Patrick Ortman, Inc.

Ten Reasons Your Website Still Sucks

Written By: Patrick on June 30th, 2009

suck

We know you don’t want your website to suck, and we know you don’t have a lot of time on your hands. Consider this list a starting point of things to avoid in your own online adventures, and enjoy:

Ten Reasons Your Website Still Sucks

10. You don’t understand that what’s under the hood matters even more than the pretty outside everyone sees. The words “semantic markup” and “web standards” never came up when your digital agency talked about your website. Think of a web presence as architecture, because it is. A house built on a weak foundation cannot stand.

9. Despite all warnings, you insisted on going “full Flash”.

8. You still haven’t played with blogs, Twitter, and other social networking tools.

7. You hired your cousin Benny to build your website for $200 and a case of beer. Because really, anyone can build websites, right? Meanwhile crickets chirp and your company looks like a joke online.

6. Conversely, you hired SuperMegaTraditionalMarketingInc to do your website, and ended up with a $400K invoice. Meanwhile, crickets chirp and your company still looks like a joke online, although at broadband speeds.

5. You still think the web is TV. It is not. It is a conversation, and it’s your job to facilitate conversations about your brand online. Not to blast us with spam and one-way missives.

4. Speaking of those one-way missives, we’re tired of listening to your boring corporate non-speak on your website. Speak like a person, and we’ll like you better.

3.  Every company in your space looks the same online. Why is that? Lack of vision, and lack of leadership.

2. Why haven’t you updated anything on your website for 9 months? Are you still in business? Because it sure looks to us as if you’re dead and buried. And slapping a RSS feed onto your homepage really doesn’t count as updating your website.

1. You still refuse to work with your digital agency to help you craft a coherent, visionary, results-oriented web strategy. If you want to succeed online, you must forge a partnership with your digital agency and stop looking at them as some sort of commodity vendor.

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New Web Design, More Flash Strategy

Written By: Patrick on June 24th, 2009

new-business

We’ve landed a new web design client for our company, and we’re very excited about the project. In particular, we’re looking forward to creating a site for this client that blows away the competition with regards to usability, design, ease of maintenance, and search engine friendliness.

That last one won’t be too hard to pull off, since in this space every single competitor’s site is Flash-based.

Now, we love Flash. And this client’s website will have some Flash on it. But even as search engines start to index some of the text in a Flash file, they miss a lot of important stuff. Agencies that deploy all-Flash websites for their clients without any sort of thought about accessibility are really doing their clients a disservice. No matter how beautiful the websites are, search engines pass them by as if they don’t exist.

So of course we’re building this new client website using web standards as much as possible. And anytime (more…)

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How To Choose A Digital Agency

Written By: Patrick on June 19th, 2009

bluearrowmac

First, What Is A Digital Agency?

“A digital agency is a business that delivers services for the creative and technical development of internet based products. These services range from the more generalist such as web design, e-mail marketing and microsites etc. to the more specialist such as viral campaigns, banner advertising, search engine optimisation, podcasting or widget development etc.” -Wikipedia

We think they left a few major things out. But it’s a good start.

Not An Advertising Agency

A digital agency isn’t an advertising agency. Advertising agencies primarily deal with traditional mass media. Digital agencies mostly deal with Internet and digital campaigns. Also, advertising agencies often make their money off ad placement. Digital agencies generally make their money through their creative services you’ve hired them to complete.

That said, there’s been a move lately by Sapient, a large digital agency, to buy ad agencies. And a lot of advertising agencies are buying digital agencies. Time will tell if organizations with such different cultures will be good for their business or a bust.

Not Just A Web Design Company

The main differentiator between a web design company and a digital agency is a digital agency has broad and deep expertise in areas a web designer just doesn’t. A truly great digital agency understands the big picture for a client’s needs, and has all the tools and expertise to fill a client’s needs and turn out successful multi-platform online campaigns. If it  (more…)

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RED One Diary: Greenscreen and Tungsten

Written By: Patrick on June 16th, 2009

Greenscreen RED shoot, Burbank

It’s no secret that the chips that power video cameras are balanced more towards blue light (daylight) than orange light (tungsten, inside lighting). The RED One is no exception, and it’s not usually a problem. Unless you’re dealing with footage that is underexposed and shot indoors, and shot using tungsten lighting.

This was the situation from a recent shoot we did in Burbank. And using our 80D filter on the camera didn’t really help a lot because the lighting was already so low.

Now, if this happened today we’d have been using the new RED firmware build that gives much better results in these situations. But we couldn’t afford to go back and reshoot, so we were stuck.

Luckily, the RED community (special thanks to the 4K Ninjas for their constant experimentation and helpfulness) is on the case- there’s a plugin for After Effects called NeatVideo Pro that can seriously reduce the blue channel noise that happens in these situations.

We bought a copy. It’s magic. Suddenly, unusable footage is looking very, very good. Greenscreen keys that took a nodetree that looked insane in Shake are now easily keyed with one click inside Keylight. And I’m talking wispy hair and all. Amazing.

So we’re getting the word out- if you shoot or edit RED, get this plugin. Now! It’s only $100, and can save you tens of thousands of dollars while making it possible for you to deliver shots that your clients will utterly love.

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PATRICKORTMAN, INC.

We're the Los Angeles, California interactive and digital agency led by Internet pioneer Patrick Ortman.


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