Blind Acre Media

For a large corporation like Paul Mitchell Schools, we knew that the most important tool we could offer was an organized website infrastructure. Through placing each individual school under one roof (the corporate site), we have been able to increase both intra-communication between corporate and each school, as well as external communication with the end user.

This has helped substantially within our Interactive Branding efforts for The Schools. With the umbrella structure, each school’s site contributes to the overall link building and brand growth. The corporate Paul Mitchell Schools site reinforces each individual school’s web ranking, and vice versa. As a result, the ranking of Paul Mitchell Schools increased four-fold.

We have also helped contribute to marketing efforts for Paul Mitchell Schools through Search Engine Marketing (SEM). This consists of creating paid advertisements, based extensive research of the top keywords. We then bid on the highest ranking keywords to provide the best converting user traffic to their website.

We have also offered social media webinars to help each school increase brand awareness and become more connected to potential students and additional resources to aid in overall growth. Our webinars teach each school how to set up, monitor and manage social media pages. For Paul Mitchell Schools as well as all of our clients, our goal is to make web management and communication as simple as possible, without neglecting pertinent resources.

In line with our goals at Blind Acre, we have committed to continually updating and fine tuning information flow for various media. As with Paul Mitchell, we want to ensure that you are always in touch with your potential clients, and they can reach you with ease.

Today at 9 am, our parking attendant looked like she was dancing around her booth, jumping up and down, swinging her arms wildly. As I moved closer, I realized she was working out. At first, I thought that was just strange. Then I considered what it would be like to sit in a small parking attendant booth all day, with merely windows and a chair. I was instantly inspired. I quickly came to the conclusion that although she did not have the most glamorous job, she made the most of it.

At BAM, we try to do the same, even though our push-up competitions usually take place on Fridays. The principle of contributing our best efforts for the time we are given here reminded me of our Think Different group, and how it helps us both today and in planning for the future. In the group, we brainstorm ideas for improving current projects, and conjure new business opportunities. This process allows us to have alternate revenue generating ventures, securing the success of Blind Acre beyond web development for our clients.

Think Different is our version of a ‘think tank’ with a twist. Anyone from our office can submit ideas, enabling an open flow of input. We believe great ideas can come from anywhere, with even the most obtuse plan becoming our next big thing. After someone submits an idea, the group evaluates it based on a variety of factors; time, cost-effectiveness, research and development and overall profitability being a few.

With its inception only two months ago, we are actively pursuing the best and most inventive ideas for our growth, as well as our clients. It is not about the quantity of ideas, but the quality. Only two months ago, we came up with the idea to start this project. Although we may not be doing P90x in a parking attendant booth, we are expanding our horizons to reach our best, both individually, and as a team.

Back in the old print days, writers were highly trained and plentiful. They covered everything from big news, to entertainment, sports and local events. With the glorious entrance of the internet, and birth of the blog, it became more and more difficult to distinguish who was a ‘real’ writer, and who just wanted to be heard. With these blurring lines and the decline of print advertising, mass content found a new home.

Although there is a great deal of content out there, many companies have been neglecting their need for the basics. Explanatory sentences, introductory paragraphs and additional content pages have been lacking. On many sites, the absence of content makes it harder for clients to connect to the company, because they need to go to sites like Wikipedia for additional information. A bulleted list of services and solo headlines are not going to cut it anymore.

For example, assume I want to get my teeth whitened, and visited the website of a dentist who specialized in a new and quicker laser technology. All that is listed on his website is the name of the laser. I want to know how long it takes, whether there is tooth sensitivity, how long it lasts and how much it costs. I don’t want to have to sift through the haystack to find out basic information this website should have. It is all about being customer-driven.

As an online culture seeded in ‘knowing,’ we appreciate a journalistic approach to web content. We want to know the who, what, where, why, how; and we would like it in a succinct grouping of words that are clear and understandable. We want organized, short paragraphs with proper spacing. We like reading blogs if they are well-written, and give us interesting take-aways.

What your company writes online could make a huge difference in the overall traffic to your website.  Journalists may have been written off by the perpetually declining newspaper industry, but can be particularly useful in the vast sea of ‘wannabe’ bloggers.

The ‘Chinese Wall‘ separating the desire to inform and the desire to persuade is crumbling more rapidly online than in print. This puts every company in the position to take hold of it and develop content, or let the opportunity slip through their fingers. This form of strategic advertising encompasses more than just viral e-mails and targeted placement. We are entering an age of advertorials, stealth user reviews, SEO copywriting and better online content.

This logical progression makes it even more important for your company to have more than just half-ass, thrown together blog posts, press releases and content pages. Your written content is part of your image, and even more online, part of your reputation. Spelling errors and ill-worded run on sentences will be judged along with the services you offer. We as users look for competency, and your content will tell us a great deal.

Blind Acre has seen the benefit of being able to provide our clients with quality content. If you are not a writer at heart, you can always hire us…or one of the thousands of laid-off journalists serving tables right now. Don’t neglect your website.

In the past, the word ‘Harvest’ always reminded me of Thanksgiving. Food, family, good friends and company!  Ahhhhh.

Unfortunately, now, when I hear the word Harvest, I think of our new time tracking system.  What a downer!

Ok, everyone who likes keeping track of their time yell, “I do!”

Did you hear that?  Deaf silence.  Let’s face it, nobody likes keeping track of their time.  So, why is it so important?

In any business that produces something, whether that be a house, a widget, a piece of software, or in our case, interactive media products; it is critical to know how much it costs to make. In accounting terms, this is called Cost of Goods Sold (COGS). This cost is particularly important to consider when you have multiple projects and various phases of each product.

In determining the true cost of a product or COGS, you may want to ask yourself these questions: Is this product really profitable?  Should we continue to make it?  Should the individual making this product be working on it, or is their skill set better at something else?  Is this product, or portion of this product, something we should continue to make in-house, or outsource? The list goes on and on.

In fact, my best evaluation tool for the financial performance of our company is detailed time tracking. This tool provides more accurate estimates of how long a product will take to produce, and accordingly, how much profit can be gained. Underestimations will lead to less profitability, and overestimations may alienate clients. Additionally, we use time tracking to categorize the products we make into the most and least profitable per hour spent. This is a tool is essential to track how we are doing now, and how to plan for the future. Without it, I simply cannot do my job.

My job is to make this company more profitable, and to do that, I need the compliance of my staff. So, what is the incentive for the one who has to deal with the egregious daily task of detailed time tracking?  Their incentive: Profit.

• Profit allows us to put a retirement plan into place and match 3% of your contribution.
• Profit allows us to add other benefits for you and your family.
• Profit allows us to say, “Hey, it’s Friday!  Let’s cut out early and go grab a beer.”
• Profit allows us to purchase new chairs and desks and perhaps a nicer office space.
• Profit pays for the party at Christmas time.
• Profit allows us to increase your salary, or pay bonuses.

Need I say more?

To maintain professional in the workplace, most managers and employees have traditionally  kept their business and personal lives separate. With the introduction and popularity of new technologies such as Facebook, this task has become substantially more difficult.

There are several logical reasons why a manager would want to distance themselves from their employees personal lives. Managers absolutely need to keep a ‘business first’ relationship with their employees, regardless of how close of friends they may be. At the end of the day, friends or not, a manger needs to do their job, by pulling the trigger on a tough decisions that may arise  with their employees (such as discipline or termination).

Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, once said, “removing people will always be the hardest decision a leader faces. Anyone who enjoys doing it shouldn’t be on the payroll, and neither should anyone who can’t do it.”  Being good friends with an employee will make this decision that much more difficult for any manager. This is why some managers avoid getting overly involved with employees lives outside of work.

Additionally, managers must also ensure that their status of an authoritative figure remains intact.  The respect that an employee has for a manager can be forever tarnished by that manager having one too many cocktails during a casual after-work happy hour or holiday party. Managers always endure a high risk of others witnessing them acting in an embarrassing manner outside of work, most especially if alcohol is involved.

Employees, on the other hand, have their own reasons to keep their work and personal lives separate. Like managers, employees too must attempt to portray a professional persona, especially during after-business-hour events where managers may be present.  An employee who makes a complete fool of themselves outside of work in the presence of a manager, may miss out on various opportunities, including promotions.

All of these aforementioned challenges have only been amplified by Facebook.  Facebook allows embarrassing moments from our personal lives to be documented online in a highly transparent, single location. As the Facebook medium becomes more accepted, it can enable non-work related interaction between employer and employee, 24/7.

Everyone in the workplace now has to monitor not only their behavior outside of work that may be captured on Facebook, but their own posts and behaviors online!  On top of that, both need to monitor the online behavior of their friends to ensure their actions do not produce detrimental consequences. ( For example, posting something embarrassing on their Facebook wall or tagging an embarrassing photo of them.  In fact, there is an entire website devoted to embarrassing social blunders on Facebook that can be found here).

This also holds true for job-seeking individuals whose Facebook profile may be investigated by potential employers. Sadly, having a provocative Facebook profile picture may be the difference in landing your dream job or not!

Facebook has done a lot to enhance their privacy settings so that users can dictate who views what on their profile, but business professionals must extra careful of their presence on social media networks.

Character is what one is; reputation is what one is thought to be by others.

What is your company’s reputation when it comes to customer service?  Provide great customer service and the referrals will come in quickly; upset a client and as quickly as the business came in the door, it can leave.   Remember, an individual is most likely to do business with a company that someone speaks highly of.  Word of mouth can be your best form of advertising.

Customer service isn’t just about asking “how did we do” or “how can I help?”   It is essential to develop a plan of action that is tailored to your customer’s wants and needs.  Gather information from your clients that will allow you to better service them.  An important part of good customer service is to be proactive not reactive to an issue or concern.  Offering a great suggestion or idea that can help grow their business will set your company apart from the competition.

A high number of business owners are looking into the possibility of blogging as a form of marketing for their business. However, since most businesses take place offline there is a concern as to if the time put into blogging will have a positive impact for the business. The thing to remember about a blog is that it is, in essence, a platform for communication and community building.

The importance of communication in marketing is not anything new. Offline businesses have done direct mailings for years, so the idea of providing routine, free information and using it as a promotional vehicle is likely not news to anybody. However, the idea of building a community around your business is a newer concept. It is a concept that really has not come about until social media began taking off and people started realizing the power of conversation to build “buzz”. You can use a blog to build a mailing list and to invite comments from your readers.  And, by using the blog to form a two-way communication platform with your followers, you are developing a relationship which turns them into a potential customer for your business.

Blogs offer your offline business a worldwide audience. You can publish information and disperse it to a lot of people for free. So, can a blog be useful for online Marketing? Absolutely.  In this day and age, any business website which is completely static could be considered by many a waste. Therefore, it is important to set up a blog on your business’s website.

Traditional business owners probably don’t realize just how much they would out-do their competition if they would invest to increase their internet presence and build relationships using social media. You could increase the brand awareness and revenue tremendously because most businesses have no idea of the power of the internet for their business or how to go about increasing their online presence.

In the web and print design industry proper tool selection and proficient usage can make or break your productivity; be it a computer that’s fast enough with a large enough screen, a high-quality large format printer, an appropriate design software suite, or your choice of input devices such as keyboards and mice. In this review we’re looking at mice…or more specifically, the Wacom Intuos4 Pen Tablet.

Analogically speaking, a pen tablet is to a mouse as an 18 wheeler is to a Radio Flyer wagon.

[For those of you who are not in the industry or are otherwise not aware of what a pen tablet is, I suggest you read this before reading any more or else you will be SO lost.]

About 8 years ago I got my first pen tablet as a Christmas present. It was a Wacom Intuos2 and it totally changed my workflow and the way I designed and interacted with my computer. Around 3 years after that I upgraded to an Intuos3 that had a wide-screen aspect ratio and nifty customizable buttons and touch-sensitive scrolling pads. About two weeks ago I was privileged enough for upgrade my Wacom Intuos3 with a new Intuos4.

 

 

 

The biggest difference between my old Intuos3 and the new Intuos4 is size. There’s about a 2″ diagonal size difference in the canvas area. The was a little jarring at first because of the muscle memory I built up over the last few years using a smaller device. I found I had to make much large arm and hand gestures to reach certain points of my screen, but that’s more of a preference than anything. The truth of the matter is that the larger surface area creates more precise movements when illustrating.

Now, let’s talk new features.

The Intuos4 has 8 customizable buttons with coinciding LED displays that label the buttons with their function. This is something that was SORELY missing on the previous models. The Intuos3 did have 8 customizable buttons, but no way to know which one does which aside from memorization.

 

Now, there is a downside to this. As cool as it is to have customizable buttons and LED displays, anyone who’s been in the industry for more than a year should proficient knowledge and muscle memory or key commands in certain applications like the Adobe Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, InDesign, etc). Out of the box I customized all of the buttons and tried to FORCE myself to use them but my keyboard muscle memory was to strong to overcome. So, in order to not let the buttons and the LED displays go to waste, I drew an ASCII cat who’s name is Mr. Bluefacé.

 

 

 

Between the two sets of buttons in a scroll wheel. This is similar to the scroll bars on the Intuos3 in that it is touch sensitive and has no moving parts. However, when it comes to scrolling it’s more glaring improvement is that it’s in fact a circle instead of a vertical bar. This allows for a constant movement to scroll instead of repetitive swipes of your finger. Inside the scroll “wheel” is a push button with 4 different settings. Each setting makes the scroll wheel act differently. Examples may be scrolling in Firefox, zooming in Illustrator, switching between layers in Photoshop, etc. One negative about how this works is that they reverted back to their old ways in that there isn’t a way to label each setting; the settings are determined by a single blue LED dot instead of actual text.

Let’s move away from the funky electronic features and start discussing the canvas area.

As noted previously the canvas on this model is about 2″ larger than the previous model which allows for more precise gesturing and detail work.

Wacom also totally changed the texture of the canvas mat by giving it..well..more texture. This creates a totally different feel when using the pen than on previous models. It now feels much more like pencil on paper than it did previously even with the standard plastic pen nib. One downside of the new canvas mat is that the texture clings on to dirt. It’s harder to keep clean and after a while you can actually feel dirt rolling around under your hand. Also, finger prints are much harder to clean off. Though this point hasn’t yet been proven by me, I would also venture to guess that the increase in texture on the mat will mean that I’ll be burning through pen nibs much quicker than before.

On the topic of nibs, the new tablet comes with the same set of nibs that the Intuos3 came with; a bunch of standard plastic nibs, 3 felt nibs, and 1 spring-loaded nib. There is one new addition to the set though, a nib with a little rubber or foam (haven’t figured it out) tipped nib that makes the pen’s feel like you’re using a big magic marker.

Perhaps one of the best improvements to the Intuos4 is probably the simplest. There’s finally a place to store your spare nibs, actually INSIDE the pen holder!

 

There’s a few other minor features but in a nut-shell, that’s the Intuos4. I love it and couldn’t design without it.

PS: Oh yeah, it comes with a mouse too if you ever feel like lowering your efficiency.

One of the holy grails in modern web development is separation of content and presentation. This is often understood to mean a separation of HTML and CSS, but it goes deeper than that. In order to take full advantage of the concept, first we need to understand the difference between semantic and presentational markup in HTML. Semantic markup describes the purpose of content, while presentational markup describes how it is rendered on the page. For an example of the difference, let’s take a look at two methods of displaying a header on a web page.

A semantic approach:

<h1>My Page Title</h1>

The h1 tag identifies this element as a top-level header, but does not dictate how headers should be displayed (font size, color, etc.). The presentation rules can then be controlled in a linked stylesheet instead of inside the HTML.

A presentational approach:

<font size="24" color="black">My Page Title</font>

The font tag dictates how the element should be displayed, but does not identify what part of the document the element is (a header, a subheader, a paragraph, etc.). If we want to change the way headers are displayed, we need to change the font attributes for every header on every page of the site.

Keep in mind, however, that writing semantic HTML means more than just moving presentation to CSS. Consider the following:

<div class="header">My Page Title</div>

This approach lets us separate content from presentation, since we can control the .header style in CSS; but it’s less useful to any software that might make use of the document, since the software would be more likely to look for a primary header in a standard h1 element than a div.header element.

Benefits of Semantic HTML

• Semantic markup makes it easier to control layouts. Presentational rules can be delegated to linked stylesheets, minimizing the need to modify the documents themselves.
• It promotes interoperability. Semantic markup allows programs to share, analyze, and process documents more effectively. Modern web developers need to be concerned with more than how the pages look in a browser. We need to consider how well spiders, aggregators, and other applications can make use of our content.
• Semantic markup is good for SEO. Content in an h1 element provides a hint about the document’s primary topic, which can help search engines determine how it should be categorized.

The Microformats web site provides useful information about semantic HTML and a list of semantic elements.

Having Problems Copy/Pasting to CKEditor?

First, what is CKEditor? CKEditor, formerly FCKeditor, is an open source WYSIWYG text editor (WYSIWYG, pronounced [wiz-ee-wig], is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get) from CKSource that can be used in web pages. It aims to be lightweight and requires no client-side installation. The first version was released in 2003. –Wiki

The CKEditor allows administrators of a web site to easily make content changes without having to know coding languages. (Note: CKEditor is not the only WYSIWYG text editor out there, but serves as a good example.) An issue that we have run into is that our end users are having problems seeing the content they entered. That is a big problem considering that this is the main purpose of the tool. We found that our users were having this problem when they were copy/pasting from Microsoft Word. Here is an example: I copied and pasted the first paragraph of this entry into the CKEditor straight from Word.

Now after I saved this entry this is what the page shows…

It shows a few hundred lines of this, then, shows the actual text from the first paragraph. What is all this code? It is the XML data related to the Word file. (XML- Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents electronically. –Wiki ) The XML data contains the code for things like the font style, font size, margins, meta data, style definitions, etc.

So, let’s talk solutions!

There are many ways to solve this issue. The least creative non-technical method would be to manually type your content rather than using the copy/paste method, but who has time for that? A better non-technical approach would be to change the word processor you are using. The best thing to use is a text-only or plain text editor such as Notepad, which is included in all versions of Microsoft Windows since 1.0. One thing to note is that plain text editors do not include features like spell check, so be sure to proof your pasting!

Now, let’s get a little more technical. CKEditor, in the newest version 3.1, has a “paste from word” button. This feature, theoretically, should strip the xml data when you copy and paste from Word. The feature does work, but there is some inconsistency in how this feature performs. Thus, we chose to exclude it from our application of CKEditor on our client websites. Other WYSIWYG text editors have plug-ins available that can be downloaded that perform the function of stripping the xml data. But again, there is inconsistency in how they perform. Most of the buzz around this issue suggests that CKEditor should automatically detect content formatted from Word and strip it. No editor has implemented this feature into the editor itself… yet.