Since today is yesterday was Launch Party, I thought it would be appropriate to launch the new look for our website and blog. I’ve had the theme set live for myself and others on the team for weeks, so I’ve forgotten the rather … basic … nature of the default theme we were using

Dave Shea of Bright Creative did the original logo work. Paul Jarvis of TwoThirty tweaked the logo and did up the overall design plus the WordPress template for this blog. Alexa Booth took Paul’s design and did a Drupal template for the main site.

Why do we have two sites? Well, this is our social blog space. In general, we think it’s best practices for companies to have a corporate blog. Some see fit to integrate it into their main site, but especially when your “main site” is a web application that actually IS your business, we think it’s a good idea to run your blog on a separate system. It becomes your status spot if something goes wrong with your main site, so you can keep people informed.

As well, we have the challenge of wanting to present a fair amount of information. Some of that has to be easier consumable as “static” content, easily guide people to the right information, and so on. We can continue to be more conversational here, as well as showcase many of the other social tools that we use — here is the full list of tools that we use.

Lastly, since I’m a raving Drupal fanatic, I ended up building Extranet features into the main site. Our portfolio company members, mentors, and other advisors have access to some additional features and information when they’re logged in.

I know there are lots of bits and pieces still to tweak — from wording and clarity to graphical fixes (the auto complete throbber looks crappy on a black background). Leave a comment or let us know what you think on Get Satisfaction.

It’s official, BarCamp Vancouver is set for September 27th. This is the third annual occurrence of this event, and we’re pushing it out a little farther than its traditional late August so we can have enough time to organize it.

For starters, it’s going to be larger. We’ve got (free) registration currently capped at 225 people: please do sign up now to let us know that you’re planning on attending. Last year’s event had 80 people on the waiting list…just sayin’.

BarCamp Vancouver will also be playing host to two “sub camps” — specifically, WordPressCamp and PhotoCamp. Please do check off the appropriate item in the registration form if you’re interested in those events, so we can help estimate numbers. We’re going to reserve space and time for dedicated sessions around those two topics.

Lastly, there are a bunch of other events happening around the same time. The Thursday before — September 25th — is National Digital Media Day. Maura is planning a Launch Party for Vancouver that evening to coincide with the day, and potentially coordinated across the country. September is going to go off with a bang…

One of the things we’re doing at Bootup is to gather together best practices that we can share with startups and founders. The goal is to get the most bang for your buck, from spending money to spending your time.

When Danny and I decided on the name for Bootup, we had basic systems up and running in something like 3 hours: domain registered at NameCheap, configured for Google Apps for Domains to get email, calendaring, and docs up, and a basic website / blog at WordPress.com.

Even if you have technical people that can setup and run some of these things, your goal is to build your technology / grow your company. For instance, talking to AdHack, I quickly put them on to Unfuddle, a hosted SVN and ticket tracking system. Below are two tools that I love, and that are on the list of sites we encourage startups here to use.

I’ve been organizing a couple of events recently – VinoCamp is coming up August 16th, and BarCamp Vancouver is going to be either September 13th or 27th (you can help decide which date here). For both, I’m using Eventbrite to do registration and sell tickets. I’m evening considering using Eventbrite’s ticket functionality to “sell” sponsorships through their PayPal integration. Gathering registrant information? check. Affiliate links? check. Tracking links? check (Miss604 and TechVibes are neck and neck in sending traffic, BTW). In all, a really great tool for doing free as well as for pay events, although there are a few little changes that I wouldn’t mind seeing.

Which brings me to my next tool: how are you gathering feedback? feature requests? beefs or bugs with your product or service? Seeing a blog post by Vince at Pennyminder reminded me about Get Satisfaction. It provides a way to implement everything from bug reporting to forum discussions about your company or even specific products. While you certainly want to keep in close contact with your early users and respond directly via email, Twitter, blog posts, etc., you can promote Get Satisfaction as a more structured way. For example, a suggestion via email might get the response “Great idea, I’ve added it as a suggestion to our Get Satisfaction page - please tell other people about it if they also think it’s a good idea”. I just added Bootup Labs - you should probably at least claim your company name and monitor it, even if you don’t plan to use it directly.

What other tools can you recommend, and how have you used them? I know there are local Vancouver startups that would fit this bill, like ScribbleWiki.

I’m heading to Boston for the next 6 days for the annual North American Drupal convention, aka Drupalcon Boston 2008.

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of the Drupal framework (I’m a Permanent Member of the Belgian-based Drupal Association), but the relevance here is my experience with open source development communities and methodologies in general. I was impressed and moved by Matt Mullenweg’s keynote at the recently finished Northern Voice 2008 conference: almost half of it was dedicated to open source. One line that he said really rang true for me (paraphrased): “the long term utility of proprietary software trends toward zero”.

I’m giving one presentation on mapping business requirements to code, participating in a panel on training your in house team on Drupal, and helping to moderate a birds of a feather (BoF) session on RDF and the Semantic Web in Drupal. Oh, and likely having one or two business and technical meetings ranging from my friends at brand new Acquia, to those crazy aggregation hackers from D.C., Development Seed.

While the conference is sold out (800 seats!), there are various social events in and around the conference. Drop a comment if you’d like to meet up while I’m in Boston. Are you using Dopplr yet? I’m finding it to be a useful tool, feel free to add me to see where I’ll show up next.