We’re proud to be co-sponsoring DrupalCamp Austin 2009!

This will surely be a cool event this upcoming Saturday and Sunday, dedicated to timely topics of development, design, and business by and for the local Drupal community.  (Note the ENTERMEDIA room where all the Design and Business track sessions will be held.)

Our own Nick Lewis will be presenting on the topic of Building Amazing Interfaces with Drupal & jQuery UI.  Oh yes.

We hope we’ll see you there. Register here!

The facts:

Who?

• Drupal Gurus and Newbies!
  
• Drupal users, developers, designers and decision makers. It’s where community ties are strengthened and Drupal’s future is decided.

What?

• DrupalCamp!
  
• Where some of the best developers and leading business owners cross paths, exchange ideas, find partners and conceive projects.

Where?

• Norris Conference Center!
  
• Three large meeting rooms for speaker sessions, keynotes, and BoFs. Located at Northcross Center (Anderson Ln. and Burnet Rd.).

Why?

• 20 sessions (10 each day)
• Two keynotes (one each day)
• Session tracks include: development, design, and business
• Dedicated Birds of a Feather (BoF) space
• Breakfast and lunch are included each day

Smashing Magazine does it right once again…a great resource for spies like us…

>> Call to Action Buttons:  Examples and Best Practices

Call to action in web design — and in user experience (UX) in particular — is a term used for elements in a web page that solicit an action from the user. The most popular manifestation of call to action in web interfaces comes in the form of clickable buttons that when clicked, perform an action (e.g. “Buy this now!”) or lead to a web page with additional information (e.g. “Learn more…”) that asks the user to take action.

AustinontheRocks.com is live!  This brand new website is all about serving up search results for local happy hour and food/drink specials based on user submitted criteria.

Say you want to find a bar in North Austin that has a nice patio, beer and wine specials this Thursday night, a big TV to watch the big game, is “date worthy’, and allows a dog.  Austin on the Rocks will deliver the skinny.  (It won’t buy you a pitcher, root for your team, find you a date, or walk your dog.)  This unique site actually caters to Austin bar-goers and Austin bar/restaurant-proprietors alike, because it matches up the perfect customer with the perfect local food and drink establishment.  Bars can control and update their own entries on the site, too.  Design cues are simple, clean, and easy to navigate, so the user experience is smooth.

From concept to creation, ENTERMEDIA made it happen for this start up custom application-based web business built in Cake, including:

• brand and online strategy consulting
• creating the cool logo
• designing all interface and admin layers
• sussing out important content strategy and user-experience decisions
• setting up a database design that will allow Austin on the Rocks to scale gracefully

Our fantastic client Cathi Rustmann and her daughter Taylore Cunningham are the one-two punch signing up the hippest bars all over Austin to be a part of this.  Cathi and Taylore have big plans in store for Austin on the Rocks and really perform a great FREE service to local folks who want to find the best food and drink specials in town. Be sure to follow AusontheRocks on Twitter and become their facebook fan:  you’ll hear about unadvertised food/drink specials and “get ‘em while they last” promotions you won’t want to miss.  Cheers!

One of our all time favorite clients is Ausley Algert Robertson & Flores, LLP, the best family law practice in Austin.  We redesigned and launched their website in Drupal this summer and really enjoyed the collaboration.  Then they they were kind enough to mention us in their first blog post:

” … The folks at Entermedia are professional, patient, creative, and helpful beyond anything we could have expected.  If you need website help, we highly recommend Entermedia…”

Wow!  Probably the best testimonial we could ask for, but we swear we didn’t ask.  We are very grateful.

Last week we got a fantastic bit of client feedback on a recent redesign project we wrapped for his web-based business:

Hey guys,

I wanted to let you know that we have launched our new website:  http://www.yourteacher.com/

On our first full day yesterday, we had (##) subscriptions. (Our old website averaged (#) per day.)

It’s clear that the new design and graphics have been a complete home run.

Thanks again for all your help!

Mike

Check out this Google Analytics graphic showing the impact of the new design on their subscription page traffic :

In the busy professional world, good work is simply expected and praise can be infrequently found.  We always strive to make our clients happy, but it feels really good when they are moved to express their enthusiasm about the finished product.  Hats off to Bryan and Ethan, who solved this redesign project in a minimum of hours and apparently to great effect.

A robust site redesign in Drupal for Austin-based domestic and international professional pet movers PetRelocation.com.

A brand new Drupal site and corporate logo for Austin’s own health, life, disability, and employee benefits experts CuatroBenefits.com.

Great clients to work for and we appreciate the local patronage.

We’ve learned that one of the best ways to ensure robust ROI for any website or web app project is to first build an accurate profile of the “desired and likely user,” which we can then use throughout the process to guide key architectural, functional, and aesthetic decisions which would please this “desired and likely user”.  Shorthand, we call it the persona approach.  We didn’t invent it, but it’s really common sense when you think about it.  Say you’re building a house…for whom?  That’s the starting point.

You may care to read Steve Baty’s recent article on the UXmatters site about the building blocks of persona research.  Baty’s overview of the concept is particularly useful as a starting point:

Personas are archetypal representations of audience segments, or user types, which describe user characteristics that lead to different collections of needs and behaviors. We build up each archetype where the characteristics of users overlap.

According to Alan Cooper, author of About Face 3.0 with Robert Riemann and David Cronin, “The persona is a powerful, multipurpose design tool that helps overcome several problems that currently plague the development of digital products. Personas help designers:

• Determine what a product should do and how it should behave.
• Communicate with stakeholders, developers, and other designers.
• Build consensus and commitment to the design.
• Measure the design’s effectiveness.
• Contribute to other product-related efforts such as marketing and sales plans.”

But where do we start looking for the data we need to build up these useful archetypes.

Baty suggests surveys, ethnographic research, interviews, contextual inquiries, and web analytics as the primary research tools to formulate a meaningful persona archetype.  Even for our tiniest projects, ENTERMEDIA tries to get as much information as possible upfront about your probable site or app user so that we can efficiently build assets they can and will use.  As Baty puts it:

One important thing to consider about these different research techniques is that each of them is good in certain ways and can provide insights into different characteristics of your audience. A common refrain among UX practitioners who are looking at personas is to draw upon as many different sources of data as you can. This helps you create a much richer representation of each different persona, but also helps you arrive at much stronger set of personas. Each data source has its own built-in bias, so combining data sets helps mitigate that bias.

You can read the full article here.

A great collection of interviews from the illuminating Jeffery Zeldman starting with the past, present, and future of web standards (and then on to the history of blogging, open source collaboration, and more).

It’s really discouraging to read this news article in the Austin Business Journal yesterday:

The Austin City Council is set to vote this week on awarding a contract to a California company to redesign the city’s Web site.

City staff is recommending Cignex Technologies Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif. be awarded the contract valued at up to $704,088.

The city council authorized staff to begin the process of redesigning the Web site in November 2007. According to background documents from the city, 228 notices were sent out to prospective Web development companies and three proposals were received back, including the one from Cignex.

City Chief of Staff Anthony Snipes said the two other companies that submitted proposals were based in Austin. However, the proposals from those two firms were both over $1.3 million, and one of the companies was later deemed non-compliant.

That’s neither smart nor cool.  In fact, it stinks. Depending on who you believe, that’s from $700K to $1.3 million NOT circulated into the local economy.  Isn’t that taxpayer money?  Are there really no other options represented anywhere the city or state than to outsource this task to California?  We think not.  Looking at the comments generated by this ABJ story, a lot of local folks who care about Austin agree this is a terrible business decision and an even worse message to send to local hardworking professionals.

You can email the mayor and city council to register your opinion here.  They vote tomorrow.

Came across a randomly thought provoking Golf Magazine feature on “How to Hit All Feel, No Think Shots,” wherein the pro player, Stewart Cink, gives us shanking and slicing amateurs five tips to to get out of our head and into our groove on the golf course.

Here’s the take home message:

“Your goal should be to become a feel player, where your only swing thought is where you want the ball to go.”

What about “all feel, no think” web design?

Sounds a little like other mantras we’ve got in the industry…”intuitive information architecture”…”the right look and feel”…”the user is in control”…”don’t make me think”.  Or the KISS method we were taught in high school journalism class and still applies for building websites:  “keep it simple, stupid.”

Don’t you love websites that really just do one thing and do it well? That resist the illogical urge to (try to) be all things at all times to all parties?  That refuse to overthink it?  We do.

Here are five rather small but highly effective websites ENTERMEDIA has built in the last few years that, in their own unique way, were simple by design, rapidly assembled, and ROI-driven.   In other words:  all feel, no think, and straight down the fairway.

Julio’s Cafe - hours of operation, their menu, and a map.  Julio’s is always delicious (nice people, too).

Nano Whitman - a musician’s website:  turned out really cool, even though it’s just facts.

Ambiente Wine Importing Company, Inc. - a sophisticated web presence/sortable wine list/sales contact directory.  Done.

Austin Rent Fence - temporary fence supplies for construction jobs or special events in Austin.  Need a quote?

Friends Without Benefits - testing the viability of a startup business idea:  the pitch explained, the feedback requested.