Brian Halligan, CEO and Founder of Hubspot, was the first presenter at yesterday’s inaugural “What’s Next DC – Your Marketing Communications Roadmap” Conference. Brian opened in one of the two long time slots of the day (45 minutes) but gave a fantastic presentation on actionable steps businesses can use to take advantage of modern inbound marketing techniques by optimizing their websites to get found by more prospects and convert a higher percentage of those prospects into paying customers. View Brian’s Slidedeck. Takeaways included:

Tomorrow several members of the Captico Team will be joining social media, new media, and technology experts from across the country (and perhaps the world!) for the “What’s Next DC” Conference in Washington, DC. The event promises to be jam-packed full of real data, case studies, real experts (no fluffy “gurus” here), networking opportunities and roving discussions.

For a number of our web design and web development clients (like liberty central, spms, and pliris) we had a need to build an easy to use interface for managing a rotating header. We really liked how Wordpress 3.0 added the ability to configure a custom page header, and so we extended on that to build an interface that can be used to configure multiple header images that rotate. We have since made it a free plugin to share with other Wordpress users.

When you think of technology companies, you probably think of hip offices, modern furniture, sleek styling, and a foosball table in the break room (well, I do). And while many a company does look just like that – Google in particular is known for its amazing culture and office environment – old school Intel was known for its “endless rows of gray cubicles, low ceilings and fluorescent lighting. For decades it resisted any changes to its office environment.” But in the last two years, Intel has been making changes.

The folks over at DCWEEK have announced this year’s event dates! DCWEEK 2011 will take place in Washington DC, November 4-11, 2011.

“DCWEEK is a festival in the US capital focused on bringing together designers, developers, entrepreneurs, and social innovators of all kinds. It’s a series of 100s of distributed events powered by the community and complemented by core conferences, parties, and projects created by the festival organizers iStrategyLabs and Tech Cocktail. DCWEEK 2010 was assembled in 3.5 months and drew 6,000 attendees from around the world.”

Several days ago, Peter Kafka over at All Things Digital, covered an onstage-interview at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) by Kara Swisher of Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. Its a great read to get a look at where Twitter sees itself going and what it’s priorities are. Plus Dick is a pretty funny character. Below are some highlights that I found noteworthy, but I suggest reading the original article for a better picture and for Peter’s great coverage…

How much is too much? At what point do we overwhelm our websites with links to, lets be honest, 3rd party sites? Are we driving users away from the very place we purport to use social media to drive them to?

In previous articles we have shown you how to add Facebook Like and Share buttons to your site and how to embed a Tweet button on your site – you can even see our Twitter feed on the right of this blog and retweet or share on Facebook this article from links below (we hope you do)! We are obviously big fans of engagement through social media, and while perhaps we need to take it a step further on our own site (stay tuned for our forthcoming redesign), I think some people might be taking it too far.

Well, maybe not fun, but less annoying for sure!

You’ve probably encountered a 404 or “Page Not Found” error in your web browsing experience. It is an HTTP standard response code indicating that “the client was able to communicate with the server, but the server could not find what was requested. 404 errors should not be confused with “server not found” or similar errors, in which a connection to the destination server could not be made at all. A 404 error indicates that the requested resource may be available again in the future.” This kind of error is commonly displayed after you click a broken link or follow a link to a page that has moved or no longer exists on a website. (If you want more technical details, check out Wikipedia.)

Of course no one wants their website to have errors, but sometimes they occur. There is definitely value in taking a little time to dress up your “Error” or “404″ page to decrease the frustration when a user encounters it. So what can you do to make the navigation process on your website less of a headache to users?

Online video watching is steadily increasing among all user demographics. Below you will find some statistics from a survey by Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project.

Following our recent articles on Generations Online in 2010 – Statistics, Who’s Online? A look at Who Is, and How People Are, Accessing the Internet, and Twitter Statistics and Info on Usage, we now present part of the findings of a survey by Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project on social networking site usage across the generations.