3000K, Inc. is pleased to announce the launch of our sister company, 3SidedBox. 3SidedBox will offer tools to give you greater insight into your business- and make you more productive, efficient, and profitable.
More at the 3SidedBlog.
After going through a few template revisions of a web application we’ve been developing, I became stuck. I just couldn’t get the interface to look like it was supposed to be used the way it was intended. The issue was that the interface was a set of tabs, each containing form fields, organized by columns. The challenge was to make the interface, which was basically a spreadsheet, to feel not so spreadsheet-like.
The ‘Ah-ha!’ moment came when I realized what it was we were really trying to achieve with the interface, on a very basic level. We were organizing tabular data, so the solution really became quite obvious. Instead of ‘divs’ and ’spans’, organize the interface using ‘tables’.
Reuters, the big international news wire service, announced yesterday that it’s opening a new news bureau. Ho hum, right? Maybe not. It’s opening that news bureau in Linden, the home of Second Life, which is an online video game (more or less).
A new bureau in a video game.
Reuters, a major international company probably not much disposed to flights of fancy or having their employees waste time on video games while at work, has assigned one reporter, full time, to cover the news and events going on in this world (it’s more of a world, really, than a video game. It’s an online simulation of real life).
This might seem a bit weird, or even irrelevant to your business, but it’s not. Second Life, you see, has ties to real-world companies and real-world dollars. In fact, according to the Second Life website nearly US$500,000 is spent in the in-game economy each day. Those are not virtual dollars, but real ones that users deposit to purchase in-game items like houses, investments, and consumer goods from real-world business.
Proposed Start Date: Oct. 22, 2006
3000k, Inc., a leading interaction agency in Worcester, MA, is seeking a brand-focused interactive designer with agency experience for a full-time Creative Director position, available immediately. We need someone who lives by high-style, highly effective design. Your work will directly impact our efforts with a rapdily growing client list, our Web 2.0 projects, and the long-term success of our company. Read: you’re going to matter here and make a difference.
If that sounds like you, submit a copy of your resume and portfolio to employment@3000k.com.
Proposed Start Date: Oct. 16, 2006
3000k, Inc., a leading interaction agency in Worcester, MA, is seeking an outstanding candidate for a full-time web programming position, available immediately. We need someone who lives by code, loves PHP and MySQL, and is interested in cutting edge technologies like AJAX and Ruby on Rails. Your work will directly impact our efforts with multiple Web 2.0 projects (we know - forgive the term) and the long-term success of our company. Read: you’re going to matter here and make a difference.
If that sounds like fun - and trust us, it is - submit a copy of your resume and portfolio to employment@3000k.com.
We’re sorry to say that Jim Faris is leaving 3000k on Sept. 22.
Jim has served for 3-plus years as our creative director, making websites beautiful, graphics crisp, sharp, and appealing, and clients happy. He’s leaving us for the proverbial offer you can’t refuse (including bigger bags of cash than we can give him) and, in a few months, to follow his wife, a National Gaurd recruiter, as she is transferred to the Washington, DC area.
Jim has played a tremendous role in helping to transform 3000k from, as he likes to say, “a few guys in a room” into a thriving, high-style agency.
We’re sorry to see him go, but wish him all the best at his new position, and in his new home when that time comes.
We are, of course, immediately looking for a new creative director. We’re scheduling interviews with candidates already and will be posting the job opening here and in the usual place soon.
Our next creative director, whoever it is, will continue the design and usability tradition Jim has helped establish and will help 3000k reach even greater achievements and continue to serve our customers with the responsiveness, creativity, and style they deserve.
HCR Group is an employee benefits and human resources consulting company that helps small and medium-sized businesses better provide benefits to their employees to increase employee satisfaction and retention and reduce costs.
When HCR Group came to us, they had different branding for different divisions of the company that confused customers and reduced marketing effectiveness. They were also unhappy with both logos and brands.
They tasked us to unify their branding by developing a new logo and brand. We delivered a modern, light, person-focused logo and brand, seen on their website.
To support this new branding, we developed a new corporate identity system: business cards, letterhead, envelopes, brochures, and a folder.
We also developed a new website to wrap the package up and drive new prospects to them. As anyone who has dealt with an HR department knows, they are piled high with stacks of paper, sticky notes, and paperclips. We carried this design motif through the website design.
When discussing search engine placement and marketing options with clients and prospects, we’re often asked “How can I get into the Top 10 results at Google?” or “Can you guarantee me placement?”
The short answer to both questions is the same: “No company can guarantee you specific placement in search engines.”
Our colleagues in the web development and marketing worlds probably already know this, but clients often don’t and it’s not said often enough by people selling search placement and marketing.
In the interest of conserving your time, I’ll refer you to these resources on search engine basics - Wikipedia’s Search Engine Placement entry and Search Engine Watch - and say this: Any business that guarantees you a specific search engine ranking is either not telling whole the truth or not showing you the caveats in their offering.
This is because “natural” or “organic” search results are determined by a secret formula used by search engines. Since each engine’s formula is secret, there’s no way anyone can guarantee a particular placement using it. Search engines make this even trickier by tweaking their formulae regularly (some as often as monthly).
Even though search positioning is a moving target, that doesn’t mean that it’s fumbling in the dark. The industry knows some things that search engines look at to rank sites (just not how much weight each element is given). These things include: how long a site has been online, the quality of the code, the frequency of updates, the text of the site, links to the site from other sites, and, though less so for Google these days, meta tags.
Even with this knowledge, search placement and marketing is more art than science. A campaign to achieve great natural search placement takes time, usually months or more. Search engine placement is an ongoing process that requires tweaking text and links, generating new links at other sites, experimenting with new techniques, and more. It’s not something you can do just once.
Search engine placement and marketing is a complex task. And it can pay huge dividends for your business. But be aware: when someone is telling you just what you want to hear about it - that you can get the ranking you want, guaranteed, and that it will happen quickly - back away. They can’t really deliver what you need.
P.S. - There is one way to come closer to a solid guarantee of placement in search results. That’s by paying for placement using pay-per-click ads (a great tool, by the way). More on those another time.
As a client, you should always be sure to keep your web agency informed about your marketing plans, no matter if they’re online or offline. I’m thinking about that this week thanks to one of our clients.
This client is planning a new online marketing campaign that could drive 100,000 users or more to their website over the course of just a few days. Terrific for the client, right? In some ways - but not so terrific if the load of all that traffic causes their website to be slow, or worse, to crash.
Throwing 100,000 new users at a site on a given day or in a week is a lot of new traffic. Not being able to plan for extra capacity for that kind of thing, especially on a shared server, can easily lead to disaster.
Luckily, our client mentioned this to us before they started the ad campaign and we’ve been able to create contingency plans to ensure that no matter how well this campaign goes, their site can handle the load and neither they nor any other clients will be negatively affected.
This situation, though, is a prime example of how important it is for clients to keep their web agencies in the loop about their marketing initiatives, no matter what medium those campaigns are taking place in.
If, for instance, this client hadn’t mentioned the situation to us, it could have caused serious problems and we would have been left scrambling to fix them after the fact, rather than planning for them ahead of time.
By letting your web agency know what you’re planning, they’ll be able to ensure that things flow smoothly and that a crashed server doesn’t interfere with the effectiveness of your campaign. Even better, they may be able to help increase the effectiveness of that campaign. There are techniques that web agencies can use to help better track difficult-to-measure media like radio or print (we use these techniques with a number of clients to great success) and to convert more visitors driven to the site by the campaign.
Bottom line? When you’re planning a big new marketing initiative or other business change, make sure that everyone who needs to know about it does - in your departments, at your marketing company, and at your web agency.
We’ve been conducting an experiment this summer: we had our first ever intern. And today we say goodbye to the Inaugural 3000K Intern, Marcus Ohanesian.
Marcus came to us from UMass Lowell, where he’s majoring in graphic design.
This summer he’s helped us with site design, testing major new client applications, building complex database-driven sites, research for client strategies, and generally helping out wherever needed.
We’d never taken on an intern before because we felt we didn’t have the bandwith in our schedules to supervise someone or give them the training we wanted to give to make the internship truly valuable for them.
As we entered this spring, we felt that perhaps we were ready for an intern and decided to give it a shot. And we’re glad we did. It’s been a great experience for us - and hopefully for him - and we’re sorry to see him go.
He returns to UMass Lowell where he’ll be a senior this fall and to his freelance web development company Perfect Evolution Studios.
Good luck Marcus!
