We got the first batch of numbers late last week for our national television commercial spot. And the client is thrilled- sales are up 20% since the ad began its run.
We’re working with the client on an expanded campaign. And we’re integrating the spot into their website and other corporate marketing materials. This is good.
There’s a lot of really bad websites out there, and it’s understandable- a lot of clients don’t understand what their web company is doing. And really, a lot of web companies have no idea what they’re doing, either.
It’s especially hard for clients to understand what they’re getting from a web company when a lot of really poor design practices can easily be hidden. See, a lot of what makes a good website happens in the code. And people don’t look at code so much. It’s time consuming to work at the code level. So most web design companies don’t bother.
That’s a mistake, and the client who chooses a web design company without understanding the design and development process is almost certainly destined for failure.
We’re currently working on a new website for a client. Let’s call them Zelda’s Bakery, because we signed a nondisclosure for the client. Zelda hired us to take another web shop’s work and well, make it work. We’re not particularly fans of the look of Zelda’s site, but she loves it, and more importantly her customers love it.
The problem is, her old web design company implemented Zelda’s design in a really cruddy way. Sure, it looks like Zelda’s design. And it sort of works like she’d like it to. But the entire website consists of images and very little text. Additionally, her navigation system uses a ton of javascript that junks up and bloats the filesizes. Since so much of the site is image-based it’s really hard to update. And finally, they’re getting really bad search engine rankings. Google can’t “see” images.
Enter us.Zelda’s new website will look an awful lot like her old website. Which is what she wants. But it’ll now have a nice database back end. The extraneous javascript will be removed in favor of CSS for her navigation menu. We’ll use CSS tricks to minimize the amount of images used throughout the site, too. Some of those tricks involve really cutting-edge things like CSS Sprites. The site will be a lot easier to update, too.
Most importantly, the guts of Zelda’s new site will be extremely search engine friendly. Which, it turns out, makes it extremely friendly to users from all sorts of computing platforms- iPhones, Blackberry users, disabled users, etc. In fact, by taking the time to program Zelda’s website using standards-based solutions we’ll be making her site much more friendly for any user.
Which is really the first step towards making the website successful.
Technorati Tags:web standards, web design
I found a place to live, finally a decent house in a great neighborhood. It’s close to everything I need, and it is more convenient to my friends like Yoji who live on the Westside. It’s good having a garage again. And, it has a view.
I think I’m moving out just in time, since the Fire Department has been using the warehouses next to my apartment as practice rescue buildings, coming in at night and ripping out the roofs, etc. This means it’s just a matter of time before all those buildings- almost a whole city block- will be demolished. The dust and mess will be incredible.
Also, as mentioned here before, my building is going ghetto. Things aren’t being repaired, amenities are being closed (it is very frustrating to see the 50 inch plasma and the couches in the common room and know none of us can get in there to enjoy it). The new management company, from Arizona, is pretty horrible. One of my neighbors calls them Nazis. And finally, their rents are going up. It’s just not worth staying, anymore.
Still, it’ll take me a couple more weeks to get fully moved out. I’ve been so busy at work lately, finishing up a video project and currently working on 4 web projects, that I can’t spend all my time packing boxes and running back and forth. I don’t mind that it’s taking a while to get moved. It helps me enjoy the process.
Today was also the day we finally ended our association with a client. The client had been having problems for over a year- they’ve lost over half their staff, and many of the departures were very acrimonious. They also fired or lost all of their other vendors. We hung in there, but eventually things got to where working with them just wasn’t fun or profitable. It was time for us to go, too.
Change is a part of life. It isn’t easy, whether it’s saying goodbye to a place you’ve lived, closing the door on a bad client, or ending a relationship and moving on. There’s been a lot of changes in my life lately, and looking around I notice that there are many sea changes taking place in those around me. We live in uncertain times. But they’re still interesting times. I don’t see the world as bleak.
I am looking forward to life becoming more interesting, more vital, more alive. There’s a lot of potential out there right now. And I have to think that it’s definitely time to move onto bigger and better things.
We’ve completed the Dr. Pasternak’s Ear Rescue website. It’s a simple site, but it meets the client’s goal of creating an initial online presence for the product that supports and reinforces the branding. Of course, it is a website that follows web standards, so it’s very well-optimized for search engines. Visit the site at www.earrescue.com
Now that we have a basic cut of every scene and a fine cut of many scenes from our web sitcom Couch Cases, I’ve been spending every spare moment working on sound mixing and editing. I find that working on the dialog is best either early in the morning or late at night, because my ears are quiet and tuned then. Dialog editing requires no interruptions, and it requires a very finely tuned ear.
My goal is to have all the restaurant scenes completed, as far as dialog goes, before we move the studio to our new location. That doesn’t leave a lot of time, but I’m confident. And the work is very good, so far.
It is very interesting to me, learning how sound is actually built in post more than it is on set. This is the same kind of thing that happens with picture, too. If people saw the horrible dailies that most feature films spit out, they’d be shocked at the amazing miracles that a good colorist and post person can perform. I already know a few miracle cures with picture, so now I’m learning some miracles with sound.
I had a good sound recordist, but we also had a lot of practical problems in some locations. Learning how to overcome these issues is a fun, if at times daunting, challenge.
This weekend was spent refurbishing a first-generation MacBook Pro for use as our main ingest machine for the Red One camera we’ll soon have here at Genius Monkeys. Our hope is that this machine can, in fact, be used as both as an on-set laptop for ingesting and cataloging the R3D files that the Red One makes when shooting, as well as for creating fast previews of footage while we’re still shooting.
The immediacy of the footage on the Red One is a big selling point for us and for our commercial clients. We can easily see if the footage we’d shot works, and we can even do a basic color pass for us or a client to sign off on, all while on set.
In the past few years HD cameras brought this capability to a lot of shoots. However, the Red One shoots something much higher quality than HD- it’s something on the order of Super35mm film, as far as quality. And not having to wait a day for rushes to come in is very exciting to us.
Of course, this means we’ll want a dedicated tech on set from now on. And that’s OK.
Today was a day full of product photography for a client’s new website and video. We’ll be taking the results of today’s work and creating some really cool After Effects animations.
