Mobile usage is up - how does your website rate?

A while back (read: months) I happened across a very interesting survey done by Gomez, the web performance division of Compuware which focused on consumers shifting attitudes and usage of the web.

Specifically, the article I found talked about the general user’s increasing impatience with websites that are slow to load, bog down or are difficult to use. While this has been anecdotally discussed amongst folks in the web industry for years, it’s nice to finally have numbers that back up this feeling.

However, users’ ire with slow or difficult sites isn’t the part of the survey that I want to hold up for examination in this post. The second half of the Gomez survey has dedicated to the growing mobile market and users’ evolving attitudes to web access on mobile devices.

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Heads up–this post is exceedingly boring and more than a little technical.

But at least the data loss was not as bad as it sounds. I recently had one large RAID 5 NAS (network-attached storage) array lose its partition table and wind up in a pre-format, factory default situation. With sufficient redundancy built into the system, it would have been easy enough to reinitialize the RAID, reformat the drives, and re-copy the data.  But that wouldn’t be much of a learning experience, really…

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Periodically, we like to challenge ourselves and test out an idea we’ve been kicking around. In this case, we asked ourselves, “What if we create a web app that uses the content of people’s tweets to determine what gifts they might like?” That’s the basic premise behind our Twitter gift idea generator: tweeSP.

We’ve just launched the site and so far we’ve been very pleased with the results of our little social media experiment. We’ve used tweeSP to find gifts ideas for friends and family, or just had fun seeing what presents are recommended for celebrity tweeters.

Many people question the value of Twitter, but here’s one example of how tweets can be used in an incredibly interesting and useful way. So take tweeSP for a spin and see if you get some interesting gift ideas for the last few people on your holiday shopping list.

PS – for those of you scratching your head over our name for this cool new toy, it’s a play on Twitter and ESP. Now aren’t we punny!

We say "NO!" to magic wand approaches...unless they're in Adobe software.

Allow me to take off my robe and wizard hat for a moment and make one thing clear: what we do is not magic.

I can understand why  it can seem that way – the web is a bubbling morass not unlike a witch’s cauldron in which just the right combination of technical know-how, design savvy, cooperative browsers, connection speed and evolving technology have to be mixed together just right to create an über site that does exactly what you want, how you want it.

In the face of this crazy and often-times confusing jumble, I can understand why, at the start, clients are inclined to say things like “Do what you think is best” or “I don’t need the details, I just need it done.” IT blogging sensation Harwell Thrasher refers to this as “IT Magic” in his post, “Why IT Magics is Never Good.” In it, he attacks the idea that it’s a win-win scenario for IT folk to let their work appear as magic, saying:

“Often the business forgets how much inherent complexity has been passed from the business user to IT.  And if the IT organization isn’t careful, that forgotten complexity turns into the perception of magic, including the feeling that the business user is getting something for nothing.  The ongoing effort required in IT to support the hidden complexity is forgotten and taken for granted, and business people begin to wonder why the Information Technology organization is spending so much.”

For us, that often means that conversations that started with “Do what you think is best” end with a “You want to do WHAT?!” Continue Reading →

We’re proud of our pro-bono work for the Semper Fi fund that aids injured Marines and Sailors – but don’t want to be accused of taking sides in a rivalry that dates back more than two centuries.

So a Manning HD crew was on hand at the U.S. Military Academy at Westpoint to document the presentation of a new Army Football truck donated by Navistar Defense.  The LoneStar vehicle was custom painted with rich graphics that salute the Black Knights and vow to defeat the midshipmen from the Naval Academy.

The footage of the ceremony and the cadet pep rally will be used to showcase Navistar’s support of our troops.  They can take sides – the Navy probably doesn’t use as many trucks.

This Veterans day, we're showing our support with the Glenview Marines

As we all spend the day thanking and honoring those who are willing to put their lives on the line for love of country, we wanted to revisit a site near and dear to our heart: The Glenview Marines. Back in June, we launched this fundraising site to help the group – made up of veteran sailors and marines who’d served at the old Glenview Naval Air Station – meet their goal of raising $1 million in support of the Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund. So far, a mere 5 months after kicking off this initiative, the Glenview Marines have successfully raised close to $300,000 and are still going strong.

They’ve recently launched a “Prime the Pump” program to keep the donations flowing. This Veterans day, they’ll all be wearing their service pins, and handing out cards to inquisitive folk that urge them to visit the site and donate whatever they can. Their message is simple – it’s not the amount that matters, but the act of giving that counts; we couldn’t agree more. Today we’ll be showing our support via Twitter, Tumblr and our blog, and hopefully help more folks find out about a great bunch of guys working hard for an equally great cause.

Happy Veteran’s day everyone!

We here at Manning have been known, on occasion, to go on at length about incorporating multimedia elements, especially video, into websites. It’s a subject near and dear to our hearts, and not just because we come from a film background; we love including video because it works. In our experience, video successfully engages users, effectively communicates messages in a genuine fashion and engenders conversation among viewers.

One of our long time clients – award winning cameraman Norman Lloyd – happens to agree with this concept so much that he created an entire non-profit organization called The Commitment & Sacrifice Foundation, which is dedicated to producing and distributing films that help active duty soldiers, veterans and the general public come to terms with the experiences of war, it’s after-effects and the healing process of talking about these experiences.  Obviously, when Norman came to us to design and develop his fledgling foundation’s website, we knew the bread and butter of his site would be its films.

Embedded video player on the C&S Foundation

Manning wanted to make sure we gave the Commitment & Sacrifice Foundation’s visitors instant access to Norman’s films, without compromising the overall look and feel of the site by haphazardly plugging in un-customized players. We also felt it was necessary to provide Norman with a feature he could easily update himself. In addition, because his films are theater quality, we thought it would be a value added feature if visitors could view the films at full screen. These three requirements lead us to choose Vimeo, a third party video hosting platform, custom tailored to the film community. For an annual fee, we upgraded to the ‘Vimeo Plus’ package, which allows users additional weekly uploads, unlimited HD videos, HD embeds, 2-pass video re-encoding that results in higher quality, priority encoding, and more. It also presents the user with easily-customizable features such as adjusting the player’s buttons, uploading new trailers, and tweaking current videos.

Now, whenever someone comes to the Commitment & Sacrifice Foundation website, they’re able to instantly view these trailers, read where they’ve been shown and awards they’ve won, and most importantly, read testimonials from people affected by the very same movie.  If there’s a  more powerful impetus to donate, we can’t think of one.

We officially launched the Commitment & Sacrifice Foundation’s new site on November 10th, just in time to support one of his films – Shakey’s Hill – as it’s broadcast nationally on the Military Channel in honor of Veteran’s Day. So check out the site and be sure to tune in Nov 12th from 9-12 ET on the Military Channel!

The challenge for any business is reaching people interested in your services and engaging them in a meaningful way. For the owners of a new niche brand that meant finding the right platform to showcase their work so customers understand what they do.

New Bronze Age Tile owners Denise Siegel and Dave Jaffe sought to expand their customer base by launching a hand-crafted bronze work business called deniseSiegelbronze. They needed an online presence to reach customers looking for the unique, beautifully crafted products the company offers, to establish Denise as a leader in her industry, and engender conversation with her clients and beyond. They also wanted something that was easy to update themselves and to showcase bronze pieces as Denise created them.

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What’s not to love about the Chicago Blackhawks Stanley Cup season?  The Answer: The Chicago Sun-Times coverage of where the Stanley Cup Trophy has been over the summer.

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The Hawks are a business school’s dream case study of transforming a team that played before a measly crowd of 5,000 into a sell-out sensation. Now other NHL teams are trying to take hockey marketing to the next level. To compete with the big three (pro baseball, football and basketball), they’re looking for even more innovative ways to connect with a loyal fan base through social media. Continue Reading →