Archive: April 2008

Dreamweaver CS4 is under the Stiletto Prerelease Program. I have been using CS4 for a little more than a week on a live project. Being aware of bugs and Adobe being aware of those bugs I found, it’s exciting to glance at what the possible end product will be. One of my favorite software enhancements will and always are the Search and Replace Tool.

I think it’s the best on the market and nothing comes close. The thing about that tool that breaks out of other search and replace tools is searching with regular expressions. I have used this thing ever since I knew it existed. For a bug fixer this saves about 10 minutes of my day per bug. As for Dreamweaver CS4, I can play with “Check browser compatibility” function all day. Although my job focus is not in styling and most of my projects are using XSLT, it still faster copying a page source to DM and seeing if it’s cross browser compliant than opening every browser. I have a personal project I heavily rely on the “Check browser compatibility” function with. Another milestone of DM CS4 is Subversion Controls, even though it’s still under development. It was an easy transition to switch from TortioseSVN.

I like the fact I can remote and commit on the same program. Some other mentionable functions I can’t live without is Synchronization and Apply Source Settings. All of these features listed save me about 3 hours of work if I didn’t use DM and time saving is everything to me. I have not personally taken advantage of the spry framework because most of my projects are set with using the Prototype Framework. We have also come up with our own custom AJAX methods built on our product base. I have used Dreamweaver on projects like Education.com and two other projects not released yet.

We’re so pleased to have supported the following environmental- and conservation-focused clients:

11th Hour Project: a Silicon Valley-based non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to popularizing high-level, high-quality information about solutions to global warming. Founded by Wendy Schmidt (wife of Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google), the organization not only funds grants but puts on events and activities directly themselves. SolutionSet redesigned the site to match the influence and energy of its supporters. Read the 11th Hour Project case study.

Act Now (acquired by Saatchi & Saatchi S): helps companies position themselves to the fast growing green customer base by helping them implement operational procedures that reduce waste, save natural resources, and through sustainability, helps them motivate their employees to achieve their performance goals. See the Act Now case study.

American Land Conservancy (ALC): a national non-profit land conservation organization that conserves landscapes for the benefit of people and wildlife. They work in partnership with communities, landowners, non-profit organizations, corporations and public resource agencies to create innovative and effective conservation solutions. Through land acquisition, conservation easements, restoration and stewardship, ALC has secured hundreds of thousands of acres for wildlife habitat, working landscapes, parks and open space across the United States. SolutionSet redesigned the ALC website and powered it with a content management system for easy site updates. Visit the ALC website.

Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST): acts to protect one of our most precious and threatened natural resources: the spectacular lands of the San Francisco Peninsula. Using funds from private donors, POST purchases critical open spaces as opportunities arise, saving 60,000 acres of land in San Mateo, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz counties since 1977. SolutionSet designed and developed a targeted campaign site to raise funds for their latest acquisition project, Mindego Hill, and also created complementary direct mail pieces. In conjunction with the Mindego campaign, SolutionSet also completely redesigned the POST corporate site. Read the Mindego case study, the print campaign case study, and the POST corporate redesign case study.

Today a press release went out announcing the SolutionSet clients who took home Official Honoree distinctions in this year’s Webby Awards.

To recap, those winners were:

Kaboose: Official Honoree in the Community category
Education.com: Official Honoree in the Education category
Education.com: Official Honoree in the Family/Parenting
Dillon’s List: Official Honoree in the Personal Web Site category

The Official Honoree distinction is awarded to work that scores in the top 15% of all work entered into the Webby Awards. With nearly 10,000 entries received from all 50 states and more than 60 countries, this is an outstanding accomplishment for SolutionSet.

See all honorees at http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current_honorees.php?season=12

See all winners at http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current.php?season=12

Last year Delfina and SFBIG took two honoree awards, and this year our clients won four. It’s really exciting to see SolutionSet work continue to be judged as award-winning. A big kudos to the teams responsible for these sites.

Day one of the community forum has treated us to a keynote speak from Alan Weber (Co-Founding editor of Fast Company) to talks hosted by Rohit Bhargava (SVP Digital Strategy and Marketing Olgivy) to Rachael Makeel (Ebay) and Mark Williams (Apple Support Community).

This invitation only event has attracted an impressive list of representatives from Cisco, eBay, Microsoft, Consumer Reports, Apple, Yahoo amongst many others.

One exciting fact: Mikhail Gorbachev is staying at our hotel speaking about the environment in Santa Fe. I’m hoping to get a glimpse of him.

Some interesting top line points/notes from the conference:

1. Community Strategy - two fold (Business Strategy and Community Strategy)

2. Don’t think the community belongs to the organization. The community belongs to the users. This approach will help drive managing community strategy and decisions.

3. ROI - Analyze in two ways (Investment but also Time)

4. Metrics (business and user specific) - List out the community site objectives then outline a measure-able metric for each. This applies for both the organization but also driving and understanding the objectives of the users. Then providing them with visibility of their success for their own objectives can drive higher adoption and use.

5. The opportunities with communities go beyond the revenue measurement. The value of brand equity, knowledge sharing, self support etc is more difficult to measure but hold value within the community engagement.

Day Two

Future of Online Communities

1. The future of community will blur distinct communities and content to be less about features but more about “my relationships” with my constituents. Also the speaker mentioned considering the open framework (e.g. OpenID) between varying communities to allow users to weave at their own patchwork of communities around their own interests. Jenna Woodul CCO LiveWorld

2. Corporate America needs to open to have a dialogue with their customers to drive relationships, loyalty and interaction. This will drive brand engagement, product strategy and thought leadership. Stephanie Bowman - Sr. Product Manager Adobe

Wow, these messages sound familiar and part of the genetics of how SolutionSet views the impact of Brand Marketing. The leading organizations will drive and lead this methodology with creating relationships through community marketing strategies.

I have been meaning to get back to doing one of these recently. I found one I liked online at:

http://wordpress.betech.virginia.edu/index.php/2007/10/03/css-sitemap/
I took at and adapted it and it can be found at

http://www.kaplinsky.com/css-sitemap/sitemap.html

The guts are pretty much the same, but I did the following:

a) Added numbering the way I think it should be done on site maps

b) Created a sample “small business” heirarchy which is valid for very many websites

c) Added links the way that I think a sitemap should be linked - in development, they can be linked to comps, shell pages, and then final pages. For next time, I will add a status indicator (probably the color on left will change when a page has not been started, in progress, and ready for review)

d) Added a “legend” at the top

e) Added header / footer links as most sites have these

Comscore just recently released a study examining the effects of search and online display ads to varying conversions such as site visits and offline sales.

A few years ago while working at a previous agency, I launched a similar campaign for an established and well known helmet manufacturer based in Santa Cruz. The purpose was to run an online campaign to drive sales of their products at a large retailer. The executive team at the helmet company was skeptical about the effectiveness of online advertising. However, we were able to convince them to test a pilot campaign.

We measured the sales at retail locations in the quiet period and gather historical sales for the same period for the past two years. The reason was that seasonal purchasing behavior affects these types of products also. This served as our baseline. We then tested our campaign with PPC search only and a combination of both online ads and search. We found that there was a statistically significant list on in store sales as a result of the campaign. However, we also found that the search medium provided the heavy lifting in terms of sales when compared with online display ads. One note not reported by Comscore was that we experience a lack of about 2-3 weeks after the online campaigns launched before the in store numbers reached their lift peak.

I was excited to see that the Comscore study supported our results. However, they are reported much larger sales lifts percentages. This may be due to any number of variables.

The big take aways?

1. Online advertising significantly effects offline sales

2. Search advertising is more effective than online ads to drive sales conversions

3. Running both mediums drives a larger return on advertising then running independently

On February 25th, New York Magazine introduced an issue baring Lindsay Lohan mimicking poses from a famous photo shoot at the Bel Air Hotel in LA as Marilyn Monroe. It was photographed by the same gentleman, Bert Stern, who photographed Marilyn. There was some controversy and good taste backlash - which was probably to the benefit of the publisher.

Smartly, the publisher decided to include the photos free online via their slideshow feature that appeared in the actual magazine. The numbers are staggering…In the first TWO days after the release, which included a server outage due to traffic. They experienced 34 Million page views. It is estimated that ad sales for those two days at an estimated $15 CPM that the New York Magazine earned $500,000 on online ad sales (IN TWO DAYS without the overhead costs of paper and printing). The amazing part is that the slideshow can reside virtually forever with $$ coming in with each impression. Consider that actual magazine sales are short lived and restricted by the numbers that are printed in the run and that they get replaced with the next issue - the online medium’s ceiling is less limiting.

Anyway, granted Sex sells but this is a great example of the power of the online medium and the power of how more accessible content is online to drive such volume of viewership.