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Giving the client what they need, not what they ask for April 10, 2008

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Just now I was buying a new domain name because of a misprint in my AXIS interview - it’s probably a common mistake, so it was worth the $7.

Anyway, there was an ad for some wannabe-posh restaurant on I-Drive - “Bola”. link

OK, seriously, who has a flash website that plays music? With late-90’s slideshows?

I also love that when I link to the “blog” - check out the design they chose for that. All of the posts on said blog have this huge text right below the title and right next to the very stale and infrequent date of the posts - “No Responses”.
No Responses

Way to go on the authenticity, D*****bags! It’s not the designer’s fault, there was a breakdown in communications. Somebody has also dropped the ball on doing a follow-up with the client once the dist settled.

If you really want to create a compelling experience on a website these days, I think the only option is to use video. If your restaurant is so “high-end”, hire a damn video crew to come out once in a while and throw THAT on your site - or maybe even your non-blog.

Check out some of the stuff MindComet is doing, for example. They don’t mess around. I can’t say I always love every site they put out, but they know their strengths. I definitely appreciate the need for experienced marketing folks working along side talented designers and developers. I don’t slight the person who created this project, they just had too many things to think about all at once.

I’ve recently been re-reading a book by one of my role models - Hillman Curtis. It’s called MTIV: Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer.

I actually had “New Media Developer” printed on my business cards for a while, and people would ask “What does that mean?” I’m sad to say I didn’t have a story for them at the time, but now I think I’d have a thing or two to say about it.

In MTIV (Making the Invisible Visible), Hillman, who is a world-renowned designer with clients like Adobe and bestselling bands on his client list, tells you how he gets his work done. In fact, all of his books are like that - he goes through his creative process. He’s got some steps, he identifies the goals at each step, and he gives lots of anecdotal support. He’s clearly been working at a very high level for a long time.

People who have read this book and really understand it would have never designed that site for BOLA - at least not in the last 18 months or so.

MTIV Here’s lesson 1 (implied) from the book for me: separate the technical requirements of the project from telling the story. As a team of one, when I go into the job, I always know I am going to have to turn around and implement these ideas once I get back to my text editor, so most times when I’m in a meeting with a client, my brain is already downloading Drupal modules and clicking checkboxes. At my new job, this isn’t so much of a problem, because my role during those meetings is to translate what the editorial folks or the PMs are asking of me into technical requirements, identify sticky points, and give them an estimate of how long this new awesome feature will take.

However, even at a job I had for a couple of weeks managing an online store for a print shop, I not only had to put my propeller hat on, but my marketing/customer/business hat on, and normally the propeller hat gets priority. That means I’m donating 40% at best to thinking “is this even a good idea, does this communicate the message, will visitors understand the story?”

Then a few weeks later, I’ve started writing code, laying out the homepage, or what have you, and it hits me - THIS SUCKS! Did I design this? Then I remind myself I’m “not a designer” (which is bollocks because I’m always calling myself a “front end guy”), and I come to terms with the reality of the situation. We’re not communicating effectively here, we’re masturbating and pretending the result was a web page.

How do we fix it? Drive back to Sanford, tell the client “I’m sorry Mike, I had my head up my ass when I designed this… will you pay me to fix my own mistakes?” Nobody is going to go for that! Sure, you can give them a spiel about ROI and conversions, and maybe wrapped in the warm fuzzy blanket of “SEO”, which might as well be voodoo and divination to most clients, you might even be able to convince them to spend 30% of the original budget doing what you really should have done in the first place, in 15% of the time, without your trusty subcontractors, in your spare time, just so you feel good about work that you’d already written off as “finished”.

No, you can’t fix it. Clients don’t go for maintenance contracts any longer. Most of them don’t even want to pay you for hosting, let alone support.

The ONLY solution is to do it right the first time. That means making checklists, getting your freelancer buddy support system to consult and make sure you’re not leaving any huge gaps (oh, you do have some sort of a peer support system, right?), and above all, making sure you understand what the client needs.

I’m only feeling the slightest bit hippocritical right now, and if you’ve worked with me in the past, and you’re quietly thinking I’m full of shit as you read this, consider this my formal apology for underdelivering. In most situations during my “freelance” (”slacker”) career, I didn’t put 110% to anything work-related, and it wasn’t until my “Tabula Rasa” day (Jan 17th, 2006), that I had even decided to push myself to improve, and it looks like it’s taken about 2 years and 3 months.

So, FullSail grads, budding New Media Designers and Developers, and folks that have been doing this “since the early days”, and are planning on making a concerted effort to create stunning work, every single time, even if it’s for half of your rent money, here are a couple of tips:

What a Week! August 31, 2007

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Exciting stuff, and I’m sure there’s more, like new podcasts with awesome interviews and awesome Internet TV too. There must be more getting tangled up in all the excitement. If you’d like to hear more about any of these endeavors, I’d be happy to chat. There are a dozen ways to contact me mentioned on my blog, so just pick one.

New Server April 8, 2007

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Earlier this week, I lost 3 months worth of email, to a problem as-of-yet undiagnosed. I had been meaning to get things moved over to our CervoSites hosting (it is our hosting reseller plan), but I was worried the transition wouldn’t be smooth… like maybe I would lose all my email!

I am now on the new server and email is running again, but if you sent any important email to < rprice AT ryanpricemedia.com > you’ll have to send it again, I don’t have it.

Moving over the wordpress and upgrading from 2.0.7 to 2.1.3 couldn’t have been easier, and now links and posts share taxonomy - very efficient.

I also made the switch (and redesign) for Blogging Fringe, mostly because we were on Detroit Creative’s servers, and their PHP version is old. Also, I’ve been getting free hosting for Liberatr podcasts with Jake for a year now, and it is time to renegotiate the sponsorship.

We’ve been hosting the Cervo Systems website on our own servers for months now, and a few weeks I will make that look all pretty and make podcasting/media the focus of the site, but I have too many contracts open right now to get to work on my own sites. However, I was told the other day to consider myself one of the people in Florida who knows more about Drupal forms and theming than just about anybody in the state (Kia would argue the SouthEast, but I have nothing to back that up). You can see for yourself once we start opening up Petentials a bit more… right now only about 50 people have access to the site. If you want to get on the beta list, email me and tell me why.

From the Vault: Cervo Guys 02 February 21, 2007

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This is a quick podcast Charlie and I recorded at Charlie’s home outside of St. Cloud. We are wondering about VOIP and why phone companies don’t have better audio.

Cervo Guys 02 - VOIP

From the Vault: Cervo Guys 01

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This is a quick podcast Charlie and I recorded at our regular Monday night Panera Bread meeting. We were rolling on the idea that restaurants and cafes should give props to podcasters for the free/cheap advertising.

Cervo Guys 01 - Restaurants

Temporary Insanity February 7, 2007

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Don’t ask me why, but I just wrote a song. I don’t write songs, but this one just kind of got stuck in my head and I didn’t know who to share it with, so i wrote it down - with chords and everything.

It’s about evil Starbuck’s Coffee and (partly) how it makes me run to the toilet.

I used my little Casio keyboard from like 20 years ago — if that doesn’t date me, what will? It still has all the stickers on the white keys with the little # and b in the corners. I tried to write a song on it last week and I realised it’s hard to write a song when you HAVE to… when that happens you should go to the PodSafe Music Network and grab a Swedish pop-punk band instead.

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There are also brand new episodes of Shrink your Ecological Footprint and You can’t spell crapface without PFA from this weekend posted. Those are two podcast talkshows I record with my friends, the first over Skype to Arizona, and the second locally in my living room with a sweet echo. (really)

On Sunday, I am getting jazzed up about having our #3 installment of Florida Creatives Happy Hour at the Copper Rocket starting after 3PM. Immediately before that is the Enzian’s #2 installment of the Indie Film Slam revival.

Tomorrow John Rife and I are getting together at Dandelion to talk about refreshing his videoblog a bit in anticipation of a major road trip (he will be phoning home every few days with a new video). We are planning on doing some Google Maps mashup stuff as well as the standard blogging/feeds thing. I am hoping to be able to get some microformats in there as well. I would like for John to be discoverable by people outside of Orlando who might happen by. I know YouTube has (some imitation of) geo-identification, but I don’t think it gets included in the search results. Tagging and research will help, and reciprocal links (as many as we can get). I hope John meets some bloggers along the way, and makes plenty of MySpace friends.

This will be a fun 3 months of online marketing blitz, especially considering that the location (not virtually, but physically) and focus of the content will be changing almost every day.

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Last but not least, the very talented Damien McKenna has been acting as my second set of hands this week, doing some work on a Drupal 5 site for a client. He just got this very spiffy and finally bug-free system going where you add an image (or several images) to your node (this one’s for a single project in a portfolio). Once you save the form, a module called imagecache auto-generates thumbnails for you. Last but not least, these images are munged into links to one of those spiffy AJAX image boxes, like lightbox or in this case thickbox.

The payoff? Instant photo gallery. Pats on the back for Damien.

If you’re still reading, thanks for enduring. I haven’t written many posts like this since my LiveJournal days. The last two I’ve done have been videos.

Mr. A for Effort 1/22 January 23, 2007

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I thought of doing a personal videoblog a long time ago, and I figured that I often give people too much credit just for trying, so I thought of calling it “Mr. A for Effort”. Check it out.

Did I Mention Florida Creatives? January 16, 2007

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Holy crap, kids. You know how to Happy Hour.

Most of these updates and things will be posted to the FloridaCreatives.com site, because I make a web page for everything. If I sneeze, I buy a domain name for that too.

Still, we had easily 40 people show up to the event last night, with lots of bloggers throwing in their two cents.

I got some video last night that I will hopefully be purposing to Orlando Scene TV. I am still trying to put together the first episode in my head… it always comes out like Rocketboom.

I hope to see all those people and more next month after Film Slam on the 11th.

Something to eMail Mom About December 29, 2006

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I’m sorry, but I really enjoy finding a web page I make on the first page of Google. Search for stardust videos and the 10th result as of now links to OrlandoVideo! The search for orlando video also puts us 4th right now.
I was on this particular search string because I am helping out the world by contributing to WiFinder.com, which is a modest site with modest Google Ads to support it that I saw on MyBlogLog (which I signed up for today).

Speaking of Ads, I tried to sign up Liberatr for Text Link Ads, but apparently I don’t have enough “juice” or “thrust” or whatever euphemism for power they employ at their site. I do like the free tool that lets you compare your site to another across a number of different categories, but I was disappointed about the denial by their algorithm for the ability to sell good ads on my site (for now).

In other software/blogging/web related news, Charles and I were testing out WordPress MU this week and we were disappointed by the not-as-easy-to-use-as-WordPress-ness of the thing. I guess when you are trying to run multiple blogs off a single install base you can expect some complexities, but I am still waiting for someone to collaborate with on writing a tool to run a podcast network or for the price of Blogsmith to come to a reasonable level.
I am excited about trying out my own videoblog as a way to get across some more complex thoughts through this site, and to add to the idea that this is now “Ryan Price vs. the Media”, or whatever I am calling the blog nowadays. Still, I applied to have a show on WPRK 91.5FM the other day and Charles is inquiring about writing a tech column for The Orlando Weekly. If anyone can help us get in front of some good eyeballs for that, leave a comment or use the email contact form at the top of the page (which is new in about the last 2 weeks or so).

Thanks, Florida Creatives! December 19, 2006

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We had our first Florida Creatives Happy Hour last night, and I must say it was a success.

Big thanks to Marc, Alex, Kathryn, Kait, Emily, Becky, Charles and Ryan (me).

Keep checking Florida Creatives for more details.

Quote of the evening by Becky Lane:

Blogging community?

The next event probably won’t be at Dexter’s, although that is a nice place if you don’t want to talk so much. Here is the list of suggestions so far: Crooked Bayou, Moonlight/Roccos?, Lk. Eola Wine Co., 310, Fiddler’s Green, 3/9, Tom & Jerry’s, Bull & Bush, Cleo’s, Cafe Tu Tu Tango.

Pretty soon there will be a Google Groups or a mailing list of some sort for getting out announcements, so stay tuned.