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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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Raleigh Web Design is Booming
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.
It was just over three years ago that we opened our doors to the public and began doing business. While we were in the startup phase we had big dreams, and heard much about the importance of being located in a technology hub. Paul Graham, an author and startup evangelist we respect greatly even listed "Bad Location" second on his list of startup mistakes.
Startups prosper in some places and not others. Silicon Valley dominates, then Boston, then Seattle, Austin, Denver, and New York. After that there's not much. Even in New York the number of startups per capita is probably a 20th of what it is in Silicon Valley. In towns like Houston and Chicago and Detroit it's too small to measure.
As a services firm, his comments don't necessarily apply, but we still had our concerns. Three years later?We couldn't be happier to be in the Triangle
Over the last three and a half years we have learned a bunch, met hundreds of awesome clients from across the country and worked really hard. This has been a big part of our success, but it would be incorrect to dismiss the special atmosphere here in the Triangle that has helped us grow as a Raleigh Web Design firm.
The Triangle was just named the smartest metro area in the country thanks to its universities and industry. UNC bucked convention and named an entrepreneur as its newest Chancellor.
In our specific industry, things are even better in the Triangle. Students in local universities (UNC, NC State, and they who must not be named make up "the Triangle") are taking web design and development seriously. A great community, Refresh the Triangle, has grown under the support of great companies like Viget. And it seems that all of the companies in the area push each other to continue doing better and more innovative work.
Since we are a web design firm, almost all of our work is done online and we can partner with companies all across the nation without leaving the comfort of our office. Services like GotoMeeting, non-recent inventions like email and the new affordability of plane tickets means that we can be connected to folks everywhere.
The low cost-of-living here is great too. We're able to run inexpensively with few downsides due to the great culture the Triangle provides. We've even located our offices in Carrboro, America's Foodiest Small Town.
At the end of the day, we have to attribute some of our success to chance, being located in such a great area. Several members of our team have come from local universities and we've had the great fortune to work with many of the schools as clients. So if there are budding raleigh-area web design firms reading this, have no fear -- the triangle is a great place to start!
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We're Hiring
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.
Our team is excited to announce two career opportunities we're accepting applications for: Front-End Web Developer and Interactive Project Manager.
Interactive Project Manager
- Project Managers 2.0. They have extensive knowledge of all things online media and are able to communicate how to leverage the web because they, themselves are completely engaged in new media technologies.
- Aware of the importance of a company's website as the hub of its online presence.
- Love working in a high-energy environment and are able to manage multiple clients at the same time while being completely thorough with each one.
- Naturals at dealing with people of all shapes, sizes and levels of technical savvy because of their responsive and patient communication skills.
- Writers, bloggers and storytellers.
- Happy to occasionally extend the work day past 5 to make sure a job gets done right, a site is launched on time, or a client is kept happy.
To apply, fill out the Interactive Project Manager application.
Front-End Web Developer
You should be completely comfortable with and interested in:
- Rapid development / prototyping of front-end XHTML / CSS / JS
- Debugging cross-browser compatibility issues
- Design Usability and Semantic HTML
- Photoshop's basic features for design manipulation, chopping up, etc
Other skills it would be a bonus for you to have, or really want to learn:
- JavaScript, with an emphasis on jQuery
- Web Design and Photoshop/Illustrator Mastery
- PHP or other web programming languages like Ruby or Python
- Front-end template languages, i.e. Smarty, Django Templates, XSLT
- HCI/UI/UX best practices
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Why We Decided To Split Our Blog In Two
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 readers of our blog have likely noticed, we have greatly increased our blog posting frequency over the past couple months. We hoped that this renewed dedication to blogging would help our inbound marketing efforts with better organic search rankings, increased inbound links from other blogs, more exposure across social networks, greater mind share, and a larger number of subscribers.
Thus far, our efforts have been extremely successful in almost all of those facets. We've seen our organic search traffic more than triple, reached tens of thousands of new people, had our posts linked to from dozens of other poplar blogs and publications, experienced an increase in traffic from Twitter and other social networks, achieved some recognition as a leader in jQuery techniques, and more. However, our subscriber count has stayed rather stagnant, with only a slight increase of about 15%.
At first, we wondered if perhaps our increased frequency was causing people to unsubscribe? Quickly, we recognized that many of our favorite blogs also post daily, so we doubted that frequency was a deterrent. Also, upon looking at the Feedburner statistics, we saw that the main issue was a lack of new subscribers rather than an increase in unsubscribers (at least that meant our current subscribers were enjoying what we write!).
We then took a look at our actual blog content to see if we could gleam any insights from our actual writing. It quickly became apparent that our posts varied, almost exactly 50/50, between Internet marketing topics and in depth web development techniques.
As a non-developer, I can attest to the fact that no matter how interesting I found a marketing post, if it was sandwiched between posts about smarty image resizing and jQuery calendars, that I likely would not subscribe to that overall blog and would rather just hope to stumble upon it again sometime in the future.
By not focusing our blog on a specific niche, we were losing out on building our subscriber count for people interested in only that specific topic. However, while we certainly wanted to increase that subscriber number, we couldn't sacrifice one of our niches, as both are important to our company and its continued growth.
Half of our business is with folks who look to us for programming expertise and use our CMS for designers and ad agencies. While the other half is with end-clients who come to us for our Internet Marketing and web design knowledge to build and leverage their own web presences.
That is when we came up with the solution to divide our blog into two separate blogs: an Internet Marketing Blog and a Web Development Blog. That way, all of our new organic and inbound traffic would land on the blog that most interests them, be able to browse that niche's content, and have the ability to subscribe to just that blog. Also, understanding that there are some renaissance men out there, like Joel, who are equally interested in development and marketing, we'll allow people to continue to be able to read and subscribe to the "Full Blog."
We're interested to see how this experiment evolves and it if it affects our subscriber count and perhaps even our inbound links, as people read more links when presented with a full blog of related content to digest.
Now, what you've all been waiting for: if you want to specialize your feed from us, feel free to choose from below. Thanks for your continued support! Let us know your thoughts on this strategy in the comments and if this change is likely to affect whether or not you subscribe.
Internet Marketing Blog Subscription
Web Development Blog SubscriptionFor more information on business blogging, check out our series on blogging for business.
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This Week at NMC - July 24, 2009
Megan Winterhalter
Megan Winterhalter is the Public Relations and Advertising Intern for New Media Campaigns. Her focus is in copywriting and building client websites. A junior in The School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UNC Chapel Hill, she is double majoring in Advertising and History with a minor in Mathematical Decision Sciences. Find out what she is up to by following her on Twitter.
Another week has passed meaning another week full of websites, blogging, and office entertainment. We've recently split our blog into a web developers' blog and an internet marketing blog, allowing visitors to view the entire blog or to view the content that specifically applies to their area of work. After hearing about Google's plan to allow developers to test Google Wave, a few of our staff signed up and included a poem to convince Google why we deserve to test it. Alex Pomer's poem was so good, we felt it deserved some recognition this week.
Alex's Poem:
Google, we're behind because we've designed
so many sites, the gigabytes
of conversation, are the variable equation
for moving faster and becoming a web master.And now on to more entertaining and useful information...
Entertainment
- German water bed prank
- George Lucas in Love
- A great entrance to a wedding
- Alex listened to this Michael Jackson cover medley on repeat for 2 hours
- Little kid's got moves like MJ
Around the Web
- Microsoft changes ads due to legal threats
- Most Engaged Brands on the Web
- Amazon buys Zappos
- Basketball in Washington: The Power Game
Development
- Getting in on Google Wave
- Sign up to test Google Wave
- Social Network Icon Pack
- 15 New jQuery Plugins to Help You Conquer the Web
Sites We've Launched This Week
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Go to our Development Blog to read about new technologies, techniques, and tutorials for developers and designers.
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Go to our Internet Marketing Blog for strategies and discussions on how to fully leverage your web presence.
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