter is that “meta tags” are not nearly as important as they used to be, and that should be remembered when one is allocating his/her time towards this specific task. Not too long ago – during the time of the good old Web 1.0 – meta tags were a primary factor for search engines, and all of us gave those ”meta keywords tag” and “meta description tags” that little extra bit of attention. They are, however, no longer the primary factor for the modern search engine. And alas, the statement that got this introspection going is relatively true …

Whilst meta tags are no longer the main factor in classifying indexing, titling and describing websites in the modern web world, some – such as the “meta description tag” mentioned above – are still important and should not be immediately discarded.  To better explain, a meta description tag is a brief and concise summary of your page’s content. If you do not use one, then Google (and other search engines including Yahoo and Live Search) will simply do its best to describe your page by using a section of your page. This tag is especially important when it comes to the “related sites” functionality.

On the flip side, taking the example of the “meta keyword tag”, it is a summary list of the most important (key)words in your web presence. At the time of its introduction, this tag was meant to make it easier for search engines to find relevant content online. Working as a partnership between web site developers and the search engines of time, the tag was a pointer to the site content – and relevant and contextual content to that effect. The partnership collapsed when web developers and web managers started resorting to “anything at any cost” to bring visitors to their web sites, and in the process abused technology through techniques such as “keyword spamming” and consequently broke the psychological contract in place with the search engines. This – for obvious reasons – has resulted in the search engine algorithms assigning less (or, for some tags, none) importance to specific meta tags.

The “meta keyword tag” – to be precise and to the point – is dead. It is useless, a waste of space, quite redundant code, and not worth anyone’s time. None of the major search engines make use of “keyword technology” any more, and outside of the major search engines (even if the minors index it) no one should really (really) care. The old “meta description tag”, I would say, is still relevant.

One tag that is still very relevant, and absolutely a must to put in, is the “Title” tag. It is imperative that you make good use of the “Title” tag and maximize its impact by making sure that the title of pages across your website are different – even if only by a little bit. A careful and systemic use of the “Title tag” gives you good control over search engine robots behaviour, and therein lies the reason for my quandry earlier today. True, tags are not what they used to be, and true, you cannot leverage them as we once used to – but they are definitely not irrelevant and a smart, judicious use of tags can still go a long way in ensuring that your website is pulled up whenever someone searches on … your keywords.

For more information on the history and usage of the meta tag check out the wikipedia entry here, and for a really good list of meta tags, their attributes and their usage, please click here