Archive for Marketing
Posted by Ryan on October 8, 2008 at 4:42 pm · Filed under Marketing, Web
Every Web site has a purpose. Yours may have more than one.
Your Web site is a collection of possible types of content and applications. The purpose of your site can be identified by thinking about your main business objectives and answering a couple of key questions:
- What are you trying to accomplish on the site?
- Why are customers coming to your website?
Let’s walk through a couple of examples. If your main goal is to achieve and maintain customer satisfaction, your site is likely a Support site. If however, your main objective is to enable the direct sale of products and services, then your site is likely a Commerce site.
Web Purposes will help those of you in the web space measure the business value of your activities vis-à-vis your business objectives and facilitate tracking of your site’s success metrics.
Review the following Web Purposes to see which apply to your Web site.
- Ad Revenue
- Commerce
- Community
- Extension of Product
- Marketing Communications
- Public Relations
- Self-Service / Support
- Subscription
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Ryan on August 8, 2008 at 11:07 am · Filed under Design, Marketing, Web, experience, user experience
You’ve all seen them before on your mail and packages. They are starting to turn up all over the place. It’s also becoming a much more complicated landscape. There are more and more types of two-dimensional matrix barcode appearing all the time. The majority of them are consisting of black and white square modules arranged in either a square or rectangular pattern, which gives them that television static look. They are however no longer limited to just black & white or square in shape. There are others that look more like crop circles, some that actually have pictures in them and some based on color triangles.
Microsoft has introduced their own version that they call the High Capacity Color Barcode. This version has both a 4 color and 8 color version that offer a much more data storage.
An interesting aspect to the High Capacity Color Barcode is that is supports RSA signatures. With it’s long list of features and data density it’s your best option for actually storing information that needs to be physically printed on a surface. The only challenge with Microsoft’s solution is that there isn’t any easy way to use them yet. As of this time there are no public readers available for cell phones or online.
However with today’s always online technology and readers based in cellphone, I’m personally interested in ShotCode’s solution. They are focusing on mobile tagging that work sort of like a TinyURL in that they only contain a link to a URL. To use a ShotCode you can use generate one for free on their site. To decode you can Download a ShotCode mobile barcode reader from their site or choose from a few option for the iPhone from the App store.
It’s interesting to see how these codes are starting to take off in general use. The site Semapedia is all about creating links between real world objects and Wikipedia. On their site you can enter in the Wikipedia URLs and create a DIY printable sticker sheet, that you can then go and tag objects with. Everyone should go and create some and stick them on stuff.
The QR Codes seem to have become the most used in advertising right now thanks to their success in Japan. It’s the code that I myself have noticed more and more in public spaces and adds.
So which one is the best? For me it’s the one that is easiest and cheapest to create and scan back in. For that I’m leaning on the QR Code at the top of the list followed by DataMatrix and the ShotCode. I’m interested in using the HCCB, but will have to wait.
Here’s a little sample of some of the matrix codes I could find:
Posted by Ryan on May 7, 2008 at 3:51 pm · Filed under Internet, Marketing, Web, experience
I found this ad today while doing a little research about Microsoft’s SharePoint Server
I very much like the juxtaposition of Mary Kay “Enriching Women’s Lives” and Grand Theft Auto.
It’s pure magic.
I wouldn’t have guessed that this ad was a good idea on this page as it is. Let alone the conflict that occurs with the featured quote author.
I’m just saying.
Posted by Ryan on February 14, 2008 at 1:33 pm · Filed under Design, Marketing, Web
I worked on a little Silverlight Valentine’s day e-card for Microsoft. The original card design was going to be a bit more, but we had some time constraints to deal with. Overall, it’s a simple application. The meat of the developement work was done by the talented folks at Aeshen.
I would like to go back and really rework the concept more, but you know, I like to make code and design perfect and the real world demands that stuff ships on time. Enjoy. I hope everyone has a wonderful Valentine’s day.
xoxo
Ryan
Posted by Ryan on November 23, 2005 at 1:51 pm · Filed under Internet, Marketing, Web
Gap.com is temporarily closed. I find this interesting that a major online retailer would choose to go offline instead of some sort of better organized roll out of new services. They must be losing money like crazy. If I had suggested that this was an expectable solution on any of my e-commerce site I’ve managed I think I would have been fired.
Posted by Ryan on November 21, 2005 at 11:20 am · Filed under Marketing, Web
This article in the New York Times talks about how Wal-Mart is testing out selling high end products and testing electronics on their e-comm site. As much as I dislike Wal-Marts overall business stragegy, I think they are pretty smart here. Testing products online first and limiting their speciality products online only makes their e-commerce site an entirely new element. Since Wal-Mart is everywhere it doesn’t make sense to just sell the same stuff.
Posted by Ryan on November 17, 2005 at 10:12 pm · Filed under Internet, Marketing, User Interface, Web
I usually like to watch the latest movie trailer once it’s online. I have noticed though that over time they’ve become more and more annoying. They don’t design the downloadable video to be, well, download friendly. The file sizes tend to be much bigger then they need to be and they often have a lot of wasted information in them. Take this Superman Returns trailer for example. There is a rating message, and three logo splashes along with music and audio before I get to any of the visual I want to see. In fact these take up almost half of the download.
What I’d like to see is a video that cuts to the chase. My bandwidth and time are worth something to me. I don’t like waiting for a video and it’s even less fun if it starts playing only to show logos and then stop and wait again. I’m not sure what happened to video streaming. It really seems to be something that’s just not done anymore. Now it’s all downloads instead.
