With Toyota’s recall and Comcast’s announcement that they are rebranding themselves as Xfinity I figured I’d take some time and explore the idea of damage control advertising. It’s nothing new. The Emancipation Proclamation was a part of Lincoln’s re-branding campaign; it was his effort to rebrand the war and get public opinion back on his side. It might have started in politics but quickly moved into corporate advertising when corporations like Phillip Morris decided a name change was necessary to get rid of their bad press. More recently some of the major banks have had name changes in an attempt…
Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Comcast/XFinity: Changing Your Brand Name as Damage Control
The dominance of search
Last night I attended a presentation for web professionals in the Chicago area. It was organized through meetup.com. The presenter was Matt Moog, Founder & CEO at Viewpoints. You can see his slide deck here.
Among his many relevant points was the notion he referred to as ‘the dominance of search.’ Matt’s focus for the evening was specifically on sites that serve up social commerce, but I think the search issue is something any site needs to consider seriously. What Matt was referring to was his claim was that 50-80% of traffic across the web comes from search. This was a…
Read MoreApple to announce Slate – and the crowd goes (sorta) wild
Apple fans have been hearing rumbling of the apple tablet, the completely flat fully functioning notebook computer, for years now. Apple released the iPhone, still no tablet. They released the Macbook Air but didn’t waste a breath on the tablet. Finally, after years of building it up, Apple is close to bringing it down to us. If you happened to be on CES or G4 that day, you might think it was Charlton Heston coming down the mountain with a certain stone tablet instead of the long awaited new gadget from Steve Jobs and Co. Outside of the message boards…
Read More8 things Ushering in the “New School” of Web Development, Part 1
In the grand scheme of my profession, that being a Web Developer, I would still consider myself to be a rookie. I have been developing web sites and getting paid for it, for around 3 years; however, I would probably say that I have been doing it “professionally” for around a year and a half. Even with my “rookie” status as a web developer, I do consider my talents to be very respectable, especially for the relatively short period of time I have been doing it. One thing I have noticed since I began my career is the difference between,…
Read MoreThe importance of documentation and planning for user experience
User experience expert – John Yesko, gave this latest presentation and the topic was “Rich User Experience Documentation – Beyond Static Wireframes.”
Read MoreHaystack is here! Our initial thoughts…
Well, Jason Fried, the President of 37signals, announced the imminent release of Haystack on his Twitter page in October, and now it’s officially here – Haystack. Haystack is similar to a job posting board, but is engineered to allow design agencies to post themselves in a single destination and hopefully get located (like a needle in a haystack) by prospects all over the country or in their city.
This is a good idea for 37signals (the company behind the product) as it potentially places them squarely in the middle of that intersection where design agencies and companies in need of interactive services…
Read MoreAn Event Apart: Chicago 2009 – Web Form Design
I had the opportunity to attend An Event Apart: Chicago 2009 this past week+ (thanks Ted & Charles!) and was fortunate enough to catch Luke Wroblewski’s presentation on web form design.
I was pleasantly surprised that one of the most boring topics on paper was actually one of the most interesting of the conference. I don’t know if that’s a testament to Luke’s work or an indictment on the rest of the speakers (who were, in my estimation, pretty mediocre…save Dan Rubin) but I’d rather not dwell on the negatives of the event (for now).
As a designer, the form page has always…
Read MoreAn Event Apart – What’s the Content Strategy
I recently attended ‘An Event Apart‘ here in Chicago. A conference for web professionals with some of the industry’s leaders delivering messages about cutting edge design and the best practices we should all be following.
The speaker in my opinion who stole the show was Kristina Halvorson, author of the book ‘Content Strategy for the Web.’ She made the observation that content on a website is critical to its success, but is often left neglected until the end of a project. She (accurately) pointed out that many of us spend most of the time designing a website around its content and…
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