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.)
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.
We are getting excited about Google Wave, coming later this year.
What is a wave? A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.
There will be a meetup tonight to discuss what this Google Wave thing might mean for Austin and our local tech community. Come join the discussion!
We’ve known for some time now that the aggrieved local taxpayer and Austin web professional community’s outcry over reported plans to outsource the City of Austin website redesign to a Californian firm did not fall on deaf ears. Kudos to Austin officials for listening to concerned locals and resetting the project.
Austin Chronicle reporter Wells Dunbar delivers a thorough rundown of the project’s history, priorities, and current trajectory in this week’s issue. It’s a good read, and the stuff about “crowdsourcing” is just plain cool. Who knows? Maybe there’s a scenario where we’d do work on the project, if stars align.
Whatever final form the website redesign takes, it will certainly be an improvement not only over the existing portal but also over what the city was mulling just a few months ago. The balance the city faces is in designing a site that can satisfy not only the tech-savvy crowds of OpenAustin, who have vastly invigorated public discussion of the site, but also the average visitor looking to contact her council member. (As Web tools like social networking, blogging, and the like become more ubiquitous, this gap is already shrinking.) Another component that shouldn’t be overlooked is the original impetus behind the redesign, the push for greater transparency and accountability; the city could get the slickest website in Cyberspace, resplendent with Web 2.0 doodads, but if it isn’t fed more information on permitting, development, and budgeting, it would still be an epic failure.
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.
Friends are telling us that our own Ryan Krouskup has been prominently quoted in the latest issue of the Austin Business Journal. He gave a longish interview about a month ago to an ABJ reporter doing a feature on the rising profile of open source code and it’s impact on business today. You can be sure ENTERMEDIA was humbled to be contacted and glad to offer any and all insight. Unfortunately, haven’t been able to track down a copy yet or find a link on the website–just wanted to share the news.
By the way, we had a great week. Put the finishing touches on a big website we’ve been working on for a while now…landed two exciting new website projects (one an education tool build out coming to us out of Michigan, the other a website redesign for a great local law firm)…but the biggie is that we got official word we are going to be the web team of one of Austin’s finest, most respected, and largest homegrown retail institutions! More details soon.
Enjoy what’s shaping up to be a beautiful weekend.
About midway through the locally-produced new comedy “The 2 Bobs” (written and directed by Tim McCanlies and set to debut at SXSW this Monday 3/16 @ the Paramount), there is an important plot point where the narrative flashes back to the “early days of the internet.” A montage of website stills and film clips moves quickly to the cues of an on off-screen narrator.
We were approached last year about contributing design enhancements to the fictional websites shown in the film–to make them look more like real websites of the mid-nineties and fix a few matching issues.
Bryan, our creative director, did some fine archival research, got creative, and mocked up some very authentic-looking old-school websites to present to the editing team for The 2 Bobs. We also scripted some of the transitions into and out of the flashback. Under a tight deadline and miniscule budget, we made a little movie magic happen. Tim McCanlies even signed off on our work. Just goes to show you what we’re capable of.
We’re very pleased to hear that our stuff actually made the final cut (which we hear is quite good, by the way). We’re even thanked in the closing credits. This is so cool. If you go see the movie during SXSW or anywhere down the line…the website stuff about the Jenni-Cam, that’s Bryan Pape’s handiwork. Good on you, Bryan.
Subsequent to much thought and not much ballyhoo we’re turning on our blog. We’re excited about it.
Excited to have such thoughtful and creative clients these days. You probably know how nice that is when it happens. Excited that the projects we’re getting a chance to work on just keep getting better. More challenging but exponentially more rewarding.
Excited about our team here in Hyde Park. We’ve really got a complementary and skillful crew in house now with Chris and Nick the indefatigable code warriors, Ethan and Ryan handling the bulk of the strategy and project management, Bryan making the pictures pretty and the transitions seamless and Campbell dottin’ dem i’s and crossin’ dem t’s. It’s a tight group of individuals and we lean on each other to get things done.
So after four years going on five … [pause for reflection] … we feel like we’ve been doing what we do long enough and well enough that we have something to say about this web design and development business.
No, we haven’t seen it all. Of course we learn something new every day. Surely we’ve not arrived to where we want to be–not yet. But that’s what this blog is going to be about…the day to day work of what we do. And the value in it for us as professionals and for our clients engaging us to help them run and grow their business.
It is exciting.
We’re going to take our own advice and get to the point quickly. So even though we could go on in regards to intro and caveat, we’ll leave it for now as “more to come.”
Greetings!
