Domozych Media » Web Development

Fred Wilson on The Twitter Platform’s Inflection Point

wunruh — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 17:44:28 +0000

Fred Wilson says:

Here’s are some places where I think we might see these killer apps emerge:

Social Gaming – There have been a number of attempts to build social game experiences on Twitter. But I’m not aware of any successes of scale like we’ve had on the Facebook platform. I think we will see it emerge soon.

Verticals – We have some successes to point to here like Stocktwits for finance and Flixup for movies but this is a wide open opportunity in most verticals and we haven’t seen as much effort here as I’d have expected.

Enterprise – CoTweet comes to mind as well as the efforts that Salesforce has made to integrate Twitter. This is a huge opportunity.

Discovery – This is one area where there is a significant amount of effort. Hunch, Listorious, TweetMeme, Cadmus, WeFollow, and MrTweet all come to mind.

Analytics – While Twitter will obviously be delivering better analytics to its users, particularly its marketing and business users, I believe that there is always a market for third party analytics. Google Analytics is available for free and yet none of the large analytics providers have seen their businesses suffer. There is simply a voracious appetite for information on the Internet. So companies like bit.ly, Radian6, HubSpot, Scout Labs, and others have a bright future.

via The Twitter Platform’s Inflection Point.

Big media bends over to Apple’s iPad with HTML5 videos #HTML5 via/ @geekdotcom

wunruh — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 16:57:27 +0000

Determined to have its iPad show Flash videos right inside web pages, Apple has been working behind the scenes with the biggest sites on the web. As a result, a number of sites that serve Flash videos now cater specifically for the iPad with HTML5 videos. Meanwhile, Adobe responded by showcasing its Flash 10.1 player running on six major mobile devices, including webOS and Android devices.

As you know, Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs has been touring the biggest media outlest personally in the run-up to the iPad launch, trash-talking Adobe’s Flash. Looks like he has managed to persuade the likes of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times to begin feeding their videos via HTML5-compliant browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. The change required content creators to re-encode their videos using open codecs like Theora and H.264 (supported throughout Apple’s ecosystem) and reference them in web pages using HTML5’s tag.

via Big media bends over to Apple’s iPad with HTML5 videos – Cell Phones & Mobile Device Technology News & Updates | Geek.com.

Branding, Identity & Logo Design Explained

wunruh — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 16:45:58 +0000

There has been some recent discussion on the web about this topic, about your logo not being your brand. Although this may be true, I haven’t seen any clarification of the differences between ‘brand’, ‘identity’ and ‘logo’. I wish to rectify this.

What is brand? – The perceived emotional corporate image as a whole.

What is identity? – The visual aspects that form part of the overall brand.

What is a logo? – A logo identifies a business in its simplest form via the use of a mark or icon.

via Branding, Identity & Logo Design Explained.

Online Social Optimization

wunruh — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 11:01:50 +0000

Welcome to the first module in the Online Social Optimization course. This module is free to use, and you are welcome to share the tools and instructions as you see fit.

via Module 0: Your Basic Toolkit | Online Social Optimization.

NO!SPEC » Why Speculation Hurts

wunruh — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 03:12:09 +0000

Speculative design work is an attempt to force inspiration without the benefit of experience. None of the designers are allowed the opportunity to get to know you and your business. They aren’t allowed the time to examine your market and industry. They simply lack the necessary data too allow them to make good, informed decisions about your marketing.

The result is that the designers are forced to develop ideas based upon their own personal experiences and preconceptions about you and your company. Without any research, or discussions with you to guide them, their ideas become less about substance and more about style.

via NO!SPEC » Why Speculation Hurts.

Who Owns the Rights to a Graphic Work?

wunruh — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 04:07:01 +0000

Question:

Copyright for Graphic Designers – Who Owns the Copyright to a Graphic Work?

Answer:

Unless otherwise specified in a contract, the graphic designer retains the right to his or her creations, and should always attempt to do so. When designing a work for a client, you are also selling specific rights to use it. Copyright laws protect against additional use without proper compensation or agreement.

For example: You design a logo for use on a specific product package for a cosmetics company. The company likes it so much that they decide to extend its use across their entire product line. You should be paid for this additional use, as it increases the value of the graphic work you created. For this reason, be sure to include in your contracts what the work can and cannot be used for.

Sources:

“The Graphic Artists Guild Handbook: Pricing and Ethical Guidelines.” Eleventh Edition. Graphic Artists Guild, Inc. 2003.

via Who Owns the Rights to a Graphic Work?.

Content Management Systems Explained

wunruh — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 14:39:30 +0000

Content Management Systems we support are robust, widely-supported by the development community, powerful, and free to own (open-source). Once we install, design, and modify a system, we train you on how to keep your site up to date and current with content you add anytime!

WordPress- once for blogs, now excels for any dynamic site! Easy to Use!
Joomla- powerful web presence system, create a community online!
Zencart- top notch, extremely powerful online shopping cart/store!
Gallery- photographer’s best friend, create and sell multimedia easily!
MediaWiki- like wikipedia? Make your own Wiki, great for instructions!
phpBB- the classic online bulletin board, your own web forum!
Moodle- educational web presence. Easily get your classes online!
Pligg- social media center, great for sharing links and info

Click Here for a General Price List on Our Services.

A Test Image – Tokyo Subway Map

wunruh — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 04:57:00 +0000

Website Design and Competitive Keyword Analysis

wunruh — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:32:21 +0000

Here at Domozych Media we understand that building web sites is more than just designing a beautiful web page. Web sites are information humans find interesting and a space for search engines indexing the content itself, creating a semantic map of relevance for potential searchers.

At the same time, a website should bring the real world branding image in line with the larger web presence. Creating content that will attract traffic and links can take time, and often there is something of a sandbox effect that is overlayed across new domains by the search engines until they’ve determined the site’s value against the backdrop of the internet as a whole.

When you contact us, we’ll begin by discussing with you what your needs are–do you want to offer services, sell products, or simply create an informative site highlighting your business? If you are an artist, are you wanting a digital portfolio space you can easily update? If you are a musician, perhaps you’d like to sell .mp3s and ringtones, or have a calendar where you can update performance dates.

No matter what your needs, we can identify the most likely search terms people will use to find your information, then work the content and the layout of your site around specific keyword phrases that align with those terms. There are a number of ways to do this, and I have years of experience in efficiently and precisely identifying what people are searching for in any given keyword sector. The content is as important as the form and function if your site is going to be seen by the people who are searching for what you have to offer, which is why Andrew and I work together on each aspect of any given project.

Once the competitive keyword analysis is complete, I provide Andrew with a map of the most valuable terms which he uses to structure the site itself. From there, I work with him to find the best configuration of unique text that emphasizes your services, products, and information. This information architecture underlies the site from the very beginning, so as you grow you know you’re organically adding to a semantically relevant backbone in a direction that won’t decrease your relevance over time.

Also, the competitive analysis will show exactly what your competitors online are doing, and often will reveal points of differentiation where you can leverage your unique strengths against their existing sites. Obviously, this blog piece can only deal with the more abstract nature of keyword analysis, and every site design will be different, but some very basic principles are universal. If you’d like to know more about the research and optimization aspects of website design, web presence, and social media in general, my longer report entitled ‘Quaint Media and Today’s Memetic Ecology’ is available to read for free and you can contact us directly using the form below:

[contact-form]

Podcast: Designing for Maximum Compatibility

wunruh — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 13:41:47 +0000

Today’s podcast (which you can listen to using the player at the bottom of this post, or by downloading directly) is the beginning of a number of podcasts which will highlight how we focus on building sites people can easily use, without confusion. At the end of the day, your website is a solution to a specific concern, that of connecting with people who are interested in what you have to offer. Creating a space where people can learn about your services, products, and brand is the purpose behind putting your site up online.

While this podcast discusses the compatibility issues that arise with flash specifically, we will also be explaining how interactivity can be created using simpler approaches which emphasize your content rather than relying on the bells and whistles of over-the-top animations and flash intro screens. While there are a lot of useful ways to use flash in a website, often relying on graphics and interactivity can limit who is able to use your site. This is something we strive to avoid.

Instead, we explain in today’s audio how the technological changes in browsers and the upcoming advances in html itself are creating new opportunities in how web design can frame content, and how we at Domozych Media are preparing our clients to meet the coming revolution in mobile commerce.

Here are a few related articles on this, from the excellent blog Web Design Ledger:

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email us using the form below and we will happily address your questions in upcoming podcasts.

[contact-form]

A Quick Look at Simple Customizations for WordPress Themes

wunruh — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:34:46 +0000

In the video below, I show you how I switched the theme on my blog, then performed a little bit of theme customization to remove the categories and tags underneath the posts on the front page.

If you cannot see the video, you can download the high-quality .mov file or watch it on youtube. This is only a quick example of the kind of in-depth customization we can perform at Domozych Media, and highlights the flexibility of the WordPress interface. If you’d like to contact us regarding your own site, you can do so using this form.

[contact-form]

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and You

wunruh — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:59:30 +0000

Yesterday we introduced the very first Domozych Media podcast. Today we wanted to talk a little bit about Really Simple Syndication, or ‘RSS’, and how it can help your site not only maintain an audience, but actually grow your web presence. Here’s a link to our feed validation results which show our podcast feed is easily readable across any RSS reader. And here’s a link to our actual RSS feed. When we build a fully functional site for you, there’s a number of feeds which will be accessible and we will be able to repurpose those feeds across a number of other third-party sites, some of which I highlighted in an earlier post.

For today’s example I want to focus on the site FriendFeed, #18 on that list of 67 social media networking sites, a site which was recently acquired by the larger social network Facebook. Here you can see the FriendFeed site for the book The Art of Memetics, which incorporates a number of different RSS feeds from several different sources. Being able to combine RSS feeds from your dynamic pages, such as those produced through the blog’s content management structure, or those pages created as you add new products to your shopping cart, creates an additional RSS feed which can then be folded into the front page of your site, or republished on a dedicated Twitter profile, or reused across any one of those other ‘lifestream’ style social networks that are listed on that previous post.

RSS began over a decade ago as RDF, but within a few months was renamed. It remained a somewhat obscure use of XML until blogging became a widespread approach to content management, at which point RSS adoption grew and the competitor Atom also drove developer’s interest in designing cross-compatible readers that regular people (i.e., non-techies) could easily configure to keep up to date with news and information from their favorite sites. Take a moment to review the history of RSS on wikipedia if you’d like to learn more.

Today, every major browser incorporates an RSS reader, and there are a number of stand-alone RSS readers as well. Sites like Yahoo and Google incorporate RSS readers on their home pages, and software, such as iTunes, relies on RSS to keep up to date with podcasts. Updating your static site to incorporate RSS feeds can help you to maintain an audience over time, as well as provide an avenue for you to announce specials or updates to your products or services.

If you have questions, or would like to contact us to remodel or design your web site, you should send us an email using the form below.

[contact-form]

Domozych Media Updates

wunruh — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 16:19:38 +0000

Andrew and I have been working together to produce the most flexible, cross-compatible solutions for ourselves and our clients in the Albany, NY area. Domozych Media will work with any specific client-type, from non-profit through to a larger business. We strive to create an attractive, user-friendly site/application specifically for maximizing customer experience or whatever intended results you require.

We’re updating this site with more information and extensive demos to showcase some of the techniques we can bring to your project. Be sure to read our About Us page to learn more, and stop by our Portfolio page to see some of the sites we have constructed and maintain. We work with open-source products and create our own modular web sites using licensed software. Take a look at our demo shopping cart, which can easily be configured to work with your products, be they digital or physical.

Building on the back of open-source software like WordPress and Zen-Cart means we can access the vast community resources to address and troubleshoot and given situation. This blog is run on a WordPress framework with a few specialized plug-ins and a great deal of web customization. Our shopping cart is a secured install of Zen-Cart, and can be customized in a number of visual ways and integrated with PayPal or your preferred payment vendor.

Information marketers can create and maintain newsletters and autoresponders through a customized shopping cart, or we can integrate your own email sign-up forms with non-intrusive javascript pop-ups, like this one demonstrated on our site, to highlight site news. Musicians with a fully installed Zen-Cart can sell .mp3s or give them away for free directly to their fans, without paying fees or royalties. Literally any digital media can be marketed directly through on of our sites.

We work with you to design the most effective approach for your specific needs. If you’d like to contact us for a consultation, simply let us know in this email form:

[contact-form]

Web Design for Internet Marketing

wunruh — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:17:09 +0000

It’s not a secret in the internet marketing world that web design needs to be simple, flexible, and fast. Our tableless approach creates exquisite squeeze pages to harness cross-compatible accessibility on any internet-ready device. Sony mylos, Palm Pilots, Blackberry phones, iPhones, Wiis, Xboxes, and Playstations, netbooks – if you can use it to surf the net, you can read a squeeze page and landing page we built.

Successful sales pages online are different from web structures built for internal networks. Joint venture partnerships are driven by email marketing. Below is a borrowed image, taken from Flickr and used under the creative commons license (something I wrote about on this blog previously), which can be seen as an array of ‘touch-points’ to find potential leads using a social network:

At the center of this hub is where you want to be able to communicate your brand message, your internet presence, with the support of a flexible infrastructure that can be adapted to each of your offers. Internet marketing moves at a different pace than the quaint world of traditional media, brick and mortar office hours. The internet is global, and open, and accessible everywhere – with the right web design, and the right marketing architecture in place, you can be too.

[contact-form]

What’s your plan for long-term growth?

wunruh — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:53:24 +0000

Earlier today this article appeared on my inbox:

Research has shown that mental stimulation similar to the stimulation that occurs in individuals who frequently use the Internet may affect the efficiency of cognitive processing and alter the way the brain encodes new information.

The article went on to say that

searching online may be a simple form of brain exercise that might be employed to enhance cognition in older adults

That it in effect promotes the development of connections that didn’t previously exist within their brains. That’s amazingly powerful stuff – the Internet can actually rewire your brain – and if you’re online now, you’ve already experienced this!

Neurological networks mimic brain patterns – the same can be said for cities, as researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute across the Hudson River have shown recently. It also happens to be the best way to construct a web presence for maximum outgrowth potential. That’s the approach with Domozych Media. We build a web presence that targets multiple channels while balancing maximum compatibility concerns.

We have most of the beta site up now, you can see some of our existing portfolio and clientele, and more is on the way.

[contact-form]

Contact us directly through Email

admin — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:11:17 +0000

[contact-form]

Online Social Optimization and Lifestream Toolsets

wunruh — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 15:15:38 +0000

I’ve written about when I started using Twitter, and my current list of Twitter profiles may seem excessive, but that’s only the start of my digital footprint. The purpose behind the different profiles becomes more evident as you see the way it is tied into my FriendFeed and Tumblr profiles, and I’ve even developed a wordpress site designed to capture and recombine all these feeds into an auto-posting system so anyone who wants can track my personal shadow as my attention moves through this digital space. I’ve done this for a number of other clients as well, and I’ve found that this background layer of constant updates has helped sculpt their online presence over time, organically generating a significant body of associated data around their online identities.

Tac Anderson calls this ‘Being a Social Media Ninja’ and his blog post explains how he set up this very same approach for Microsoft Store, although he relies on Posterous as the primary lifestream hub for Microsoft rather than a private wordpress install. What’s most important, though, is that you find a way to approach a lifestream that is best for you and that incorporates the keyword phrases, the social media, and the organic reputation structure you want to associate yourself, your company, and your brand with over time.

Online social optimization is something I’ve been studying for years, beginning with a grounding in early social issues that arose from email and chat rooms and progressing into a life-long study of memetics and belief patterns in social bodies that form both online and off. Socially optimized behaviors manifest in many, many different ways. Today’s digitally enhanced social body can perform intricate social action with a remarkably low-level entry point into the group’s organizing network. The implications of this are far-reaching, and over time the transformation this has had on social issues and a philosophy of governance will become more apparent.

My focus has been on understanding the reasons why one tool is chosen over another, and what trends can be anticipated over time. Working closely with Andrew here at Domozych Media has allowed me to find ways to maximize this knowledge base and adapt it to real world branding concerns. Social media is easily the most powerful direct response mechanism ever conceived, and properly used it will invigorate companies, political campaigns, even the entertainment industry. I began by working closely with musicians, artists, theatre troupes, and independent film producers, and that ongoing collaboration led Edward Wilson and I to write ‘The Art of Memetics,’ a DIY guide to effective word of mouth marketing using social networks both online and off.

The experience of self-publishing and distributing this book led to the formulation of an approach to marketing I labeled ‘OSO’ – or ‘Online Social Optimization’ – which encompasses three interrelated fields, online reputation management or ORM, search engine optimization or SEO, and social media optimization or SMO. The principle is simple – each of these three fields overlaps the next, and by approaching each situation through a holistic, top-down view rather than the more narrow adherence to one methodology over another, a more successful organic structure can be built for longer-lasting results and greater communicative reach throughout society.

Using lifestream technologies online is one of the trends I predicted early on, and the development of these mashups of social networks, social media, and status update trackers has exploded over the last few months. Friendfeed, Posterous, and Tumblr are three great examples of this kind of lifestream application, although we’re now seeing more and more social networks incorporating lifestreams into their own networking features. We are skilled at web development which incorporates this kind of technology to best position you in your respective field.

If you’d like to learn more, feel free to contact us with the form below:

[contact-form]

Podcast: How Site Navigation Strategy Increases Website Traffic

wunruh — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 13:20:10 +0000

In this podcast, Andrew and I discuss how we discover the most applicable site navigation structure based on keyword analysis. In creating a web site, every aspect of the site is important. Here we discuss why this is, and provide a few pointers on how to break out of the traditional web design.

This is a bonus podcast, in response to a question, and you can play it using the player at the bottom of this page, or download the .mp3 directly to your computer or device. Look for our next podcast on search engine optimization next week, and don’t hesitate to contact us at 518-595-9734 if you’d like a website remodeling consultation.

Domozych Media » Web Development

Fred Wilson on The Twitter Platform’s Inflection Point

Further Reading

Big media bends over to Apple’s iPad with HTML5 videos #HTML5 via/ @geekdotcom

Further Reading

Branding, Identity & Logo Design Explained

Further Reading

Online Social Optimization

Further Reading

NO!SPEC » Why Speculation Hurts

Further Reading

Who Owns the Rights to a Graphic Work?

Further Reading

Content Management Systems Explained

Further Reading

A Test Image – Tokyo Subway Map

Further Reading

Website Design and Competitive Keyword Analysis

Further Reading

Podcast: Designing for Maximum Compatibility

Further Reading

A Quick Look at Simple Customizations for WordPress Themes

Further Reading

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and You

Further Reading

Domozych Media Updates

Further Reading

Web Design for Internet Marketing

Further Reading

What’s your plan for long-term growth?

Further Reading

Contact us directly through Email

Further Reading

Online Social Optimization and Lifestream Toolsets

Further Reading

Podcast: How Site Navigation Strategy Increases Website Traffic

Further Reading