addi+ions blog: Insights from the Internet Obsessed

You may have noticed that we recently redesigned our site. The redesign was mainly a push by the designers (Gema & I), but eagerly supported by everyone here at dt. We are our most important client and are constantly looking to improve and adapt to changes within our insanely fast growing industry. Our website is never done. It is constantly evolving and getting better. Remember in school when you would turn in a paper and the teacher would immediately assign you another?(I used to hate that!) That’s how we treat every page of our site. It keeps us fresh and makes us constantly critique and improve our process. Here are some of the changes we made…Hope you like them!

Old Site:

New Site:

1. We increased the overall width of the site - Due to the increasing size of the average computer monitor, sites have been getting wider over the years. This is nice for us designers because it gives us more real estate above the fold, less scrolling and more breathing room. Wider just looks better (if you disagree, look at the tv industry).
2. We broke free from the “page” look - Our old site was contained within the boundries of a rounded rectangle. Our new site is nice and open with headers and footers tiling the full width of the monitor.
3. We switched the emphasis of the homepage – Our old homepage was very product-heavy. Our new site puts the emphasis on us as a company. We highlight what we are doing by showcasing our latest projects, our blog, and upcoming events that we are attending, participating or hosting.
4. Our footer has a footer! – A lot of companies are breaking free from the boring “privacy policy & copyright” footer. We incorporated a nice big footer that highlights our social media links, employment opportunities and information on our co-working space. It balances with our large header and gives the page a solid foundation.
5. We gave it a flexible layout – We are using a slightly modified 3 column layout that allows us to be flexible using a 2/3 1/3 column structure for most pages, while our more graphic heavy pages (projects & side dishes) use all 3 columns.
6. We focused on simplicity – We shortened our copy and removed unnecessary pages. We have lots to say but we want our website to be clear and simple. We feel that the details should be discussed in person.

These are just a few of the changes that I wanted to highlight. Look for more changes in the near future. They are coming!

This evening I will be presenting to the iMarketers Association along with Larry Marine of Intuitive Design. We’re going to be tackling the widgetsphere, from the origins to today’s big players. Who’s doing it right and what are the correct widget strategies to use when creating your own pieces of the web served a la carte. There will be free drinks and lots of time for networking and questions. Hope to see you there!

Here’s a description from our events page:

We’re all familiar with widgets – we’ve used them in MySpace, Facebook, iGoogle, Yahoo, and the list goes on. But what does it all mean to your business and what are the strategies you can take for the most profitable & effective implementation? Before you jump into building, designing or implementing widgets you need to decide how they will meet your marketing and business objectives. At this event we’ll discuss the critical marketing components to consider before, during and after creating widgets.

Join the discussion on Wednesday, May 28 at 6:00 – 8:30pm

Event: Topic: Widgets: Strategies and Effectiveness

When: Wednesday, May 28th, 6:00 - 8:30 PM

Where: University of San Diego — Degheri Alumni Center 120

Who: - Alex Funk, digital-telepathy - Larry Marine, Intuitive Design

Cost: $30 online.

Register Now!!

Here’s a sample digg story I ran across this morning,
Standard digg-bait headline, average 954 diggs, but 228 comments.

I CAN understand why the 954^th person dugg it, it shows up in their profile, it pushes the story further up, algorithm etc.. etc…

What I CANT understand is why the 228^th person commented on it. What is their motivation ?

Digg only shows the first 50 or so comments by default, so its highly unlikely someone will click through 4 pages of comments to get to their comment. If chances of anybody noticing their efforts are so slim, Why do they do it?

This is not a rhetorical question, I don’t have the answer to this, I would like to open it up to discussion and see if someone can shed some insight on why commenter #228 even bothered, or why people leave 10,998 comments on YouTube videos.

Active.com is a San Diego based online community for people who are passionate about team sports, health & fitness, and other recreational activities. Active.com serves as a portal to connect athletes to like-minded athletes, sports, training programs, tips and nutrition.

Since its first site launch in 1999, Active.com hasn’t been through as many redesigns as I would have expected – the first design for Active.com was launched in 2000 and was kept until 2001 and then Active posted a change in 2002 through 2007. For five years Active.com kept the same static, 3-bubbled homepage design. In summer of 2007 they launched a newly designed look (beta) so let’s see how the redesign pans out…

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Ahh yes, easy data portability. What a pain in the arse. Moving data between multiple locations and keeping it synced is such a hassle. There’s lots of ways you can do it - email it to yourself, burn it to a CD, put it on a thumb drive, even using Microsoft Briefcase (if even you remember its still there in Windows XP). Any way you cut it, its a pain to move files easily and keep it synced up at all your locations - until now. Continue reading