upprdwnr // 3.17.10
Having a Web site is no longer enough // 1.3.10
If you gave a potential client a business card in 1996 and it had a Web site listed on it, you were legit. The general consensus would have been your business was on the cutting edge, and it was pushing towards the future. By the early 2000s, if you didn’t have a Web site, you were already years behind. I can’t remember the last time I heard a client say, “Well, we’ve been around for about ten years, we think it’s time for a Web site.”
Those days are long gone; the whole world has a Web site. Netcraft is reporting that as of 2009, the Web now has over 233 million Web sites. So what now? If you already have a Web site, how do you make it better? Redesign it? That ship sailed years ago. We are well past the days of having difficulty finding a company to give you a good looking site; there’s one on every corner. The landscape has changed, and the RFPs we respond to focus all of our attention on strategy. We no longer talk to clients about just their Web site, but instead their Web presence.
So what is Web presence? In a sense, your company’s Web presence covers every single point of mention on the Web. This includes not only what you produce, but also what others produce for you. Between Twitter, Facebook Facebook test ( 
-2 | 102 ) blogs and all of the other avenues of user communication, your Web presence may have grown without you even knowing it.
All of this information is out there, so why not use it to your advantage? Social media allows you to surface this content on your Web site. Let’s say you go to search.twitter.com and search for your company’s name. The results show that there are lots of tweets relating to your company, most positive, some negative, and a few questions from users looking for help. All of this can be used to your advantage.
You can take the search results and surface them on your site. Now when users come to your site they see the good tweets about you! But what about the negative tweets? Well, sign up for a Twitter account and respond to them directly in an effort to change the users’ perspective. More companies are doing things like this every day to create transparency. And for those asking questions, you can respond directly to inquiries. Now your site shows positive tweets, how you respond to the few negative tweets, and how you answer users’ questions.
What other ways can you grow your Web presence?
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Brighton // 12.1.09
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Nike does it again // 9.14.09
It always seems that every Nike campaign and accompanying commercial is more impressive than the last. To be honest, I’m a homer for Nike. They are my favorite sports brand as far as the equipment I use, so maybe my thoughts are biased. But products aside, there marketing is simply amazing. As far back as I can remember Air Jordan promos, to the most current Adrian Peterson Combat Pro ad, I always seem to be amazed.
The latest Nike Pro ad:
From the video, graphics, and audio, this promotion is just awesome. I worked in TV for a few years, so I really love top-notch graphics and well directed video.
There is something to be said that your branding is so strong, that you can have promotions like that are this strong, while having no VO, no product mention or no features or product attributes. But still, you can be put in that scenario, and you still have to deliver. Nike better than any company I know of, does a great job of selling simply by being “cool”.
Nike brass does a great job of not only perfectly knowing theit product, but also perfectly knowing their target demographic. In the past ten years, they have not only to continued to dominate sports they have always dominated, but they have slowly bled into sports they once had a smaller stake in. This example uses football as the market that Nike has grown it’s market share in.
As of late Under Armour has made a major move towards Nike in football especially. They also really know their product and market well, but they take a different tact. Nike employs a more sophisticated style while Under Armor employs a very “pump-up” tactic. Both work very well, but I have more respect for the Nike promos as they stretch the creativity further.
Again, kudos to the Nike brass for allowing their agencies of record to take the chances they do and providing us with market leading campaigns.
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Wordpress pagination for the current category // 8.23.09
Wordpress delivers a out-of-the-box pagination that is built into most themes. It allows the user to cycle through “previous” and “next” articles posted on the blog. But often, you may want to cycle through article posted just within that category, not the entire blog. This can easily be done with a small mod to the out-of-the-box pagination.
Here is the out-of-the-box code for pagination:
<div class="navigation">
<div class="alignleft"><?php previous_post_link('« %link') ?></div>
<div class="alignright"><?php next_post_link('%link »') ?></div>
</div>
If you want this to navigate through posts within the category of the current post simply change it to this:
<div class="navigation">
<div class="alignleft"><?php previous_post_link('« %link', '%title', 'true') ?></div>
<div class="alignright"><?php next_post_link('%link » ', '%title', 'true'); ?></div>
</div>
You can see that the “previous_post_link” and “next_post_link” stay there so the action is the same, but you can see that there are some added parameters here. Wordpress default usage of this function is this:
<?php previous_post_link('format', 'link', in_same_cat, 'excluded_categories '); ?>
As you can see, this allows you to set a boolean value of ‘true’ or ‘false’ for the in_same_cat. In our example, we just set that to true, and the pagination becomes centralized to the current category. You can also leave the boolean set to true, and use the excluded_categories to add a string value of categories to not be included in the pagination.
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