Home page face lift for NELLCO

Published by Jake Goldman on April 10th, 2009 in Clients and Design & Creative and Featured and Strategy. 4 Comments

Most of our website design projects involve a first design for a new site or web application, or a complete redesign from the ground up. A home page and design “refresh”, however, can be a smart, often overlooked investment in a site’s vibrancy, particularly in times when budgets are tight and that vision of a redesign might be out of reach.

Of course, not all sites are suited to an evolutionary (as opposed to revolutionary) face lift. Putting lipstick on that 10 year old site with the scrolling marquee, blocky graphics, and green background is probably not a smart investment. But there are many websites with reasonable aesthetics – maybe a few years old – that don’t need to be torn down and rebuilt. Some creative thinking about how existing structural elements can be refined, coupled with a face lift of the home page’s content and, perhaps, key landing pages, can offer real bang for the buck.

Recently, we did just that for the New England Law Library Consortium (NELLCO).

NELLCO Home Page Face Lift

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Content Management System (CMS) ROI – Not Just About Cutting Costs Anymore

Published by Christopher Murray on April 9th, 2009 in Content Management Systems and Featured and Strategy. 4 Comments

I’ve been working with website content management systems for 9 years or so – since the last time our economy took a bit of a nose-dive. Around that time there was a flood of discussion about the ROI of implementing a Content Management System (CMS), mostly written by vendors trying to sell very expensive software in a down market. We’re in a similar economic situation now, but over the past 9 years two big things have changed:

  1. The cost of CMS software has decreased exponentially since 2000
  2. Site visitor expectations have increased exponentially since 2000

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3 simple examples: why Internet Explorer 8 disappoints web developers

Published by Jake Goldman on March 21st, 2009 in Design & Creative and Featured and Programming. 25 Comments

UPDATE: Paul Thurrott, a Windows journalist, has featured some commentary on our post over at his Winsupersite. Check out his post, and the great discussion below it! Thanks for the input, Paul!

Internet Explorer 8 is out, and a lot of people – technically sophisticated and otherwise – are wondering what, if anything, this means for the web. As professional web developers, our view is that while Internet Explorer 8 is an incremental improvement over its predecessor, we’re mostly disappointed by its lack of progress.

Having read a variety of takes on IE8, we were inspired to write this article for two audiences. First, there’s little in the way of concrete examples and clear explanations for a large swatch of the business technology decision makers (that many of our clients represent) who are often savvy about technology, but look to organizations like us for a deeper understanding of the strategic, cost, and technical significance. Second, reading the comments on tech savvy websites like Neowin, Digg, and the Winsupersite have me concerned that there’s a growing and false notion that IE8 is just great, and its rendering problems are the result of web developers writing non-standard code optimized for IE7.

To understand why IE8 is a legitimate disappointment, we need to start by providing background on how different browsers impact web development, both from a cost and design standpoint. If you think you already have a handle on this, you can skip ahead to our 3 straightforward examples of IE8 disappointments.

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Web as part of a greater campaign: economic and philosophic differences

Published by Jake Goldman on March 8th, 2009 in Strategy. 0 Comments

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.

Comparative Campaign Media

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