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Launched and Live: Our Most Recent Websites Powered by HiFi
Megan Winterhalter
Megan Winterhalter is the Marketing Assistant and Copywriter for New Media Campaigns. She assists in marketing communications and launching client websites. A senior in The School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UNC Chapel Hill, Megan is pursuing a degree in Strategic Communication. Megan interned at New Media in the summer of 2009 and has spent time working in the creative department of McKinney. Find out what she is up to by following her on Twitter.
Over the past few weeks we've been really pumped to start using our new Content Managment System, HiFi, on a few of our client websites and the results have been great! Our designers and developers have been able to take designs and accurately replicate them online without system restraints standing in their way. Our clients have been able to easily update and add new content without getting lost or overwhelmed. HiFi is supposed to make the job easier for everyone involved, and so far, it's doing just that.
Our recently launched sites include Alice Bordsen for State Rep, Georganna Sinkfield for Secretary of State, Joystick Labs, and Ariana Kelly for Delegate. Be sure to check them out and let us know what you think!
Here are some shots of the CMS in action and the sites they control:
Creating and editing a form:
Page Editor:
Homepage of Sinkfield 2010:
Organize content through the site tree:
Alice Bordsen for State Rep:
Putting these websites on HiFi has allowed us to not only demonstrate to clients the possibilities HiFi offers, but it also lets us know areas that we can make even better. Overall, we're really happy with how HiFi is coming along and excited to hear great feedback from the clients who have began to use it.
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HiFi Website Featured on Design Shack
Clay Schossow
Clay Schossow leads New Media Campaigns' project management and business development efforts. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, he has guided more than 200 websites from concept to launch. He is a frequent writer on Internet marketing and online campaigning. You should follow him on Twitter.
We're very excited to announce that our new Content Management System, HiFi, has been featured on one of the most popular web design galleries, Design Shack. The gallery boasts over 10,000 RSS subscribers and carries a lot of influence in the web design community. Currently, HiFi is holding down a solid 8.5 rating based on visitor votes -- we encourage you to also go vote for the design.
The Design Shack post says the site is featured for its bright colors, oversized deisng elements, repeated use of small tirangles, and the navigation buttons.
While it's an honor for any of our projects to be featured on galleries, this one is particularly sweet for a couple reasons. First, it's our own product getting recognized, which is a really nice bonus. Second, HiFi is positioned as a CMS for designers and developers -- the specific audience that closely follows Design Shack. When we originally designed the site, we had a goal of getting featured on design galleries, as we knew that would drive targeted and relevant traffic to the product.
The strategy seems to have paid off, as HiFi had 4x the typical daily newsletter signups yesterday when we were first featured. In addition to sheer volume, these registrations are likely more targeted than a typical day's. Designers found us through the gallery, browsed the site, liked what they saw, and converted to our newsletter for updates and announcements.
Thanks for all of your votes and support!
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Why We Wrecked Our Site Traffic
Clay Schossow
Clay Schossow leads New Media Campaigns' project management and business development efforts. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, he has guided more than 200 websites from concept to launch. He is a frequent writer on Internet marketing and online campaigning. You should follow him on Twitter.
Last year around this time, our company had a call to arms: we would blog. Not just boring drivel so we could claim that we maintain a blog, but good, useful, specific content about things we know and are working on.
The goal was to show the world the things we’re doing, offer some helpful advice and plugins to the community, challenge ourselves to do cool things worth reading about, and to increase our overall site traffic.
The strategy paid big dividends in all of those realms. We focused on jQuery, JavaScript, CSS tricks, and other development strategies. Traffic grew to a reliable 40,000 + visits per month, our tutorials and plugins were featured around the web, we were encouraged to take extra time in coding to push the envelope, people were appreciative and thankful for our efforts, and we ranked high on Google for very competitive terms about jQuery and JavaScript.
Mission accomplished, right? Not so much. While we were getting all of those visits, they rarely converted into leads for our web design and development services. The people finding us had already solved 80% of the problems we address for our clients, and they were using our free resources to solve the remaining 20%.
Furthermore, it gave our blog a split focus. Covering front-end web development, politics and web marketing all on one blog meant that too many posts were going up that didn't appeal to our followers.
Monetizing Our Targeted Traffic
We began to wonder if there was a better way to organize things to provide a more consistent experience to our readers and to perhaps benefit ourselves from the traffic. We threw around a range of ideas: a book on jQuery promoted through our posts, accepting some choice advertising, selling our plugins, and more. Ultimately, we decided that these options were outside our core focus and motivations for the company.
We then realized that our growth in traffic was perfectly coupled in timing with the launch of our first product: HiFi CMS for Designers and Developers. Not only would it be great to send additional traffic to HiFi, but our visitors happened to be perfectly targeted for the product. Designers and developers who value doing things the right way in an innovative manner. We could also maintain two highly focused blogs instead of one that was all over the map.
The Process
However, internal discussions about the benefits of the traffic and actually pushing 1,000+ people a day away from our site were two very different things. The process didn't happen overnight, because we needed to be sure that we did everything right.
First, we imported all of our technical blog posts from NMC into HiFi. Naturally, there were were some formatting errors in the import and we had to go through every post line by line (including code samples) to make sure the import went smoothly.
Next, we realized this was a perfect opportunity to further optimize some of our popular post URLs and title tags. We went through each post to make sure it was optimized according to Google Keyword Tool and that the URL was as tight and relevant as possible.
Finally, the scariest part of the whole process came. We set up 301 permanent redirects from all of the old NMC links to the new URLs on gethifi.com. Nearly all of our blog traffic is referred from Google, so we wanted to ensure we kept all of our ranking with the new posts. According to Google and every other trustworthy resource out there, the 301s are the best way to maintain your page rank and successfully pass it along to the new site. While Google hasn't lied to me before, it was a little bit harder to "flip the switch" when 30,000 of our monthly visitors are on the line.
Wednesday May 26, 2010, a date which will live in infamy, we pulled the trigger. Everything looked to work perfectly thanks to weeks of efforts from across our team.
The Results
While the traffic switch went perfectly and HiFi saw a large spike in incoming traffic, it's only the first big hurdle, it isn't the ultimate motivation of this experiment. The real goal is to turn that traffic into followers and leads for HiFi.
Within the first week, HiFi has gained dozens of new Twitter followers and there has even been some nice new chatter about HiFi. Also, our email list has gained a decent amount of new signups, but not a number aligned with the volume of traffic now going to the site. So, our next step is to optimize the site for our new type of visitor who lands on HiFi accidentally rather than intentionally and might not be seeking out the email signup. Also, now that we have more traffic, it's important to provide more valuable resources to those visitors and encourage them to subscribe. We're accomplishing this by building out the site's content and planning several exciting new plugins to publish exclusively on HiFi.
We're excited with the initial results, but recognize we have a lot of hard work ahead of us in continuing to generate good content and increasing our conversion rate. Let us know what you think and if you've ever done something similar. -
The Hidden Costs of an Open Source CMS
Jonathan Hungate
Jonathan is responsible for developing new business relationships and leading the launch of select client projects. He has more than 6 years of marketing and communications experience and has managed a wide variety of successful web projects.
When it comes to building your new website, one of the most important decisions you and your web development team will make is which content management system (CMS) to use.
Open Source
Open source solutions such as Wordpress and Drupal ar e increasingly popular options. As with other open source projects, they offer some compelling features—a library of community-developed plugins and modules, no licensing fees and access to the source code. These perks are certainly attractive, but make sure to also consider that while open source solutions may be free and open, and therefore possibly more attractive than a proprietary or “closed” solution, that doesn't mean they don't come without a price. In other words, there are often hidden costs or compromises behind the veil of “free”.
Here are a few of these important factors to consider before you choose an open source solution.
The Oh-Crap Moment
When something goes wrong on your site or you need a quick turnaround on a new feature, you or your developers may find yourself at the mercy of an expensive learning curve or unorganized and often out-dated online documentation. Also, consider that open source projects don’t come with a support line—not without a cost, at least.
Double-Edged Sword
The most intriguing attributes of open source solutions can also be the scariest—you have access to a community of developers who are constantly developing new code. On the one hand that sounds great—a free workforce! On the other hand, some 10 year old 10,000 miles away may write an unstable "hello world" plugin that eventually gets installed on your enterprise website. That's not just scary, it's a liability for you, your business and your customers.
(Planned) Change is Good
With open source, changes in the software are always available, but they're also inevitable—which isn't always good. When Wordpress 2.7 (Coltrane) came out, it brought with it a new interface. Most people would agree that the changes were a welcome improvement, but beyond that is a deeper concern—it's a change that was out of your control and one that forces you to update your CMS interface or risk running an older version, which often has security concerns. This could also lead to training needs for your staff, the need to update incompatible plugins and other hidden maintenance costs.
Our Approach
At New Media Campaigns we decided to build our own custom content management system from the bottom-up—one that we know like the back of our hand and that we can bend to our will, usually with very little effort. It's the result of years of development and the product of our experience with launching hundreds of websites of all types, kinds and sizes. It may not be the right solution for every site and it does come with a cost. But, in my experience, you get what you pay for. If you decide to use open source CMS solutions, make sure you know what you're paying for—and perhaps more importantly, what you're not. -
A Look Back at What's Ahead
Jonathan Hungate
Jonathan is responsible for developing new business relationships and leading the launch of select client projects. He has more than 6 years of marketing and communications experience and has managed a wide variety of successful web projects.
Some people say that you'll instantly know if a job is right for you—those people don't know what they 're talking about. At a minimum, I think it takes a good six months to have a good feel for a new position and if it's really going to be a good fit. So, as my first two weeks at New Media Campaigns draw to a close, I don't know what the future holds, but I have picked up (or confirmed) a few things since I've been here.
It's all about the team
With any job, the people you work with make a big difference. Surround yourself with the right people and, more often than not, things will work out just fine. Such is the case with this group—from top to bottom, the NMC crew is an all-star cast. How did they assemble this A-Team? Although I secretly suspect that Mr. T is kept on retainer for HR consulting, I've been unsuccessful in my attempts to confirm that. I have, however, noticed a few consistent philosophies that seem to have resonated with the group: trust your employees, give them the tools and direction they need to succeed, keep them inspired, and then step aside and let them do what they do best.
Great service and a strong product go hand-in-hand
With only one of these you may survive, but you'll never prosper. Exceeding expectations and consistently delivering results leads to happy, repeat clients—the type of clients (and partners) that become evangelists for your company. It's simple to understand but much harder to execute. Lucky for me, it's something that this group figured out some time ago.
Never settle
The strong product that I spoke about above—it's more than just a good-looking new website, it's often what's behind the curtain that really sets a site apart. Our current CMS powers hundreds of websites and provides our clients with full access and control over their site. It'd be easy to rest on the success of that system and focus our development resources on building new sites, but that's part of a "if it's not broke don't fix it" mentality that stands in the way of innovation. Enter HiFi.
Having used (and cursed) a number of different content management systems, I'm really excited about HiFi and what it means for our clients. Behind a polished and intuitive interface, this system boasts some exciting and powerful options for building websites. I really believe it's a system that will take our sites to the next level. If you haven't already, head over to the gethifi.com and check things out. While you're there, don't forget to drop off your email for updates on the system as they're rolled-out.
So, is that it? No, but what do you expect from the new guy?. After all, my time here has just begun.
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Over at GetHiFi.com: Automatic file minification on nginx
Eli Van Zoeren
Eli Van Zoeren is a front-end developer and designer at New Media Campaigns. Previously, he received a degree in Visual Communications from Beloit College and had a successful freelance career. You can find out what he's been up to at his personal website or on Twitter.
For our HiFi content management system we wanted to automatically combine and compress CSS and Javascript files. On complex sites, minification can have a significant impact on page load times. In this post I am going to discuss the technical details of how we set things up on our nginx server.
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Big Relaunch of the GetHiFi.com Site
Joel Sutherland
Joel Sutherland leads operations at NMC where he has launched over 250 sites and served as lead developer on the company's CMS which serves millions of unique visits each year. Joel has an Honors Degree in Computer Science from UNC Chapel Hill where he was a Morehead Scholar. Follow Joel on Twitter.
For some time now we've been working on our new Web Marketing platform, HiFi. We first launched a marketing site for it back in September. At that point it was just a simple landing page with a cool rainbow header.
This time around, we worked with a local designer, Lenny Terenzi to get a really killer design. We just re-launched GetHiFi.com on the design last week. Today, we put up a 38-slide slideshow that documented the process of taking Lenny's complex design and turning it into a website. We thought it would be interesting to followers of this blog since it covers HTML5, CSS Sprites and a bit of jQuery. So if that is something you're interested in, head over to the post to read more about it:
Building a Complex, High-Performance Site with HTML5, CSS, and jQuery
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Roundup of Recent Events at NMC
Joel Sutherland
Joel Sutherland leads operations at NMC where he has launched over 250 sites and served as lead developer on the company's CMS which serves millions of unique visits each year. Joel has an Honors Degree in Computer Science from UNC Chapel Hill where he was a Morehead Scholar. Follow Joel on Twitter.
This fall has certainly been busy at New Media Campaigns. We thought it would be worth giving our followers a quick update on some of the progress we have made and work we have done. Here is an overview of the goings on since this summer.
1. The NMC Team Grows To Seven
Eli Van Zoeren
Eli joined the team back in May as a developer and has been doing great work for us since, both for our clients and writing on our blog. Eli also has a strong background in HTML/CSS/JS and also likes to work with some occasional backend code. He is also a wonderful photographer. You can learn more about Eli on our team page or his personal site. For up-to-the-minute Eli, follow him on twitter.Patrick Clarke
We are all excited to have Patrick join our team. In addition to being a rabid hockey fan, Patrick is an excellent web developer. He comes to us with a strong background in HTML/CSS/JS as well as great talent in working with Content Management Systems. ;At NMC Patrick will be helping our clients get set up on our CMS, making sure their beautiful site designs are paired with beautiful code. You can ready more about Patrick on our team page or at his personal site.2. NMC Launches its 350th Site (Probably)
We say probably because we don't keep exact count. That said, one of the sites we recently launched below was probably our 350th since we started just 3.5 years ago:
Click a thumbnail to visit the site.
3. GetHifi.com is Up and Running
HiFi is the name of our next Content Management System. Its goal is to allow a design and marketing campaign to be realized in a website without having software standing in the way. You can read more about its mission and join hundreds of others who have already signed up by visiting its homepage.
4. New Tools are our Most Popular Yet
In 2009, we've made it a priority to release as many of our tools and as much of our knowledge as we're able through our blog. So far this has been a big success as we've had a multi-thousand percent increase in traffic and many of our projects and plugins are being used by developers all over the world. Here are some of the latest to make the rounds:
- HiFi Regular Expression Tester - This uses jQuery to allow you to quickly test and see the results of javascript regular expressions in real time. It has over 300 delicious bookmarks and has been tweeted over 100 times making it one of our most popular tools on Social Networks.
- nmcDropDown - This is straight from Eli's website toolkit. It makes building cross-browser dropdowns as easy as running a jQuery plugin. It uses hoverIntent if available for best performance.
- HiFi Sitemap Creator - This allows you to use a simple textile-like language to quickly build a website sitemap. Since it was introduced there have been over 300 sitemaps created in 5 different languages.
Be sure to check out those tools if you haven't already!
5. NMC East Opens
Luckily for us, a great coffee shop just opened next door called the Looking Glass Cafe. As you can see in the picture it has a great outdoor seating area which is perfect for enjoying North Carolina weather. As we've grown our office has gotten more cozy, so having NMC offer an open tab next door has been the perfect option. If you ever stop by, you'll probably find Alex or Eli attacking a project together while enjoying some coffee and tea respectively.
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Free Regular Expression Tool for Writing and Testing RegExps
Kris Jordan
Kris Jordan leads web programming & development at New Media Campaigns; Kris previously worked for Microsoft's Developer Division, and studied Computer Science at Brown University and UNC Chapel Hill. You should follow Kris on Twitter.
You know the green-on-black code flying all over the computer screens in The Matrix? Regular Expressions don't look too different. They can be really gnarly and debugging them is a pain. This is why we created a free Regular Expression tool to help learn, author, and test RegExps.
Regular Expressions are a powerful way of programmatically searching for and replacing text. They're used in a wide variety of ways. Some examples include validating inputs to ensure a user has provided a valid phone number and email address, finding all links to external websites on a web page, extracting content from one website to another, etc.
I will be using the HiFi RegExp Tool in an upcoming blog post series on "Getting Comfortable with Regular Expressions". You should subscribe to our development blog to receive updates on this series as they come.
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