Increasingly, savvy organizations are asking for web solutions built on open source content management systems. We’re all for it: we’ve built solutions on a variety of platforms, including WordPress and Drupal, both open source projects. We’ve even released a few open source plug-ins of our own.
Open source certainly offers benefits, including a transparency that we believe encourages better programming (“the best disinfectant is light”), the removal of the dependence on a single software vendor, and often times, incredibly low cost of ownership. All of that said, as advocates of custom solutions for clients with custom needs, we know that the open source solution isn’t always the right solution.
More importantly, we’ve found that savvy clients and prospects asking for open source are actually getting at something more essential: open platform solutions.
Continue reading Open source and open platforms: the questions you should be asking
The Council of Public Relations Firms launched the first version of RFP Builder; a web application that guides prospective PR firm clients through the process of selecting the right firm. Our new case study has the details.
Acelero Learning released the new version of their public website. Built on CitySoft Community Enterprise, the site includes a new Head Start Resource Center with self registration, a custom news channel with improved formatting, and a custom jQuery-powered slideshow on the home page that offers all the elegance of Flash without the overhead or maintenance costs.
YAMI-U and the resulting campaign, No LOL in HIV, was featured in an article in the New York Times. We led the web component of this campaign, working closely with the youth advocates and the creative directors, The Watsons.
Continue reading Assorted client news: RFP Builder, Acelero, YAMI in NYT, and more
Since last Wednesday, I’ve been hunkering down at the Hilton Garden Inn in Washington, D.C., leading the web component of Cable Positive’s Youth AIDS Media Institute University (YAMI-U). The purpose of this 7 day program has been to develop and produce a multi-platform social advocacy HIV/AIDS awareness marketing campaign, working with about 20 young adults already active in various HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns.
Over the past week, we developed an overarching campaign theme that individual YAMI-U teams have translated into public service announcements that will be carried nationwide, a series of print ads, an interactive text messaging campaign, and, yes, an engaging and integrated web presence.
Continue reading YAMI-U campaign to launch this afternoon
Any educator will tell you that the best way to communicate a concept is not just by stating it, but by opening the door for the learner to discover the concept by way of their own experience or reasoning. Science experiments that go on in classrooms across the country are a testament to the importance of knowledge earned through experience, known, in the case of science, as experiments. Learning on the web, often called eLearning, is no different.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a D.C. based think-tank dedicated to advancing educational excellence in U.S. schools, understands this concept as well as anyone. So when they approached us to help them build an interactive study resource and web based game to illustrate some concepts for their “Accountability Illusion” report, we were excited to get started.
Continue reading Interactive Flash maps: using web games to teach concepts
In support of an upcoming conference, we were asked to address some questions on the theme of web strategy as part of a greater campaign. This campaign would also incorporate more traditional media like public service announcements and other branding.
Our inputs addressed issues ranging from consistency in color palette and overall aesthetic, to cost considerations, to social media integration, to mechanisms for evaluating effectiveness. Most of the discussion would be familiar to any of our clients who have gone through a full development or strategy process with us. As the dialog progressed, however, we found ourselves moving from “planning and campaign integration fundamentals” to the higher level, more philosophical subject of how the web, as a campaign medium, fundamentally differs from other campaign media, and the practical implications of those differences when thinking holistically about web as one leg of a greater campaign.
We could probably write a thesis paper on the subject, but for of the sake of our time and our readers’ attention spans, we’ve tried to boil it down to a handful of paragraphs.
Continue reading Web as part of a greater campaign: economic and philosophic differences
We often receive web project inquiries that look something like this: “Please give us a quote for how much it would cost to get XYZ”. “XYZ” is usually a nice bulleted list consisting of requirements such as a content management system, online event registration, a member-only web community, a blog, a forum, integration with a Salesforce database, and so on.
We do these things really well. By leveraging existing systems and adding some custom code, we are able to deliver a great set of tools with great Salesforce integration. Just what they wanted, right?
Here’s the problem: Too often those lists of requirements are based entirely on what a CEO loosely articulated, what a competitor did last month, some blog reading, or a lot of friends with opinions. A recent post on Smashing Magazine – 7 Essential Guidelines for Functional Design – is a good read for those considering the “XYZ” approach.
At C. Murray Consulting, our best success stories consistently come from projects where we’ve had the opportunity to engage with clients at the requirements level – to put everything on the table and leave no question unasked. When we understand our clients’ needs at least as well as they do (maybe even better), we’re able to leverage our Web expertise to tell them what they really need, why they need it, and the best way to get there.
Continue reading The Importance of the End Goal
