My beautiful infographic

From the day I stepped into the marketing world, one of my first lessons was in the great debate of usability versus design. The way of thinking was, and still is for many people, that you simply cannot have 100% of both.  Meaning, you MUST sacrifice one or the other; should your website be visually spectacular and lack common navigation and web standards or should it function well and just be… kinda good looking?

For a while, I had been trying to decide which side of the fence I stood. As a digital marketer and all around #websavvy gal, I started to subconsciously analyze the websites I came across with regards to the design and user friendlessness.  What I found is that many of the websites that balanced usability and design would fall into this cookie cutter mold – logo upper left hand corner, navigation near the top, big rotating banner messages, and if the user experience was really good (these are gems) a few calls to action sprinkled in.

Continue Reading →

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.

Continue Reading →

Textured elements for a tactile site!

Recently, our good friends Dave and Denise came to us with a request to help them build a website for their new company. Denise was set to launch deniseSiegelbronze – a new spin of her existing company New Bronze Age Tile. Her new brand places a heavier emphasis on Denise’s custom, hand-crafted bronze work and they wanted to make sure that this came across in their new site. They also wanted the site to be a platform to help establish Denise as a leader in her industry and engender conversation with her clients and beyond. And finally, they wanted something that was easy to update themselves and would allow them to showcase bronze pieces as Denise created them.

Not being ones to shy away from tall orders, or abandon friends in need, we jumped at the chance.

Continue Reading →

We’ve worked with FirstGroup for years, but this was our first international project for them. So just in time for school, we launched FirstStudentCanada.com. Continue Reading →

We’d like to say we left our hearts in San Francisco, but the truth is we were too busy producing web content for the ABA to see much of this city by the bay.

Team Manning was hunkered down for a week in and near the Moscone Center, the site of the American Bar Association’s Annual Meeting.  Mitch, Mike and Doug spent long days and nights shooting, editing and posting video clips to the group’s primary communications site www.ABANow.org.

Photo by Phil Coblentz

Our team was kept busy with quick turnarounds of video content such as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, new ABA president Stephen Zack and David Boies, the attorney who successfully challenged California’s ban on same-sex marriages. It was a fascinating time to be in San Francisco considering this ban was overturned while the meeting was occurring. Not that we had a great sense of what was going on outside of our edit room. Our late night work schedule limited our opportunities to get to see the city. So while there were few cable car rides, we were able to have some amazing Chinese take out. Continue Reading →

Registration Screen from the Times

Not to continue beating a dead horse, or to steal Patrick’s thunder by continuing to rift on the fading glory that is the Newspaper, but there’s been a pretty interesting experiment that’s being going on across the pond that has the potential to change the way we access news online. I’m talking about The Times’ (of London) institution of a pay-for-content scheme, or paywall.

As of July 2, 2010 only The Times’ homepage is available to the public. Attempting to click through to any full story results in an automatic redirect to the registration screen shown above. Current costs are £1 for a daily pass or for a trial month’s worth of access, and could potentially go up over time. Continue Reading →

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 →

For anyone following the 2010 FIFA World Cup, the vuvuzela is an impossible-to-ignore aspect of the tournament’s location. A traditional South African musical instrument, soccer fans have turned the now-plastic noise makers into the Jar-Jar Binks of the sporting world – loved by few, hated by most, ridiculed by all. The buzzing noise has gotten so bad that FIFA briefly considered a ban in response to players, commentators and broadcasters complaining about it’s impact on the game. Now, if they’d just stayed in the soccer stadiums where they belong, I’d have nothing to blog about. But the vuvuzela has become an internet sensation as well; that’s right: its trademark buzz has gone viral.
Continue Reading →

There's a reason you don't see packaging like this.

If you’ve ever left been backcountry camping, you know that it’s always a bad idea to draw your drinking water from a static source. Sure, that pond may have water in it. But when you’re parched from a day of hiking, would you rather quench your thirst from the algae-covered (and probably bacteria-filled) stagnant pond, or from a swift-moving mountain stream? The choice should be obvious.

In the past, most websites were like the pond – static pools of water. They may have looked pretty at first, but they tended to stagnate quickly. As the content grew more and more outdated, the site became about as appealing as a drink from that algae-covered water. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that when it comes to browsing the web, people’s preferences are no different—they want their content fresh.

Some of the web’s leading thinkers and interactive marketing experts see the evolution of content ‘streams’ as the future of media consumption. Gone by the wayside, they predict, will be the notion of viewers making the online journey to visit a static site. Instead, our news thirst will be quenched by a series of content streams that the user may draw from at his or her leisure.

If you think this sounds like foolish dreaming about some future web utopia, you’d be wrong. This transformation has been going on right under your nose, and we’ve already begun to see this evolution in services Twitter, Facebook and Google Finance. And one of our own clients, the American Bar Association, has already been publishing stream-based content for almost a year on their ABANow site.

Have you observed a change in the way you consume web content?

This is not the University of Arizona Mascot. It's just a Devil. And the Facebook logo. Make of it what you will...

Facebook is trying to take over the world/the internet/your life! Or at least, that’s the impression someone might get by perusing blogs, news aggregators and general web industry water cooler discussions.  With the implementation of their “Instant Personalization” feature, Facebook basically drew back the curtain on the amount of personal data they’re willing to share with other sites. Couple this with the brouhaha over their almost constant mis-steps and backtracking with regards to their privacy policies and it’s almost like Facebook can do no right.

Continue Reading →