Web 2.0 is everywhere now!  I have seen more and more Web 2.0 design styles over the past few months, many exceptional designs and many not so great! I've seen a vast amount of misconceptions regarding Web 2.0 as well. For me in the simplest definition it means, creating a user prioritized environment or user driven design. From the layout at its root, to the images and textures used throughout. Big! Bold! Simple! Direct!

One of the must-haves of any small business, be it a start-up or a long-established entity, is an insightful website that allows people to find out more and inquire about your company. It gives your company credibility in an ever-increasing technology driven world. However, gaining that credibility through a website is much more than just putting up a couple pages and a form; the key is to get qualified visitors that want to learn more about your product or service.

The arrival of "Web 2.0" has forever changed the way we use the internet.  We have transitioned from the web being pages of static content to something far more useful and dynamic.  In addition to the social aspect of the web, this paradigm shift has enabled the development of some truly amazing (and entertaining) web apps.  Here are seven such tools/sites I use often:

The Marketing Command Center (MarCC)  is a product developed by Unleashed Technologies that functions as a single source platform for Analytics, E-Mail Marketing, Website Management (CMS), and has received a serious overhaul for the first quarter of 2010. The product offering has been completely rearchitected and leverages the Drupal platform to give clients a familiar and easy to use interface. The upgrade has resulted in:

 Hello everyone! After a warm welcome and a great first week I am very excited to join this incredible team of programmers and designers!  I come from a background of creative web and print design. I have worked with many businesses, artists, and musicians over the past 10 years helping them to gain professional online and in print presence.  I cannot wait to share my creative concepts and unleash my potential!  My sincere thanks to everyone here at Unleashed Technologies for this opportunity!

Unleashed Technologies, LLC is excited to welcome the newest addition to our team Ben Guarino. Ben Guarino comes to Unleashed Technologies as a web designer with over 10 years experience in providing clients with commercial website focused on unique design and business driven goals. Ben has a rich portfolio of creative website spanning across the music and entertainment industries.

After a series of discussions, Ben fits perfectly into our team and shares the Unleashed Technologies passion for quality work we produce for our clients. Ben's incredible talent set includes:

Have you ever had the need to retrieve e-mail information and utilize the data for display on a website, GUI, or for some other web-based purpose? Recently, I was tasked with doing just that. The goal was to retrieve thousands of e-mail submissions from a contact form and parse out the information into readable CSV format.

The folks over at Web Directions are at it again.  They have just opened their State of the Web 2010 survey of professional web designers and developers.  The idea is to see what technologies and practices are being employed by web firms.  Although many "best practice" articles do exist around the net, they want to find out what developers actually use/do when creating new online presences.

Over the course of the past decade many different content management systems have come, stayed, and gone. Even today we see hundreds of players competing within the U.S. market using different models in order to capture niche verticals. As software continually expands it also becomes commoditized and features once considered to be "amazing" are par for the course.

In case you haven't heard, Google (and at least 30 other companies) were attacked by hackers in late December (codenamed Operation Aurora).  Although it cannot be publicly verified as 100% accurate, Google announced in a blog post that the "highly sophisticated and targeted attack on [their] corporate infrastructure [had orginiated] from China".  Their primary goal was "accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activi