exUrban, Inc.

This might be a bit out of date, but… I was perusing an old AdAge from January (1/18 to be exact) and came across the headline: The Best of Spanish-Language Marketing in 2009. Amongst the ads recognized as being particularly stellar were some from Brazil. Last I checked, the official language of Brazil is Portuguese, not Spanish. I know that headline writers have a challenging job, and the article does say “Latin America and Spain ” but that’s a pretty major gaffe in my book. The title would have been more accurate had it touted the best of  Central,  South American & Iberian advertising — see, an awful headline. However, a magazine that represents an industry that talks about targets and demographics and understanding the audience in order to better reach consumers should get it right.

Woops.

I’ve written in the past about how much I love Posterous. I still love it, but had an interesting learning experience, that I’d like to share.

I ran a 10K on 7 February. I wanted to write up a race report for a Posterous site that I started for some friends with whom I’m training for a race in April. I usually just post via email but I wanted to include some links to maps etc. and wanted to see how they looked so I  posted via the web interface. I didn’t like what I’d done so I edited and posted again. And again. And again. And again.

Each post went out to the world and landed in my twitter stream, my FaceBook page and on another blog that I’ve connected to Posterous. Posterous didn’t send the same link, or even overwrite the old post, but rather created a separate entry for each post, on the site, and the various other channels I’ve attached to the Posterous account. So, the lesson I’ve learned, if posting to Posterous, via the web interface, is to turn off your announcements (this would have been complicated because this is a team blog and lots of folks get it via email… each time I post, sorry team! Not reporting it to the world would have been nice, and once I had one that I liked I could have made one more small tweak, turned on share everywhere, and shared that, and I also could have deleted the posts I didn’t want.

This is an OK solve, I think, for a blog amongst friends. But it got me thinking how I’d approach it for a client, to help them avoid such a fiasco. My thought on this is to create two versions of a Postersous site under the account (which is what I have, my personal Posterous and my team Posterous) but make the second one private, and password protected, and invite no one to it, and add no subscribers, unless it’s a couple of test emails to see how things look as they go out (make sure only the editor’s eyes see the tests). Post things to the test site, tweak it and adapt it and when it’s ready for prime-time, copy the content and post it to your main site and share it with the world. I believe that this is good solve for email as well, if you are trying something that you’re not sure how it will come out you can test it on this test setup, then resend the email to the public site.

One of the nice things about Posterous is the immediacy of the posting, and typically I do only do email posts, but there are, and will be times, like February, 7, when I want to use Posterous a bit more robustly. I’d recommend learning from my minor gaffe and set yourself up with a test site where you can experiment in private. A nice possible future feature (are you listening Posterous folks?) would be a preview feature to avoid this sort of thing, but in the absence of that feature users will have to experiment.

On Saturday January 23, 2010 I attended WordCamp Boston at the New England Research & Development Center in Cambridge.

The whole event was well run and well organized from sign-up through the day the event itself. The WordCamp team did a great job communicating with attendees prior to the event as well as the day of. The NERD center is pretty amazing, really well laid out very comfortable with plenty of nooks and crannies for catching up on email etc (it is an incubator after all) and it proved to be a great spot for the meeting. The NERD center also has some nice views.

Program

The schedule of events was chock-full and well organized. As often happen at things like this there were certain instances when there were a cpuple of talks that looked great but you could only attend one. Such is life and one must choose. The schedule of the day was clear and easy to read/use and the WordCamp team did a great job with collateral. Talks were divided into tracks: Beginner (B), Applied (A), Practical (P), Dev/Design (D/D) and Unconference (informal meetings of folks to talk about things of their own choosing, and not covered in the featured talks). I attended Getting in the Loop (D/D), WP for Big Media (A), Academia in Practice (A), Sell Sh*t on WordPress (A), SEO Analysis (P) and Get Seen: Web Video (P).

Getting into the Loop, presented by Michael Erlewine, was, admittedly, a bit too technical for me — I’m not a hard core code guy, I work with them — but it was interesting to see some of the loop’s flexibility, and it gave me some good ideas for possible functions on future projects. This session  was very well attended and the crowd was over-capacity. I don’t have any notes for that because there was no place to really sit and write things down.

WP for big Media was interesting from the perspective that Ned Watson, the presenter, has been in the online publishing space for a while and has a broad range of experience at a number of top-tier publishers. Currently working with ew.com Ned talked at length about how they work with ew.com’s current CMS — Vignette! — and WP and make them talk to one another. That sort of integration, in and of itself is impressive and they are doing some very cool things. What I’d been hoping for though was perhaps a bit broader look at WP and big media, why it’s gaining more acceptance and some of the ways that WP torch bearers can use this acceptance to sell it to our own clients. One of my most interesting take aways from this, and one of the things that I’d wished there was some more insight delivered revolves around Large company’s IT departments, their view of opening up their infrastructure, and how, if at all one can approach that. as a client services organization I think that it would be interesting to have more knowledge of this to help our clients sell it to their IT departments.

Academia in Practice was probably my favorite talk of the day — hey, I do sites for schools. It was an informal panel discussion with 4 very smart folks from area colleges and universities and they did shine light on how and why they chose WordPress, and why academia is actually well suited to WordPress Implementations. At large, decentralized organizations such as Boston University, Harvard, Sloan/MIT publishing the flexibility and ease of deployment of WordPresss are huge factors in its adoption and deployment. At Wheaton, a much smaller, and more centralized school, the same reasons apply, but it suits the framework as well. I made a good connection with Chris Traganos, an organizer of WordCamp, and a developer at Harvard, in charge of the Harvard Gazette, and there was much back and forth and interaction between the panel and audience.

The next talk, Sell Sh*t on WordPress was one I was very much looking forward to. Jonathan Davis from Ingenesis presented their plugin, Shopp, and Shayne Sanderson from Instinct presented their WP e-commerce plugin. They both showed ample examples of their plugins at work on real world sites and which was great to see, as was, seeing the plugin’s interfaces etc. without having to buy (Shopp) and/or install (free, wp-ecommerce). Lots of good links to live sites came out of this talk but again, I was hoping for a bit more. Like my buddy John Haydon said, we were hoping for some ecomm best-practices, especially in relation to ecomm on the WordPress platform.

I attended the ecommerce presentation and the next presentation of the day, SEO Analysis given by Corey Eulas, with an old acquaintance from Mullen, Alice Winthrop. That may be the most fun part of these events, bumping into old friends and making some new ones along the way (hope the trip back to Orlando was uneventful, Bob). Corey’s talk was very helpful, packed with a bunch of practical, sound information. I’ll need to go check out his slides soon, because I think that they’ll be very helpful down the road.

The final talk of the day, Get Seen: Web Video, by Steve Garfield was interesting and chock full of useful information, though I must admit I was somewhat fried by this point. Lots of information was  flowing and all day long I felt as if I’d been drinking from a fire hose.I headed home prior to the end of the day and did not attend anything after 4:30 PM.

Ted Villa notes from WordCamp Boston on 23 January, 2010

Here are my notes from the day, very rough, and barely changed (PDF).

Extras

WordCamp Boston did a great job on the extras. The shwag bag was great — a really nice bag, filled with tons of cool WP and FireFox stickers and a pin, as well as scarf. The tee-shirt was really cool and the name tags were nicely designed and very groovy. Lunch was great, and supplied by Whole Foods (sandwich, banana, granola bar, Green tea energy drink) and Legal Seafoods (chowdah, baby). Barismo was on hand pouring very nice coffee, first thing, and NERD had ample coffee machines all around (though, I must admit I was a bit flummoxed by them when I went to make my first cup of the day…). Another fun bit of serendipity was sitting next to Mike Susz at the opening remarks (we’d worked together last summer, briefly) and it was total happenstance that we sat next to one another. He presented this cool Ignite talk about using short codes.

Conclusion

Overall, I thought that WordCamp Boston was great, and I look forward to next year’s event. Even if a talk was slightly different than what I’d expected, there were tons of helpful little tidbits throughout each presentation: mentions of well built sites, helpful plugins, useful sites for video hosting, etc. etc.. That, in the end is the great benefit of these events — you are exposed to all of the little things that are said when folks convene and talk. I could certainly go look around and hunt and peck but it’s great to hear experts say “I use this for….” it distills and clarifies, and for that I’m stoked to have gone to WordCamp Boston. Well done!

Striding the sidelines

Last week, while watching the BCS game between The University of Alabama and the University of Texas I was slightly stunned at the way that the eventual winner, Alabama, came out in the second half. After dismantling the Longhorns in the first half, the Crimson Tide essentially came out and played so conservatively that they nearly ended up costing themselves the championship. I’m not sure why teams do this — it is an affliction I notice at the professional level as well and it’s frustrating, and kind of boring.

So, what it is my point?

I suppose I don’t really have one.

Then what’s the relationship to marketing and advertising?

Games, like jobs have a beginning, middle and end. One needs to start strong and one needs to finish strong. The second half of an important game, and the second half of an important job are no time to go conservative. I say keep the pedal down as long and as hard as you can until you finish the job. You got to where you are by behaving (playing) a certain way. Don’t change it, don’t fritter away the opportunity out of fear of losing because you just may.

What School Can Really Be.

At the beginning of December 2009 we launched a site for the Glen Urquhart School (GUS), a K-8 school on the North Shore of Boston. Their prior site was a lovely little Flash site which was easy to use from the point of view of the visitor but was challenging in terms of maintenance, and content updates. We pitched in early April 2009 and were awarded the job in the late spring. We handled IA, design, development and production on the job as well as some IT — we helped to migrate the school from one hosting provider to another and ensured seamless continuity for their email delivery as well as maintaining the functionality of legacy faculty sites running on a third party platform.

From a prosaic point of view the need to make maintenance and updates easier served as a primary driver behind the selection of WP. We spiced it up bit however by implementing WPMU in order to increase communication touch points between the school and the broader community of parents, students and interested visitors. So, while we take full advantage of WP’s CMS capabilities, we are also utilizing fully WP’s blogging capabilities to create a dynamic and changing body of content that reflects the life of the school and its community.

Another major factor in the decision to use WP was the fact that it is an open source platform with a robust community and resources supporting it. While exUrban, Inc.will provide support on an ongoing basis we are very comfortable stating (it was part of our pitch), and very up front about the fact that the school will not need us forever. As GUS grows more comfortable on the platform and experienced using WP, the school will eventually be able to mange this themselves — thus saving money over the life of the site.

Before jumping into some of the niftier aspects of the development of this job it’s important to mention how this site, and the platform on which it is built truly reflects the mission of the school. The school promotes hands-on learning, collaboration, and creative thinking based on participation in the arts as well as extensive involvement in community service programs (in addition to offering top-flight academics). What you see on the web is the result of a collaboration between the head of the school, Raymond Nance, and 3 very dedicated board members, Libby Delana, Steve Mushkin and Joe Hosler, who actively pushed for the adoption of WP and provided invaluable insight and support for the duration of the project. The end product is now a site that will grow and change according to the school’s needs and in which members of the community may participate and facilitate this growth. Already some parents with development experience are stepping forward to help create, and extend functionality.

One more thing to note about this site is that it was featured in the WordPress Showcase on December 18,2009 – something of which we are all proud and excited.

Home Page

The home page contains some nice features that highlight the variegated nature of the school and the things that go on  during the day. Whereas, the initial brief called for a an active, news magazine style interface, the final page is much more mellow, refined and open. Openness, above almost any other quality (though avoiding blog-like verticality was a close second) became a watchword for this project because the site needed to reflect that the school is an open place that does not impose limits on its students.

Custom built JQuery gallery update-able by custom fields, images hosted at Flickr

At the top of the page is a large image with three tabs. This feature enabled us to solve a couple of design issues as well as the underlying functional requirements for easy maintenance and update via custom fields. This is a custom built JQuery gallery. We wanted to be able to show more than one hero image and also work in the words “Knowledge, Creativity, Character” which is essentially the motto of the school. Clicking the tabs loads a new image. Making the navigation of the gallery user initiated removes sometimes grating rotating images, and also encourages exploration, and interaction. It is possible to add copy, and a link to each image to drive users into the site, it is currently off for launch, but can be reactivated should it be required (and will be manageable via custom fields as well). the images are all stored at the GUS Flickr account and updated via custom fields on the  edit page interface of the homepage.

Homepage: Calendar

Pulling a feed from Google Calendar to provide a slice of life at GUS

The homepage really revolves around the calendar in the middle of the page to demonstrate the vitality of the school on a day to day basis. An interesting thing to note about the calendar is that we are using open source PHP code developed by James Cridland to pull in content from Google Calendar which the school now uses to manage its events. In the month after launch we experienced some technical difficulties with the code exhausting its memory limits. We corrected it with backend work to run an hourly Cron job that essentially breaks the overflow that was occurring. One of the reasons for this, we believe, was heavier than expected traffic to the site as a result of being featured in the WP Showcase, and also the fact that the school calendar has over 2,500 events for the year. As with much of this site we pushed the platform and our tools to their limits to provide as flexible and useful a tool as possible.

Homepage: Blog & Social Media Links

Pulling in blog content to draw users deeper & highlighting social media outposts

Beneath the calendar is a feed from the school’s blog which is located in the Parents and Community section. The blog is being used now to replace a newsletter called The Tartan that the school published and delivered monthly. Now, rather than having one monthly download of school information the same content can be delivered fresh, as it happens, keeping it fresh and lively, and hopefully sticky. We pull in the first 350 or so characters as well as an image (using Attached Image to achieve the last bit) to entice the user to explore more.

On the bottom of the page we’ve included some links to some of the school’s social media outposts. At exUrban, Inc., we often talk about the notion of listening posts — places where people can find out about you, and interact with you without having to come to the site. Because of the importance that we place on these listening posts, and the ever-increasing necessity of organizations to use and adopt social media, we’ve placed the GUS social sites on the homepage, making them easy to find and hopefully follow. The adoption and use of various social media platforms was a major driver behind the evolution of the site, and selection of WP. We are using FaceBook, Flickr and Vimeo (Twitter will be added soon) to extend GUS’s footprint and give interested parents, students and potential parents and students other venues in which to connect and interact with GUS.

Utility Navs

Easy updates, edits to utility navs

The final features to point out are the header and footer utility navs. They are all editable as their own pages and taking advantage of WP functions they appear dynamically up top or in the footer (depending on the parent) and do not require any coding to the header or footer files — again, we strove to make this site as easy as possible to update for the users.

Section Pages

Featured Pages on a GUS Section Page

On the second level of pages on the site we created a section page to contextualize the content within and also to highlight some features of the section. We created three buckets at the bottom of each of these pages to act as the highlight section. They pull their title from their target page and  a custom blurb can be created as well as an image. All of this is controlled via custom fields and therefore very easily updated by the users.

Inside Our Classrooms

Easily updateable sidebars on Class pages

Inside the classroom uses a custom template with sidebar on each class page. While we strove to keep away from blog-like verticality, we did alter design here a bit to take advantage of WP sidebar functionality. The sidebar on these pages, in this section, enables deeper levels of content, and also a different way to show the diversity of the classroom experience on a grade-by-grade basis. The teachers will ultimately control these pages (or at least the sidebar) and the sidebar affords them the opportunity to quickly and easily  update content as their classes begin studying new subjects etc. We created a feature to enable easy updates. All of the content beneath “Happening @ GUS” is drawn from a child page of the class page. Teachers can place almost any content they want into this page — be it prose, graphical or video. This feature enables easy updates to encourage frequent changes, therefore always keeping the content fresh. The sidebars also accept standard WP plugins and we are currently populating them with quotes from faculty that we are placing into the Plugin Stray Random Quote.

Showing the parent child relationship for sidebar content updates

Calendars

The GUS events Calendar

One of the features that we wanted to maintain on the site was a calendar function. Before the redesign the school linked to a calendar outside of the school and we integrated it into the school to help create a more seamless experience. We utilized google Calendar, and while we pull in an overarching calendar into the home page and also link to it on the events page, we set up a custom field to pull in other calendars, such as athletics schedules so that people can get the info they need in logical places. We helped to create the event creation and editing process that enables this functionality and ensures that the events appear in the correct calendars. The calendar functionality will be expanded and usable on the teachers’ pages (they will also have the option of using a WP plugin calendar as well as the faculty sites come online). One of the challenges we faced on this aspect of the job was that during production WP changed the way that it handled iframes — it stopped accepting them. The custom field was a solution to that issue and we now bounce the calendars in as needed. In the future it would be wonderful to be able to better skin the Google Calendar (which is an awesome tool). This lack of skin-ability is somewhat disappointing.

The Future

In conclusion, the GUS site is a very flexible and ever changing entity. We are convinced that the platform will grow as need be and have already started to make updates and changes to the site to accommodate the school’s needs and adapt to feedback which has been very positive. At its core  we believe that the site, and the process we undertook to create it truly reflect the core values of the school. While Conor Feely did the design and Joel Oliveira did the build the finished project represents a collaborative effort on the part of many people to make it a reality. We got our hands dirty, pushed the platform and our understanding of site development and marketing into some new spaces to create what we believe is a unique and remarkable site that fits the client’s business needs (flexible, manageable, easy to update web presence),  and sets it apart form other schools in the area.

My roots lie in online marketing and advertising. I’ve produced banner ads and email campaigns of every stripe. Expanding ads, HTML ads, ads with video, ads with links to 17 downloadable assets (white papers, case studies etc.), info capture ads, Flash, animated GIFs… You name it, I’ve produced it. Many look askance at the online banner ad, but I argue it’s because folks haven’t imagined how to use them in a creative and interesting fashion. This is why the WalMart ad to the left did my old advertising-producer-heart so good.

This type of ad is not new per se. Expanding deal ads have been around for years (CVS used to use them pretty well) but it’s nice to see a retailer of WalMart’s size and reach using these types of ads and paying for placement on the front page of boston.com. I don’t know the efficacy of these ads — that’s between the advertiser, their media shop and the publishers — but I’d have to say that there must be some positive results, or at least a curiosity about the results that spurred this buy. All throughout 2009 I kept reading about how the online ad is dead, but given the prevalence of ads for major companies on major sites I’d have to question that.

In my experience, the big advertisers don’t continue to spend on ads that don’t generate, if not revenue, then some sort of desired metric such as interactions, acquisitions etc. Perhaps the OLA-Cassandras should look at how ads are used. I agree, the sub-30 second animated ad with “learn more” call to action are not useful. Ads that provide a platform to users to gain valuable information on some topic of import are the way to go. We used to deliver expanding ads to IT decision makers on niche sites where they congregated seeking information. We loaded our ads with white papers, case studies and data sheets, and gave them away for free, and we never expected them to visit our site. They did, frequently (we could track it) and our client spent ever more each year on this type of campaign across various lines of business — it was good for them and it as good for us.

As far as I’m concerned, the types of ads that we produced, and the type of ad represented by this WalMart ad are very much in keeping with the ethos of the web 2.0 world: share your knowledge, give it away and develop a relationship. Treat the online ad as an outpost to your main site — one more touch point from which to reach your desired target and provide value to them. With effective (media) planing, (creative & strategic) forethought, and a willingness to test and learn, online advertising should, and still can be an effective tool. Long live online advertising.

A quick video about updating a plugin. There’s not much to say about it, it’s quite easy, but I wanted to cover the spectrum of plugins from installing, to updating. This is the last in the plugins series for a bit.

View the video in a nifty popup (use the expand button to see it larger).

The second part of the install video is actually more about Google and getting API codes, but there are some plugins that require the use of an API key so that you hook into third party sites and use their functionality, such as Google Maps (the example in this video) as well as Flickr etc. So, the example of getting the Google Maps API Key can serve as a model should you need to get one for a plugin that you are using, or want to use.

View the video in a nifty popup (use the expand button to see it larger).

I’m taking a little break from the videos about  posts etc. and putting out a video about installing plugins. This is the first in a two part series about installing plugins (the second involves acquiring an API Key to enable the plugin to work — something that’s fairly common, and not difficult to do). Later, I’ll post a video about updating plugins.

I demonstrate the install from within the WordPress admin interface because this is a video series for the novice and I’m not sure that novices want to get involved with FTP. It’s not hard to install via FTP, but, by and large, most people’s installs of WordPress will permit them to install via the admin tool. It’s quite simple, as the video will, hopefully, demonstrate. As always, please send me your feedback.

View the video in a nifty popup (use the expand button to see it larger).