We have launched many websites in our time, but few were as eventful as the one we participated in for GlenviewMarines.com. Doug and I headed up to the old Glenview Naval Base for the official launch of the site dedicated to helping the servicemen and women who make up the Glenview Marines. Having donated our services, we wanted to introduce them to the ins and outs of their new site.

As part of the celebration, we were treated to the presentation of the flags by a full Color Guard and a spontaneous singing of the Marine Corps Hymn (Did you ever hear the last verse? Hilarious!). We were also joined by representatives from the Semper Fi Fund, the Wounded Warrior Regiment and Andrew Tibby, a local Iraqi vet who had received grants from the Semper Fi Fund. Continue Reading →

I’m a little late to the party.  This work was discovered last week, I think. You can even see pictures better than my iPhone could manage here, but on my walk to work this morning, ignorant of the news, I thought there was a slim possibility I was the first to notice this Banksy work in the west loop, only a few blocks from Manning’s Office.  Oh, and the Battleship Potemkin reference is particularly funny to me too…

The work is on the side of Veerasway Indian Restaurant on Randolph, two blocks west of Halsted in the west loop.  The adjacent lot used to have a building but it was very recently demolished, opening up the wall on which the work appears.  I remember seeing the staircase between the buildings when the demolition was taking place, and the mark it left on the wall provided the perfect setting for a Potemkin parody.

The end of an era is upon us:  floppy discs will no longer be manufactured as of March 2011. Sony, the last real manufacturer of this lovable but decidedly antiquated storage form announced this week that they’ll be halting sales in Japan (the last real market for it), and have already begun shuttering their international sales in all but a few countries.

This announcement really doesn’t affect most of us individual users, as computers these days don’t even ship with floppy drives (Curse you Apple!), but tech blogs around the country (see: cnet, crunchgear, and NYTimes techblog as examples)  lit up as geeks everywhere waxed nostalgic about the good old days when awesome games like Oregon Trail and Number Munchers loaded off of 3.5 inchers and every kid was assigned their own disc in computer class…ah those were the days. (Oh okay fine – that was me in the kitchen the other day but still! Oregon Trail RULED!)

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Tonight our beloved Blackhawks take to the ice to face Nashville, beginning a month-long bid to bring Lord Stanley’s Cup back to Chicago for the first time in 50 years. (The very idea of the Music City having a hockey team is, of course, preposterous.. but that’s another post.) So here at Manning, we’ve spent the last few weeks scraping the bottom of the creative barrel trying to think up a way to show our support.

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FirstGroup, the largest provider of surface transportation in North America, selected Manning to develop an online strategy for four of the firm’s major business units. The company wanted this strategy to help integrate corporate acquisitions through consistent branding across service types and website platforms. They also wanted an easy to use content management system and one provider for all their hosting needs.

As part of that strategy, Manning recently launched the site for the company’s First Vehicle Services division. The site was designed to target key decision makers by showcasing the company’s fleet maintenance services. In addition to the First Vehicle Services site, Manning has developed sites for First Student, the nation’s largest student transportation provider, and First Transit, which operates a number of mass transit systems throughout North America.

We invite you to take a ride on the new First Group sites.

I am currently reading Ashley Friedlein’s book, Web Project Management .  While not exactly up to the project management standards of the PMBOK, the book presents a complete web project management method. I will post a review once I finish reading and have had sometime to test the method. Meanwhile, the book offers little tips in addition to the method itself. One early tip: Do It Yourself accelerated learning. The author advocates that a web project manager try to create an entire site alone. This includes generating the idea, strategy, “costing”, design, programming, … The idea is to put yourself in the shoes of other members of your team to learn what challenges they face. The goal is to improve your client and team communication skills and learn empathy for your teammates.

I really like this idea, but I feel like the author missed a benefit: undertaking the entire process of creating a site will give you a better understanding of the big picture of production and project management. This exercise allows you to see parts of the process that you may not even know exist. Discovering holes at one point in the process will teach you what you should have done earlier and should implement in your daily work.

I have attempted similar exercises in the past, but mostly to learn new production skills. I would really like to try this someday on a new project to focus on the project management method.

I hopped onto Google Analytics this morning to check in on all of our sites, and was pleasantly surprised to find that traffic to our newly launched Snowflake Workshop, has skyrocketed the last few days!  We’ve yet to see much snow outdoors yet we are in the midst of a full-blown virtual blizzard.

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We’re asking our clients to join Manning this holiday season with a new concept to help fight hunger.  2009 has been a tough year for many people.  Right now 1 in every 8 Americans struggles to put food on the table.

We are inviting our friends to kick off a grassroots campaign.  We created a website, www.ThisBagFightsHunger.com and printed up and gave out reusable grocery bags with that branding.  The concept is simple – fill the bag with food that you donate to your local food bank, and pass the bag on to a friend to do the same.

The website includes a database to find your local food bank, as well as features to track your bag as it gets passed from friend to friend.   We can all join together to make a different this holiday season.

Two sites showcasing hot new well-designed websites have chosen to feature Manning’s recently-released Snowflake Workshop on their top site charts.  We created the workshop for Brinks Hofer Gilson & Lione to give users a chance to create their own piece of intellectual property.  Try it out, if you haven’t already; create a snowflake and write a message to share with friends and family this holiday season. The snowflakes fall in a snowstorm gallery so all the unique designs are on display. The workshop debuted at number 30 on Design Chart’s illustrious top 40 sites.  We’ll see if it moves upward…

You may have also seen our post about the making of the workshop from the design perspective–look for another post soon on the development work that went into the site!

SnowflakeWorkshop.com

Whenever I come across creative work that I like, my first thought is often, “How did they do that?” As someone who works in the industry and knows all the moving parts that go into a great project, I find others’ processes fascinating. But the resources for discovering this information are frustratingly few and far between. So to do my part in providing more of this kind of background info, I am going to try to spotlight a few of our projects here on the blog. Hopefully someone will find it helpful (or at least interesting) to see us pull back the curtain a bit and reveal our creative process.

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