Written By: Patrick on November 11th, 2009
One of our web design and social media marketing clients was approached by a person purportedly from a “brand protection company” in China who threatened that they would soon be registering our client’s name in China and Hong Kong (.cn, .hk). They offered to “protect” the names for them, for a fee. They then made intimidations about how only they could offer the kind of “brand protection services” needed to make sure nothing bad happens to our client’s brand in Asia.
These guys are typical con men and should be ignored, unless you do a lot of business in China and have subsidiaries there. In which case, your Internet folks have probably already grabbed the appropriate domains there for you.
I hate it when bad people try to take advantage of unsuspecting business owners, but global business means global cons.
Written By: Heather on November 8th, 2009
You probably noticed, our website has a completely new look. We’re fierce advocates of web standards, so of course we built our own website using web standards, with some great extra features like streaming video and dynamic JQuery effects. We’re thrilled with how it turned out, and as part of our launch celebration here’s an interview with a couple of the people who made it happen. This is a special launch for us, because it’s not just the launch of a new website- it’s also the PatrickOrtman, Inc. debut of Ryan, our newest website design team member.
Welcome, Ryan! First question- why do you like being a designer?
It’s really interesting to engage in problem-solving with graphics. I love being able to assess an audience or a design brief and create a website or other design piece that is useful, practical and hopefully beautiful. And with design on the web, we’re all still figuring it out. There are better ways of designing but no absolute right way; often times usability experts will figure out that users interact differently with the web than originally thought. So there’s always room for experimenting and implementing new layouts, elements and practices to make sure users have a great experience.
For Patrick:
Why did you decide to do a redesign of the PatrickOrtman, Inc. website?
Any forward-thinking company should always be searching for ways to better communicate their brand and vision, and we definitely take our own medicine over here. For this redesign I wanted to reposition the agency a little- we’re not a web design company, or a video production company, or a social media marketing company- we’re all those things and more. When you work with us, you’re getting a digital marketing department, with strategic (more…)
Written By: Patrick on November 5th, 2009
Recently, Advertising Age talked about how businesses from the Fortune 500 to smaller companies are all starting to use web video and social media marketing channels like YouTube and Facebook to get the word out about their products and messages, bypassing traditional media channels. Usually, these video campaigns are overseen by the client’s marketing agency or a digital agency like ours.
The article says that this recent shift into web video (more…)
Written By: Patrick on November 3rd, 2009
If you use Twitter a lot (and who doesn’t?), you’re probably missing a lot of tweets from people you actually really care about. It’s inevitable, once you start following a certain number of people. But never fear, the folks at Twitter feel your pain and are doing something about it. That’s right, I’m talking about Twitter Lists. And they’re tasty.
Twitter’s new Lists feature lets you organize the people you follow into whatever groups you want. For instance, you could have a ‘friends’ list, a ‘clients’ list, and so forth. Once you set up your list, you can see what those people are up to without all the clutter of the ten gazillion celebrities you’re following. You’ll never miss an important tweet again!
As Billy Mays used to say, ‘And that’s not all!’ You can share lists, if you want to. Just make it public to share and private to, um, not share. You can also remove yourself from someone else’s list, if you like. It’s pretty incredibly easy to use , as you’d expect.
The guys at Mashable have a really nice walkthrough of Twitter Lists, so click on over there for a tutorial… if you need one. We won’t judge.
