Article Prospect Experience Design Website Calls to Action by Mark O’Brien on March 18, 2009 Many of us think about getting large amounts of high quality traffic to our websites. This is obviously a necessary element for online success, but most people don't think about what to do with that traffic once it arrives... Read Now About
Article Fast Complex Interchange by Christopher Butler on March 18, 2009 I've been thinking about these words a lot lately. I often create phrases in my mind that I feel are evocative of the zeitgeist, or at least in terms of how I'm perceiving it, anyway. When I was in college, the phrase I thought of repeatedly was "human progress landscape," which became the title of my degree project and subsequently the name of my freelance design business. At the time, I was obsessed with how our human notion of progress was shaping both our geography and the landscape of technology in which we were spending more and more of our time... Read Now About
Article Those Who Think the Farthest Win by Christopher Butler on March 18, 2009 In his keynote presentation at Convergence08, forecaster Paul Saffo said, "Those who think the farthest win...What is going on today is that there is a sort of race. You know how there are two types of fools, one who says 'this is old and therefore good,' and the other who says 'this is new and therefore better.' They are saying it is a race between those who love technology and those who hate technology. I think the race today for civilization is a race between people who think the farthest." I've embedded an edited video of his presentation below. You can also read the transcript here. Mapping a Cone of Uncertainty from Jeriaska on Vimeo. Read Now About
Webinar How to Build a Content Strategy Hosted by Mark O’Brien This webinar is designed to help you plan your content strategy, from identifying the right platform for you (newsletter, blog, webinar), to creating a writing plan for your firm, and creating lead-generation conversion points on your site. Access Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design The Future Will Be a Mix of Old and New by Christopher Butler on March 17, 2009 In a post for Core77 entitled "Beyond the Scholock of the New: Eight Strategies for Design and Foresight" Kevin McCullagh writes: "The future is always a mix of revolutionary change and evolutionary continuity--and sometimes regressions are in there too. Unlike the Star Trek view of the consistent future, many of today's trend-setters enjoy gaming on iPhones and organic gardening." Kevin McCullagh, Plan This is true of the technology we use every day to serve our clients. We have clients that are still running versions of our NewfangledCMS from over 4 years ago, yet have made upgrades to their site to reflect current trends... Read Now About
Article Social Media Referrals by Christopher Butler on March 16, 2009 Michael Learmonth at AdAge's 'Digital' blog posted last week that Facebook is sending more traffic than Google to some sites. He specifically mentioned sites like PerezHilton.com, CafeMom, Evite, and Tagged.com, noting that sites which receive lots of loyal repeat traffic are likely to be boosted by social media, since visitors are using those platforms to share content and direct others to the sites they like. Well, what about Newfangled.com? Read Now About
Article Innovation… a response to the economy? published on March 16, 2009 I like Innovation. Ever since I was a kid, I have thought about silly little things that solve my just as silly little problems. One little problem less meant more time to address x% of a bigger problem or just more time to have fun. As a child, I went to Chinese school. I had to write Chinese characters on a piece of paper with 100 squares. I actually timed myself doing it once. The word water, took me around twenty minutes to complete if I worked through it character by character. I came to a realization that - writing each character in its own respective slot took more time than doing each stroke step-by-step through each box. Not only was my homework cleaner, but it took MUCH less time ( around 3-5 minutes less actually, per word! ). Is it the most innovative thing you’ve ever heard of? Probably not. Do I consider it innovative? Yes. Nobody told me to change my method. I just went ahead and did it. Adapting the norm to improve yourself is an underlying theme to innovation. After all, finishing this homework quicker, meant I could play outside while light was still shining outside my house. Great! How does that apply to you? Read Now About
Article CTA Stats by Christopher Butler on March 13, 2009 In the last few months, we've been continuing to focus our content to fit our education-oriented inbound marketing strategy. Between our newsletters, blogs, webinars, LinkedIn group, the comments we post on other blogs, or our participation in events like the upcoming HOW Design Conference (Mark will be speaking on web strategy), our goal is to consistently share our expertise. Our philosophy is that by generating content that shares our knowledge, our site will become a hub of activity that ultimately brings us business. This is definitely what we're seeing. Above is a graph showing the number of people who either signed up for our newsletter, registered for one of our webinars, or joined our LinkedIn group each day over the last couple of weeks.... Read Now About
Article Encountering information is like… by Christopher Butler on March 13, 2009 What is information like? Is it like a "superhighway," constantly moving forward, which we struggle to merge into? Or is it like a city, expanding upward and outward, with particular localities, pockets of higher density, and even dead ends? This reminded me of a computer game I played as a kid- "Civilization" - in which you would lead a culture (hopefully) toward world domination. One neat thing about the game was that you were given a world map view, which would only show you the area that you had explored. Any outlying, unexplored terrain would be hidden behind a black field... Read Now About
Article Communicating technically to the non-technical – Part 2 by Dave Mello on March 13, 2009 In a previous post, I talked briefly about some of our principles when dealing with technical communication in everyday conversation. Naturally, the context in which we approach such as a task is framed by who we are - web developers striving to help agencies build better websites for their clients. In this post, I'll be expanding on that topic by looking at what some experts in the field have to say. Read Now About
