Author: Kyle

The Producer of the Future

Posted on by Kyle

Creativity Online has posted a nice video tour of CP+B’s Boulder office. Normally, I would have posted this as a link dump kind of post, but the first half of the video is interesting enough to warrant a post of its own.

The folks at CP+B are talking integrated producers — meaning they pair specialists in web, video and interactive on projects. As they work together, those specialists push projects to new places with the added benefit of learning new skills along the way. As they begin to see projects from different perspectives, you end up with a video producer who could excel at creating (or overseeing the creation of) a website, web pros shooting videos for online spots, etc.

This kind of idea has been knocking around in my head for the past year or so, but this video does a great job of putting the disparate ideas in my head down on pixels. I think this approach is a natural evolution of online media and those who create it.

Watch it ASAP — I think Creativity locks their content behind a subscription page after 7 days or so.

AnimalHavenKC.org redesign

Posted on by Kyle

Redesigned Animal Haven homepageI am happy to announce the recent launch of a new website for Animal Haven, a fantastic Kansas City-area animal shelter. Animal Haven’s mission is to provide a higher quality of life for homeless pets through adoption, education and collaboration with the animal welfare community. They’ve been around since 1968, working hard to place homeless pets in good homes.

Old Animal Haven homepage A friend of mine connected me with the staff at Animal Haven a few months ago. At the time, they had a website that was hard to maintain, difficult to navigate and not focused on their goal: adoptions. After talking with the staff and learning where they wanted to take the organization and the website, I was able to design a site that better addressed their audience and their mission.

The homepage was revamped to prominently feature adoptions; random photos of their adoptable pets (courtesy of PetFinder.com) are immediately visible, and visitors can view all of Animal Haven’s adoptable pets without leaving the site. I integrated tools they were already using, like Google Calendar for events and Google Checkout for donations. Thanks to the new content management system, they can easily manage the site and incorporate content from YouTube and PhotoBucket. Last but not least, I added a blog to help them share their success stories, shelter news, event information and more.

I’m really happy with the results; special thanks to the staff at Animal Haven for all of their input and effort. If you’re in the Kansas City area and you’d like to adopt a pet, AnimalHavenKC.org is the place to go.

Results:
Since launching the site two weeks ago, overall visits have increased 38.5%. Pageviews have increased 180%. The bounce rate has dropped over 72% — from 66% to 18%, the average time spent on the site has increased 144%, and blog subscriptions have been increasing every day.

Link Dump

Posted on by Kyle

Lots of good stuff out on the ol’ interwebs this week. In no particular order:

The Orange Underground – an interesting campaign for Cheetos by Goodby Silverstein. There are a lot of nice little touches, like the pattern overlaying the video and the cheap “paper” and felt-tip pen drawings in the cookbook.

Exiled!, a new show from MTV. Take the Super Sweet 16 kids and send them to live with tribes in Africa and Antartica. It sounds like a joke, but the Fallon Planning Blog has the skinny.

Guinness, Life of a Dot, a nice progression of their award-winning Evolution spot. I think these pieces complement each other nicely without trying to rehash the exact same idea.

CP+B’s Holiday Card – made for a select group of their clients, this card features a nice little customizable video and some surprising interaction at the end. (Use this code: 547WERT)

More on the CP+B tip, they’re doing some nice work for Domino’s now; taking them back to their “30 minutes or it’s free” guarantee.

Cool Flash-based website for Soïa & Kyo, a fashion outerwear maker. Love the 3D space mixed with the hand-drawn elements.

Hot Links for January 07

Posted on by Kyle

On my “to try” list; Chyrp is a blogging engine designed to be very lightweight while retaining functionality. It is driven by PHP and MySQL (with some AJAX thrown in), and has a pimpin’ theme and module engine; so you can personalize it however you want.

The new Xerox logo. The rubber ball is a mistake… they should have stopped at the logotype.

Learning to Love Leopard’s Spaces

Posted on by Kyle

So you’ve upgraded to Leopard and you’ve heard Spaces is soooo handy—it’s guaranteed to change the way you use your Mac! You check it out, but you don’t believe the hype. Until recently, that was me. As a web designer, I spend a lot of time with my browser (obviously); using one browser in multiple spaces — one space to scan feeds in Google Reader, another to check e-mail in Gmail and another to develop websites — doesn’t work. Until now.
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