The Content Crunch: Setting Your Project Up For Success

We focus on content management systems here at Trinity Applied Internet, but we are constantly reminded that for our clients, the system is not the difficult part when putting together a website redesign. (Probably, that’s because they are relying on us to work the magic.) The system, the code, custom plug-ins and even (to an extent) the design and user interface are usually relatively easy compared to… that’s right… generating the content itself.

In fact, we have worked with some outstanding organizations and businesses that, despite having an awesome story to tell, have no writers, no time, or no inspiration to get the story down on the page.  I understand their plight, having agonized for days over exactly what to write this blog post about, and how to write it.

The key to the success of your new website, depending on its goals and purposes, is probably writing some solid copy that will engage your audience and leave them wanting more. (More product. More information. More of your smiling face or your stellar services. ) This takes time, technique, and at best some experience. And while it is tempting to say it takes talent, the truth is it takes very little talent and can be learned over time.

The Content Crunch Part A, Step 1: Make the Time

So, you are designing a new website for your company. You have a list of features and functionality you need, you have completed your branding, you have plans for both online and offline campaigns to drive traffic and be supported by the website, synergistically. Now, you need to take some time out and plan for, collect and craft your content. We urge the companies we work with to do this during the few weeks or months when we are heads-down coding. We, or your developer of choice, will be busy working on things that won’t be ready for review for a while; you can be busy sharpening your pencil and crafting that content!

The Content Crunch Part A, Step 2: Assign The Right Resource(s)

Your company may have a marketing department, you might be lucky enough to have an agency, or it might all be up to you, as the owner, executive director, or team member who drew the short straw. We have a content team that can be contracted to write your copy, if that’s helpful. But in any case, someone is going to sit down and begin writing and it will be easier, faster and smoother for everyone (your audience included) if your staff or contract resource is the right resource. If you love to write, are excited about the prospect, and can spend a little time reading up on web copywriting –then go for it, you’ll do great! If (and we see this every few months or so) you break into a cold sweat at the prospect and suddenly it feels like you are back in the eighth grade with a big report due, then you are probably not the right resource for this task. Trust me. It will be agony for you, and probably not turn out very well.

Make sure you know who is going to write this (preferably before you start a single thing), and take care that that person or team is the best person or team available to you. Setting your project up for success by attending to these two (easy! simple!) tasks will jumpstart the process and have you just that much closer to some outstanding web content.

Thanks for reading. Next month…The Content Crunch Part B: Getting Past the Blank Page.

Social Media Tracking Application for the Old Spice Campaign

We love our jobs. As part of our daily course of business, we get the opportunity to work with some wonderful clients, provide solutions to solve some of their tough problems, and generally make things better for them. Some of the work is not very glamorous, but we are here to get the essential important stuff done for our customers – not grab headlines. Last week, we got the chance to work on something that was challenging, fun, and a little crazy in its reach. We built an application (overnight) to display data about the current Old Spice online campaign, and got a huge response. It does not get much more fun and exciting than that.

If you are not familiar with the re-vamped Old Spice brand and their innovative use of social media channels, let me give a brief synopsis. Last year, Old Spice hired the “Old Spice Guy” to promote their new products. Their agency (Weiden + Kennedy) created a series of fanciful commercials with the Old Spice Guy.  The campaign moved online with a series of YouTube videos,  posted as responses to users asking questions (both famous and not famous) on social media channels like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. For a more in-depth description, head over to Mashable or Digital Buzz.

This year Old Spice‘s online campaign involved a YouTube based battle of words between Fabio (yep, that Fabio) and the Old Spice Guy. Fabio was attempting to usurp the title of New Old Spice Guy, and Old Spice Guy rose to defend it. You can still watch the story unfold on their YouTube channel.

After watching the first day of the campaign, we decided to build an application that tabulated mentions of Fabio and Old Spice Guy (and related terms) across five social media channels (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, and Digg.) We displayed which character had more mentions (as well as made a worm graph of the trending in real time) ostensibly to figure out who was “winning.” You can view it here.

We blatantly stole some of the design elements off of Old Spice’s YouTube channel (they didn’t mind, apparently) to make our site identify with the campaign, then Pat went to work furiously coding the entire database application working well into the night. (He can do that, he lives in the Land of the Midnight Sun.)

The next day we crossed out fingers, and Tweeted out the application’s URL to Old Spice. Old Spice must have liked it, because they tweeted it out to their followers and posted it on Facebook.

We got 25,000+ unique visitors in one day. As a thank you the Old Spice Guy even made us a video. How awesome is that?

Despite their response making us a little giddy–

(I mean, this campaign made some big waves in our industry last year, and here they are, Tweeting and posting to YouTube about us!)

– we got a lot more out of this than a video. We demonstrated working with large amounts of data coming from different sources, creating data-crunching applications quickly and with creativity, handling irregular and enormous traffic surges, and enhancing an existing social media campaigns.

And, we had a great time. Thank you Old Spice, for a great opportunity.

Projects and Launches, Launches and Projects

We’re busy as bees here at Trinity Applied Internet.  It’s all we can do to login and give you an update now and then. Here’s the short version:

Recent Launches

www.tmcworkingsolutions.org — A hardworking, non-profit microlender in the Bay Area, TMC Working Solutions needed a more professional look and a much more robust content management system.  Content Gadget and a simple CSS template did the trick.

www.kps3.com — Our long time agency partners, KPS|3 Marketing, have completely revamped their website, incorporating some whimsical Flash (created by 9MM Media), tons of great content, multimedia elements, and our very own Content Gadget.  Their blog is really outstanding, too.

Coming Soon

Trinity Applied Internet — It isn’t just a rumor, we have a new site on the way.  Our problem is, we keep focusing on our clients’ work while our own is relegated to the back burner.   We suppose that’s certainly not a problem from our clients’ perspective (in fact we call that “by design”) — so we don’t apologize.

Reynolds National Center for Courts and Media — On the heels of the UNR Reynolds School of Journalism, its sister organization will be unveiling their new site this month. We loved the name of their last conference, by the way: “FYI, LOL or OMG? – Technology’s Impact on the Courts and Media”

Server Technology — This locally based company is a global leader in manufacturing power distribution management equipment, and their home page redesign is going to reflect their success, stature and service.

Exciting New Starts

We are proud to announce that Trinity Applied Internet has been contracted by Gnomon, Inc. to fulfill the graphic design and custom Joomla/Google Maps components for a new State Historic Preservation Office site.  Watch this space for more information on a really fun project that promotes historical tourism here in our Silver State.

Estipona Group has selected Trinity Applied Internet to build the new Arts 4 Nevada website, incorporating their vibrant and expansive new design with Content Gadget and custom calendar management, e-mail push, and other database-driven applications.

Buzz you later –

Keith and Erin

Announcing the Redesigned Reynolds School of Journalism Website

Today marks the public launch of the Reynolds School of Journalism’s newly redesigned website.  Trinity Applied Internet has been working with RSJ over the course of almost a year — to define goals and requirements, to imagine and design online applications to make department operations easier, and to incorporate multimedia and cutting-edge publishing technology to feature student and faculty work.  Suffice to say, we are proud of this work.

The graphic design was provided by the Estipona Group, and numerous members of the faculty provided strategy, review, and feedback along the way.  This project also owes a special thank-you to Professor Donica Mensing, who managed the complete refresh of all their content and populated data into all the new applications.

The website features our Content Gadget content management system, and five substantial custom database applications that manage everything from News and Events, to Faculty Pages, Scholarship Applications and the semester Course Schedule.  Prospective Students, Undergraduates, Graduate Students, Alumni and Parents each have sections of content organized and tailored directly to them.  Perhaps most importantly, the School has ample area on the site to publish student work.  The development was crafted to allow for fluid expansion and to be completely supported by staff members.

Projects like these don’t happen without a great committee. Trinity Applied Internet would like to express our sincere appreciation to everyone at the Reynolds School, including Dean Jerry Ceppos, Director of Alumni Relations Kristin Ghiggeri-Burgarello, and Professors Rosemary McCarthy, Bob Felten, Larry Dailey, Donica Mensing and Howard Goldbaum.   The committee was a pleasure to work with, and we wish them the best as they roll into 2009 with a new online presence.

Nevada Humanities Adopts Content Gadget to Manage Their Website

Trinity Applied Internet recently had the honor of working with an organization that qualifies as a state treasure.  Nevada Humanities is the non-profit organization that has been bringing Chautauqua to the Truckee Meadows, and now southern Nevada as well, for more than 15 years. With seven core  programs and a substantial annual grant-making commitment, Nevada Humanities has been a part of hundreds of state events and initiatives in the humanities, arts, culture and history disciplines.  In fact, they are also the sponsoring organization and editorial body for the Online Nevada Encyclopedia, which features some of the most interesting Nevada lore and images on the web today. (Check out the “Vegas Then and Now” interactive feature.  We hear there may be some Reno/Sparks images up there soon!)

The organization makes very good use of a small number of staff, so manually updating their comprehensive website content in HTML was at best time-prohibitive, and at worst, a real pain.  Board member Edward Estipona had already provided them with a solid visual design, but keeping up with the large volume of information, applications, forms and documents, events, and new video and other media, was becoming very difficult.  Trinity Applied Internet took the existing site design and wrapped it around our Content Gadget content management system, installing tools that would allow their staff to manage documents, publish events, and even load photography into their jQuery banner, all from a secure online administrative interface.

We hope Nevada Humanities is as happy with their new website engine as we were to be working with such an esteemed organization.  Thank you, Nevada Humanities!

Announcing PDUsdirect.com

Trinity Applied Internet is proud to announce today’s launch of PDUsdirect.com.  The website is an e-commerce solution for Server Technology, a global supplier of power distribution and management equipment for data centers, headquartered in Reno.  PDU’s Direct is the first TAI-developed website to utilize a new, customized Ruby on Rails content management system, and features a robust database solution that manages a bounty of technical product information with simplicity and ease.  The site also sports online chat support, merchant gateway, shipping calculations, a custom Ruby shopping cart, and quite a few other internal bells and whistles.

TAI is excited to have been given the opportunity to develop this project for Server Technology, a company which also has been honored this week with the first Northern Nevada Technology Company of the Year Award given by NCET.   Congratulations, Server Technology, and cheers — here’s to a great response and a healthy return on investment from PDUsdirect.com!

Content Gadget 2.5 Arrives

Trinity Applied Internet has been working hard on a little gem we call Content Gadget.  (That’s the database driven application that allows a client to maintain their website content, images, user data, meta-information and keywords from their own web interface.)  While most of our clients require quite a bit of customization, we have been working on developing a standard platform that will be a solid solution for many websites.  Well, ta da! We are one giant leap closer to that with what we are calling version 2.5. (And really not that far away from 3.0 — which to us, is really exciting.)

After hearing feedback from users of content management systems as diverse as Content Gadget, Joomla!, and DotNetNuke, Keith had a ton of ideas brewing around how to make the system as easy as possible to use.   His primary concern was building all the different components (modules, tools) to be utilized intuitively.  All the elements use the same vocabulary of drop down menus and fillable fields in order to make the users’ experience consistent throughout the system.

This is especially important for those clients who also have heavy-duty applications that have been custom-built for their site.  A client could have a lot to deal with, between managing the content, culling and responding to lead gen data, and maintaining special business applications such as password protected white-papers and financial reporting.  We feel you should not have to be a qualified DBA or other IT professional to maintain and utilize your website, so we’re making it as simple and elegant as possible to learn the system.  Clients without all the custom applications should find the changes make their administration even easier.

If you have questions, ideas or comments about your CMS, give us a call.

Trinity Applied Internet Launches Nevada Immunization Coalitions Website

Ta Da!  This past September, Trinity Applied Internet completed the redesign for the Nevada Immunization Coalitions website — www.immunizenevada.org.  The launch happened to coincide with a very busy time of year for NIC, the start of the traditional school term and beginning of flu shot season.

ImmunizeNevada.org features the new version of our Content Gadget content management system. (2.0), as well as a suite of custom tools that operate News, Events, Newsletters and Publications, among other items. The organization, which provides education, resources and advocacy about immunzations for patients and medical professionals, has been working with Trinity Applied Internet since 2005.

Extra kudos are due to NIC for establishing their own Facebook page and joining the social networking community. To join their Facebook group and help provide awareness and consistent immunizations for Nevada children and adults, visit the www.immunizenevada.org website and click through the Facebook link on the right hand side.

Trinity Applied Internet’s New Website is Coming Soon

Fact: when you are a small business, there never seems to be enough time to get to everything.

Well, that’s probably true no matter how big you are.

Suffice to say, we are going to be sporting a new look to the www.trinity-ai.com very soon.  The redesign will shine us up, feature some of our new Content Gadget tools, and better reflect the philosophy and quality of our work.

We’ll keep you posted.

Download our NCET Flyer

Didn’t have time to stop by and grab a flyer?? Get your full-color copy right here.

And, here’s the link to the beginning of our “do-it-yourself” tutorial, for those of you who we referred to the site.