Category: Clients

Client Launches: ExperienceLife.com Now Responsive

From the official press release on my recent work with the ExperienceLife.com team

“‘Our goal is to provide readers with a positive, consistent experience and easy access no matter where they are and regardless of their chosen device, be it a desktop computer, laptop, e-reader, tablet or smartphone’, says Jamie Martin, Experience Life’s digital initiatives manager. ‘Mobile traffic to our site has increased significantly over the past two years, with more than a third of our traffic coming from smartphones and tablets. Our new responsively designed site allows for the flexibility readers want and deserve.'”

Also includes this quote from me:

“One of the most cost-effective ways for web publishers to make sure their sites offer real functionality no matter their users’ choice of platform or screen size is through responsive design.”

Client Launches: ExperienceLife.com & FellowInc.com

I’m happy to announce two new client sites launched this week: one for Experience Life magazine and one for Minneapolis advertising and design studio .

Both sites are powered by a heavily-customized WordPress installation.

The Experience Life effort included the development of a system to migrate 10 years of archives, comments, assets, URLs (including shortened URLs) into WordPress. Additionally, WordPress was customized to be organized around monthly issues rather than blog post chronology.

The focus of the Fellow effort was in successfully merging the unique creative vibe of Fellow and the reliability of WordPress.

 

[Client] Rackspace’s NoMoreServers.com Launches

Rackspace formally announced a project I’ve been working on:

No More Servers

NoMoreServers.com is a rally cry of the computing-as-a-service era. The site seeks to empower businesses to acknowledge the decline of in-house computing and the rise of the All Cloud Enterprise (ACE). Covering hosting, cloud computing, SaaS, and the key vendors driving them (eg: Amazon, Google, Rackspace, Salesforce, etc), NoMoreServers.com will feature daily commentary explaining all things cloud computing. The site will include third-party content and news about hosting, cloud computing and will have a live community portal for visitors to engage on the topic of outsourcing computing.

RealTimeAds.com Launches at MinnPost.com

MinnPost RealTimeAds

I’m pleased to announce the launch of RealTimeAds.com – a advertising product now in beta testing at MinnPost.com

Karl and I have been building and testing the system for a couple of months now and I’m quite happy with it on three of fronts;

  • It feels like it makes advertising approachable to people and organizations that haven’t considered it within reach before. Especially, extremely small and locallly-focused people.
  • It re-frames publications that already exist (Twitter feeds, blog feeds, etc) as text advertisements, cuz, you know, that’s what they are anyway.
  • It extends the real-time nature of Twitter outside of the Twitter silo, helping those people and organizations to get more mileage out of their tweets.

“Real-Time Ads runs on RSS. So, you use what you are already using-Twitter, Blogger, Tumblr, proprietary CMS, whatevs!” – Karl Pearson-Cater

Interested in trying it out? Give MinnPost a call: 612 455 6953.

Yes, the RealTimeAds.com system uses a version of Cullect’s engine tuned for ad serving (verses feed reading).

For those of you following along, RealTimeAds.com is Secret Project 09Q02A.

UPDATE:
Here’s the official RealTimeAds announcement from MinnPost’s Joel Kramer

“Imagine a restaurant that can post its daily lunch special in the morning and then its dinner special in the afternoon. Or a sports team that can keep you up-to-date on its games and other team news. Or a store that could offer a coupon good only for today. Or a performance venue that can let you know whether tickets are available for tonight. Or a publisher or blogger who gives you his or her latest headline. ” – Joel Kramer, MinnPost

UPDATE 2: More from Joel Kramer, this time talking to the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

“We do believe Real-Time Ads will prove more valuable for advertising at a lower entry point.”

Secret Project 09Q02A

I dig it when my client’s enthusiasm for the project infects me. And why not – this project has all the qualities of a project I’d really like.

It even has that extra bit – an approach I credit to Chad Fowler – of taking something you don’t like and doing it in a way you can get excited about it (e.g. “we’re going to make this the best waterfall driven project eva!”).

Project Launch: Sun Support Center

I just got word the new Sun Support Center launched. This was one of the first information architecture projects I worked on after returning from leave earlier this year. A couple of things I like about how it turned out:

  1. It brings /support inline with the templates used for /products, /services, and /solutions.
  2. There’s a clear indicator differentiating free and for-fee areas of the site.
  3. Community-support; forums, open-source, etc is prominent – though it didn’t make the crop 😉

Thanks and congrats to everyone on the team. It’s always great to see a project launch.