Archive for April, 2009
Earlier last week, I completed and launched Smile-Radio, a marketing site developed for my associates at CustomChannels to pitch their new product: streaming radio targeted at dentists.
SmileRadio.com
Dubbed “Music for the Modern Dental Practice”, Smile Radio is a very “Web 2.0″ looking custom-themed CSS site running off the WordPress platform (along with a few strategically placed custom plug-ins) and will soon have an automated ordering and tracking system for e-commerce payment traction.
In addition to the layout and tracking system, I also developed the accompanying Flash streaming media player and hand-crafted the branding. Lookin’ sharp! CustomChannels and I will be doing more work in the future including a new Flash radio player with unique statistical tracking. Look out, web!
This week, I launched a new shopping cart & donation system for my client ConsciousAlliance.org. Conscious Alliance is a charity organization that sells custom concert posters for benefit concerts and puts the profits towards ending world hunger. Great cause!
ConsciousAlliance.org
Contracted to develop a new shopping cart system complete with online-credit card ordering, I utilized AJAX, mySQL and PHP to build a simple ordering system tied to their credit-card gateway along with a easy-to-use management tool to order their posters’ images, pricing and quantities. A system to allow users to make recurring donations according to their own timeframe (monthly, quarterly, etc) was included.
All and all I’m pretty pleased with the results and I hope to see their business boost!
In an interesting article on Yahoo! Tech this afternoon, web founder (who helped develop the HTTP technology that runs the web) Tim Berners-Lee, spoke to a consortium in Madrid about online privacy. The discussion in question was a new piece of software that will allow ISPs to track demographics and deliver advertising to customers. Quoting Berners-Lee: “The postman does not open my mail, the telephone company does not listen to my telephone conversations. Internet use is often more intimate than those things.”. Word.
It seems like a lot of broad-band technologies seem to be taking a more pro-active approach to their advertising. I mentioned earlier cable television networks plan to do the same thing- gather localized demographics about what you watch and use it to target advertising.
Y’know, so many services gather incomprehensible amounts of data about us wherever we go, the pessimist in me thinks this argument is just a drop in the bucket even from the Founder.
Today, a ruling in Sweden put four members in charge of the file sharing network, the Pirate Bay, in jail for up to a year along with damages fees of $3.6 million each. “We can’t pay and we won’t pay,” says Sunde, one of the four, because there was no money; all of the files were delivered for free except for some small donations accepted in order the run the hardware.
Y’know, sometimes I have to tip my hat to my overseas pseudo-anarchist buddies at the ‘Bay. It takes a lot of guts to power such an enormous community of people who are essentially subverting the law. The site was down for a short while when authorities seized their data-center, but it is back up now running from a new location.
Pirate Bay – I salute your ballsy, but reckless efforts toward the OpenSource/OpenWorld mentality. Hopefully one day we’ll all live an a Star-Trek-ish, utopian world where everything is free for all who participate, but I wouldn’t count on it too soon.
My client, Mortgage Training Institute recently launched our latest collaboration: a new pure CSS site marketing their new product LivePresenter, a top-of-line yet inexpensive product that streamlines online video presentations.
MTI: LivePresenter
Designed and developed by yours truly, the LivePresenter site was built for marketing and search engine efficiency. Along with creating a series of hand-crafted logos and icons, I also developed a media player in Silverlight 2.0 to showcase customer testimonials. I also designed layouts for their nifty back-end toolset that allows users to manage their online presentations.
Great product + great collaboration = great results! Congrats, guys.
I am very upset with Internet Explorer 6 today. Given, I’m often angry at Internet Explorer products, but today I’m especially perturbed. I’ve become increasingly dissatisfied with the fact that its one of the final remaining browsers I still need to design completely separate. More against its case: while it still covers around 16-20% of the market* (!!), Microsoft no longer distributes or updates it (in fact, it doesn’t even run on Vista).
Browser compatibility had always been an issue for web developers, causing me great pain (or more likely annoyance), over the numerous years I’ve been dealing with it. We’ve come into a great new period of layout in CSS with working coverage around 80% of browsers meaning very little work is needed to make more modern sites compatible, but its very discouraging to keep dealing with the stragglers like IE even after Microsoft has all but dumped it!
*I get my stats from W3C Schools and Wikipedia.
I read an article at Yahoo! Tech today that peaked my interest just a bit regarding Cable TV attempting to try “targeted advertising”. Targeted advertising is when advertisements are custom delivered to you based on a trend (like how Amazon knows what to suggest for you).
I’m not surprised to see TV taking on some of the ad facets that have shown success online. With the advent of TiVO / DVRs, there are a lot more ways to skip ads. Television advertising has been seeing a drop every since the popularity of mass distributed internet video and I’ve heard stats that some MTV microsites score more ad revenue than their spin-off channels.
It’ll be interesting to see how this works out. Looks like we’ll need to find another way to circumvent TV ads yet again.
I’ve been very pleased to say I’ve been bidding and contracting for more and more jobs that involve both design and development this year. When I re-established my business, it was one of my goals to be the most well-rounded creative professional I could be and admittedly had some rusty spots- design being one of them as it wasn’t a huge part of my last job and practice makes perfect.
I proud to say a lot of my designs and logo illustrations are really coming around. I’ve always thought my metaphor for design was painting on a large blank canvas and the idea is to get one great idea; whereas in development its more like putting a big puzzle together- the painting is already there, you just have to figure out the most efficient order in which to put the pieces together.
It all seems to be relating together well this month. Three cheers for covering all bases: design, development, search optimization and streaming media! Case studies to follow soon.