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A Site for University Innovation
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has been named "America's Most Entrepreneurial Campus" by Princeton Review and Forbes.com, a claim that UNC wants to uphold. New Media Campaigns has been involved in the entrepreneurship program at UNC and we are always watching the many ongoing entrepreneurial initiatives at UNC, the latest of which became a New Media Campaigns project.
It started from a book written by Chancellor Holden Thorp and Entrepreneur-in-Residence Buck Goldstein called Engines of Innovation: The Entrepreneurial University in the Twenty-First Century which will be released on September 29, 2010. Engines of Innovation addresses the need for universities to use their vast intellectual and financial resources in innovative ways to come up with solutions to the world's biggest problems. In addition to this book, Goldstein created a freshman seminar that parallels the purpose of the book and is where New Media Campaigns was able to help.
The class explored entrepreneurship and innovation in the university setting through readings, research and guest speakers. The information learned in the class was then translated into blogs, video interviews and articles all posted on a website the class maintained: RevupInnovation.com.
Naturally New Media Campaigns was interested in this effort given our ties to the University and its entrepreneurial community. We helped the class get the site set up so that the students could then take over. As a student in the class and I was not only introduced to New Media Campaigns, leading to a current summer internship, but I also learned firsthand the importance of entrepreneurship at a university.
The class was split into four groups to manage the site and create content. The web media team worked closely with New Media Campaigns and was in charge of launching, editing, and maintaining the website. The audio-video team set up, filmed and edited the interviews conducted in and outside of class. To reach beyond UNC, the best practices team researched other leading entrepreneurial universities to report on what they are doing right. Lastly, the blog team transformed class papers into blog posts and led the search for outside bloggers.
Some of those interviewed or blogging for the site include Harvard Professor Michael Porter, UNC Chancellor Holden Thorp, MIT Professor Bob Langer, Duke Professor Joel Fleishman and many others.
The students have come up with a number of cool features -- from highlighted personal interviews on the homepage, a signup form for UNC faculity and community members to submit blog posts and importantly, a newsletter signup on the sidebar of every page. Much of the sites followers are from within the University and prefer email to rss as a subscription mechanism.
While the class has ended for the year, revupinnovation.com will continue into this summer as several students have decided to stay involved. There is a core group of students staying in Chapel Hill this summer that will maintain the website daily, in addition several students will be working from around the country continuing to conduct research and interviews.
It was an exciting project for New Media Campaigns to be involved in. The project got off to a great start and it was a tremendous experience for the students. It will be exciting to see how the project continues to evolve.
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Factors in Pricing Website Design
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.
During a recent meeting with a prospective client, a question came up about 2 website quotes that varied widely in price and what I thought the difference was between the two. I thought it was a great question, and honestly, it caught me a little by surprise. So after taking some time to think it over, here are a few thoughts on the topic.
Overall, I think there are 2 primary ways to approach this.
The first is that a cheaper quote may mean lower quality work while a more expensive quote means higher quality work. For example, your friend's friend who occasionally builds websites after school could easy price a project and value their time very differently than an established agency of design professionals. In this situation, the difference in cost will likely be reflected in the quality of the end product.
The second is that for reasonably comparable work, there may be other factors that affect the way an agency prices a project. I think it makes more sense to focus on this angle for this post, assuming that the groups were vetted by the client before a quote was requested and that they were generally pleased with the agencies portfolio of past work. Also, for comparisons sake, let's assume that the components and vision for the site are equally understood by the competing agencies. That is, there are no glaring differences in what the site will include and how it will function, which would have a significant impact on the quote.
So, enough with the introductions and assumptions. Let's have a look at some of the factors that may affect an agency's pricing.
The Agency Profile
Does the agency who provided the higher quote have designer leather chairs and fresh-cut flowers in the lobby? How about high-end video conferencing capabilities or other gadgetry to woo prospective clients with their technological prowess? If so, you can be sure that those costs are passed down to the client in some fashion. There are a lot of pricing models out there and one thing they all have in common is a break-even point—the minimum amount they must charge/make to cover their costs before they make a profit. So, more often than not, the higher the overhead of the agency, the more they must charge for their services.
A side note—for better of worse, you should also consider this profile and some of these signs as potentially representative of the culture of the agency and the people you'll be working with on this project—it may be a telling sign if it's a good fit.
Quality of Product
I mentioned above that for comparisons sake, the elements of the site would be equally understood by each agency. Well, a sedan and a sports car will both have a steering wheel, brakes, a windshield and will (usually) get you from point A to B, but you're going to look a whole lot cooler and potentially more impressive in the latter. It's also likely that the sports car will provide a better overall experience for both the passenger and driver. The difference here is often the attention to detail (design and structure) and what's under the hood (code and CMS). Make sure that you take both into account when comparing an agencies work.
So, while both quotes/sites may include the same elements, that doesn't mean they're the same product. One important thing to note here is that it's not always true the the higher quote will equal higher quality work. I'll share a few thoughts on the relationship between cost and quality in the next section.
The Process & The Allocation of Resources
Does the more expensive proposal you received include a 2-day island retreat to discuss your web strategy? Probably not, but there is a good chance that the agency behind a large quote budgeted a significant amount of time and resources to different phases in the development of your new site. So, does that mean by choosing a lower quote that you're choosing to neglect or bypass adequate time to maximize the potential of your site? No.
Many groups (like ours) believe that there is a tipping point in the development of a site that, once you've passed it, you're no longer providing value equal to the added cost of the project. This is sometimes referred to as the quality-price-ratio. Be sure to keep this in mind when it comes to comparing quotes and what it means for your project. As I mentioned above, a more expensive quote doesn't always equal better work.
Your Experience
These are just a few of the factors that I think could explain a difference in quotes for a website project. From an agency perspective, what are other key factors? Or, as a client, have you ever been in this experience and which quote did you accept and why? I'd love to hear your comments and experiences.
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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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Jonathan Hungate Joins NMC Team
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’ve already had a busy start to the year here at NMC. From launching several dozen new sites to wrapping up development on our new Content Management System, HiFi, we’ve been staying busy with exciting new projects and clients. In order to accommodate this growth, facilitate new opportunities, and have someone else to join happy hour, we’re happy to announce a new addition to our team!
Jonathan Hungate has joined NMC to focus on Business Development and to also assist in managing select projects. Jonathan is a graduate of NC State (shrinking the Tar Heels’ lead on our office scoreboard to 5-1-2) where he majored in Business Management. Recently, Jonathan led marketing for Hutchison Law Group, the leading startup and VC law firm in the area. One of Jonathan’s major projects while at Hutchinson was leading the practice’s efforts to design and launch a new firm website.
In addition to Hutchison, Jonathan has worked in a variety of capacities with dozens of other organizations to help them successfully launch new websites. This means that Jonathan is already very familiar with the space and the process of launching a website, instantly giving our clients and prospects access to another web specialist.
Jonathan and his wife are due to have a son at the end of May, who we believe will be ready to start making websites before he can walk. We’re really excited to welcome Jonathan to the team and hope you drop him a line by email or say hello in the comments.
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Reminder: Join Us Today at 4:00 EST for Our Virtual Open House
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.
Today's the day, folks! We're hosting our inaugural Virtual Open House at 4 pm EST. All you have to do is go to newmediacampaigns.com/openhouse at 4 EST and our entire team will be in there waiting.
The open house is being held in the chat program, 37signals' campfire, we use all day at NMC. Our team consists of highly regarded designers, developers, and online strategists with experience in every vertical. Not to mention, we consider ourselves pretty friendly. We're happy to answer any questions you may have, whether they're related to your website, jQuery, PHP, Buzz, anything!
If you're a reader of this blog or a follower or fan of ours in social media, today's an excellent opportunity to meet the folks behind NMC. Really hope to see you there!
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NMC Holds Virtual Open House on Friday February 12th at 4:00 EST
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.
Last week, Clay Schossow was interviewed by Inc. about our "virtual" work environment. You can read the article online on the Inc. Blog. As a quick summary, back in March one of our top developers, Josh Lockhart moved to Madison, WI but stayed with us, working virtually. It started as an experiment for us but has become a great success, leading to more freedom for our NC employees. This is partially due to our use of a Campfire and Basecamp, two products made by 37Signals.
Campfire is a company chat room that we all log in to each morning. Whether we are working in our offices, at the coffee shop next door, or in Madison, WI, it allows everyone at NMC to keep in touch. One of the great features of Campfire is that it allows guests to join the chat.
This Friday, we're going to open up our chat room to our customers, blog subscribers and anyone else that wants to join. Everyone from NMC will be there, ready to answer any questions you might have. Whether it is about your website, one of our jQuery plugins, what it is like to work virtually -- anything.
All you'll need to do to join is head to newmediacampaigns.com/openhouse on Friday at 4:00. We look forward to this experiment and getting to know you all better.
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Season's Greetings and Happy New Year from the NMC Team!
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.
With the holiday season and a lot of projects wrapping up, it's been rather quiet on the blog for the past few weeks. Just wanted to wish all of our readers a Happy 2010 and thank them for their support over the past year. Below is a blast email we sent out to clients earlier today. One of our priorities in 2010 is to send quarterly updates to our clients, readers, and others. If you'd like to receive these, please fill use the form in the sidebar to receive our newsletter.
Season's greetings and happy New Year from the NMC team!
2009 was a fun and busy year at New Media Campaigns. Our team doubled in size, we launched over 100 sites, we recommitted to our blog, and we even had two people get engaged! Through all of these happenings, we were proud to be able to stay true to our core principles of quality work at affordable prices with great service.
However, we recognize none of this would have been possible without your support, feedback, and business. We truly appreciate it all, and we want to wish you a happy holiday season and a joyous 2010!
Below are some more highlights from the past year. We look forward to making 2010 an even bigger success!
Best,
The New Media Campaigns Team
PS - To keep up with our daily happenings in 2010, follow us on Twitter, join our somewhat lonely Facebook page, and subscribe to our Blog.
NMC News Highlights from 2009
NMC Team Grows to 7 and Launches 350th Site
Featured across Web for jQuery Tools
Highlighted Sites from 2009
Looking Forward to 2010
Quarterly Email Newsletter
Updated NMC Website Design and Layout
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Designing for the mobile web
Josh Lockhart
Josh Lockhart is a project manager, designer, and front-end developer at New Media Campaigns. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, Josh encourages web standards, semantic markup, and simple design. Josh writes about web development and creates RapidWeaver themes on his personal website. Follow Josh on Twitter.
Devices and Platforms
New Media Campaigns recently launched a mobile version of its website. When I was first approached with this project, Joel Sutherland and I debated how we should develop the mobile website. Should we develop a mobile website only for Apple, Inc.'s iPhone? Or should we develop a mobile website for as many mobile devices as possible?The mobile web has surged in popularity lately with help from the iPhone. The iPhone has been a tremendous success, and it has propelled web standards into the main stream thanks to its adoption of the Webkit platform. Other recent smart phones and mobile devices have also adopted the Webkit platform, such as Verizon's Droid and Palm's Pre.
Joel and I decided to target the Webkit platform rather than a single device. The Webkit platform provides a nice breadth of device coverage and a surplus of advanced web development features, such as web standards and CSS3 support. As a result, we were able to leverage advanced CSS properties such as
border-radius,text-shadow, and more. Of course, these properties will degrade gracefully in less-advanced web platforms. In an earlier blog post, Joel describes how we targeted specific devices that support the Webkit platform.Simplify, simplify, simplify
A smart phone is small compared to a desktop web browser. The Apple iPhone and Palm Pre provide a 320x480 screen. The Verizon Droid provides a slightly larger screen. With such little space, it is imperative to provide a good user experience with a simple and easy to use interface that provides only the most important information.
While designing our mobile website, I filtered our primary website into four distinct categories: Home, Work, Blog, and Contact. These categories were translated into tabs, a global layout element that resides at the top of every page on our mobile website. Tabs are an immediately identifiable and easy to use form of website navigation.
The "Home" tab provides a brief description of New Media Campaigns, with links to recent blog posts and an about page. There is also a link that will initiate a phone call and a link that will initiate an email.
The "Blog" tab provides the best example of simplification. Unlike our primary website, we do not use categories or tags on the mobile website. Instead, we provide a single paginated stream of blog posts. The listing view provides the title, excerpt, and number of comments for each blog post. Viewing an individual blog post also allows the mobile website visitor to read existing comments or leave a new comment. Ultimately, our mobile website provides a simple, usable, informative blog that provides exactly what is needed and nothing that is not.
The "Contact" tab provides only what is necessary to contact our web design agency: a simple HTML form and a link to initiate a phone call.
Our mobile website is simple and easy to use. It provides the most important information in an accessible format. This is perfect for mobile website visitors who are usually on the go, in a hurry, and need important information fast.
Device agnostic, platform centric
In my opinion, the future of mobile web-enabled devices is Webkit. Webkit provides a stable, standards-compliant, and forward-thinking platform that is being adopted by the most popular mobile devices, including Apple Inc.'s iPhone, Verizon's Droid, and Palm's Pre. RIM recently posted a job listing for a Webkit developer... perhaps a future Blackberry will also support the Webkit platform.
Our mobile website works in any Webkit-enabled mobile device, in portrait or landscape orientation. If an end-user visits our website in another device, the same information will still be accessible; we used simple, clean, standards-compliant XHTML markup to structure our mobile website. This ensures the information will still be readily accessible to any device that can adequately parse HTML.
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NMC Goes 5-1 in Off-Year Online Campaigns
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.
As a political website design firm, New Media Campaigns is happy to report that in 2009, an off year for elections, the company went 5-1. NMC built online efforts in 5 different states for city council, mayoral, and levy campaigns.
The five winners were Stephanie Miner for Mayor of Syracuse, Luke Ravenstahl for Mayor of Pittsburgh, Bonner Gaylord for Raleigh City Council, the Hamilton County Library levy, and the Five Rivers Metroparks levy. Unfortunately, the Joe Merrill for Mayor campaign was unable to unseat Binghamton’s incumbent mayor, but he ran a spirited and professional campaign that we were happy to work with.
Each campaign brought a unique set of challenges and goals to the table, and the NMC team was eager to assist them.
We were proud to assist Romanelli Communications help Stephanie Miner become the first female mayor of Syracuse, and build an online fundraising infrastructure that helped raised tens of thousands of dollars online.
The Ravenstahl mayoral campaign website design was successfully launched in just one week’s time – a very rare feat for a website of any kind, especially for such a high profile race. This re-election helps the mayor continue his mission of moving Pittsburgh forward, which was featured in the NY Times this week.
Bonner Gaylord put together a sophisticated web effort that is rarely seen with local campaign websites. He used his site to register and organize hundreds of supporters. Furthermore, the fresh design and feel of the site helped differentiate the political newcomer from other candidates.
The two levies had the unenviable task of asking voters for money in a tough economy. They were able to both be victorious by building a strong coalition of supporters. Both campaigns successfully used social networks to broaden their message and engage younger voters. Furthermore, the library levy was able to recruit dozens of donors through yard sign and bumper sticker promotions hosted on the campaign site.
NMC has already began lining up clients for 2010 and will begin revealing its client list, including several statewide campaigns, over the coming weeks as the new campaign sites launch.
Thanks again to our partners and clients on a successful 2009 election and congratulations!
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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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