The past couple of days have been fantastic days of growth and the feeling of a turning point in the history of our company.  We’ve been getting more and more calls for current clients to take on new web design projects, an upswell in photography assignments from clients has been encouraging and we are making big plans for a greater focus on podcasting aspect of our company. Last night I attended an excellent webinar hosting by Cliff Ravenscraft of gspn.tv where I learned many of the aspects of podcasting that will help us streamline and bring better service to our clients. As a result of attending the webinar I spent a good part of the morning testing out some audio editing programs and as a result I’m looking at getting a piece of software I don’t currently own, Sound Studio 3.  More than likely I will take advantage of the MacUpdate Promotion which not only includes a copy of Sound Studio but also several other pieces of software that will be interesting to try out including a copy of Parallels so we can run Windows on one our our Mac laptops that currently aren’t running a copy of Windows.

Tonight I plan on doing further work on the web site I mentioned in a previous post. The task will probably take several days as I work on it between client projects so please be patient as some things will be renamed and moved around in the following days. I want to close by saying I appreciate all of those who have thought of us for their small business marketing needs such as web site design and development, custom photography, small print jobs and online media distribution like podcasts, etc.

I find it very interesting that some companies will brand themselves by the product they produce or service they provide and another company that does the exact same thing will brand themselves by the problems they solve or even long standing  industry terms.

Take our company for example.  We provide design and development services in the realm or web, print, photography and podcasts. You will have advertising agencies that provide the exact same services, you have other companies who say they are “marketing” companies also provide the exact same services. What gives?

It’s true that a bulk of the work we do is web design and web development, especially e-commerce and content management. It’s where we started and and it’s not big secret that it’s one of the easiest businesses to get into because of the low cost of entry. It’s probably one reason we have so much local competition within that realm. In the mid to late 90’s web design was the cutting edge technology and to a large degree it was an experiment in the early days when most people were on dial up and the design specs were restricted to the limitations of the technology at the time. We do consider our web work as a “hub service.” Whenever possible we want our print products to lead people to our clients web site, Podcasts which take on a “life” beyond the a web site definitely call the clients web site home and a majority of the photography work we provide is optimized for the web as a way to effectively tell a story.

If you are looking for a company to design a web site ask if they provide other media marketing services as well/ You may be surprised that they do! If they only specialize in web design what is their mindset in regards to integrated media and consistent branding? Of course we are not talking against other companies who call themselves web design firms, marketing firms or advertising agencies but we do want to make it clear the we provide many of the same services they do but our niches and clientele may be different.

What are your perceptions who you hear the terms, graphic designer, marketing firm, ad agency, web designer, creative professional, etc?  Is it confusing to you?  Do many tend to do the same things from your perspective? Have the industry names not caught up with technology and skill sets of the work force?

What can we do to better communicate SpinningSilk Multimedia doesn’t “fix computers” and how can we make it clearer that we provide more services than web design as some people we have talked with are so easy to latch on to in conversation?

This is the first of a series of articles called the Design of Content. In fact if their is anything I have an overwhelming passion for in my career is organizing compelling content so people can find what they are looking for quickly.

When I first got online I tried out several of the free web page programs like Tripod, Geocities, Homestead and Angelfire. The biggest advantage of those programs was it was easy for someone to set up a basic web site without having to learn everything about web design. The biggest disadvantage was they did and still provide limited control over what you can do in terms layout, navigation and extra features.  Thankfully the most popular “free web sites” people are setting up these days are blogging services like Blogspot, Wordpress.com, Livejournal, etc.  I’m thankful because they pretty much adhere to good standards like consistent navigation, a good use of white space and templates provided are usually eye pleasing color schemes.

One of the mistakes I made in the early days of learning web design was trying to create typical print design layouts on the web. I actually wanted to make web sites look like the newspapers or books. It didn’t take me long to learn each medium has it’s own set of rules. A newspaper for example doesn’t have hyper links or a call to click on anything other than to say turn to such and such page.  Print material like books, newspapers and magazine are usually easier to red at longer stretches of time whereas a web site is usually designed to grab quick snippets of information and get the job done quickly.

If their is anything we can learn from the print world it is the aspect of consistency. When people are looking for information they are not looking to solve a puzzle or play a game. They want to know how to contact someone, find a product or other piece of information quickly. Web designers have put a lot of energy into optimizing graphic file sizes and web code to insure a web site loads fast, yes even on so called, high speed connections this practice is still done however the greatest bottleneck and frustration often turns out to be the inability of site visitors to find what they are looking for.  I think some people can be forgiving on a slow connection to a point but you will never see someone as frustrated as they are when they don’t understand how to find something once they are there.  If their is a problem with a web site visitor finding something it is not their fault and they are not stupid. All too often “designers” will design based on what they know and what they think looks good.  A good analogy is in the “real world” is a traveler visiting a small town, stopping to ask for directions (which the traveler shouldn’t have to do) and having a local say, “Oh yeah, just go about half a mile and turn where the old red barn used to be!”

My personal philosophy of design is part of the word itself. Design should have signs that guides the user to where they want to go without having to think.  In 2008 SpinningSilk Multimedia plans on concentrating and offering a limited set of proven and usable web layouts. One of the best books on the subject is Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. Think about your favorite web sites, the ones you visit daily and really enjoy.  Do you enjoy them because the navigation is easy and the layout directs you to the bits of information you are looking for? Consider one of the most successful companies in the world, Google has one of the most simple yet easy to navigate web sites.  Besides it’s great search results it was it’s simple clean looking web site that got everyone’s attention when other search engine sites were adding more and more features and losing white space.

As you can probably tell I am making more blog posts in one day that I have in quite a while. I’ll probably be very busy the next several days with holiday activities but as the year winds down I wanted to give a retrospective of what has been going on with SpinningSilk Multimedia over the last year. The title of this post refers to three things that we focused on in 2007 and feel sets us apart from other companies like ours in the Greenville and Upstate South Carolina market. We are known mainly for our web design, web development and small print jobs like business cards and brochures. Essentially marketing and communication services for small businesses and organizations.

We however had opportunities the the realm of photography, using the technology of RSS within our web work and 2007 was the year we became involved is networking with other businesses and made great connections online.

Photography - is certainly nothing new. Of all the “high tech” forms of communication it is one of the oldest going back over a 100 years. What have we done with photography that was unique or were great opportunities? For starters we help our web and print customers develop compelling content. We develop a lot of e-commerce sites and with that we have provided our photography services for products our customers wish to showcase. We have also developed a relationship with a media company from Atlanta, GA auditing billboards for major advertisers. We also developed a great relationship with a local magazine by photographing the individuals profiled each month.

Feeds - What are feeds? By feeds I mean the technology of RSS feeds, also known as news feeds. These special lines are what have made blogs, podcasts and innovative social networks like Twitter and Facebook popular. Not only have we been in the process of optimizing our clients web site to include the RSS option for their site visitors but we have also given presentations to local business networks explaining what a useful tool RSS is for the business person.

Friends - 2007 is also the year we became really active in networking. Yes we were involved with business and special interest groups in the past but 2007 was the year we made it a top priority. Heather and I have both taken leadership positions in a local networking group, Professional Network Connections as well as becoming very active in the Upstate Entrepreneur’s Forum, The Greenville Mac User’s Group as well as other groups and meetings associated with the Greenville, Spartanburg, Anderson Technology Council.

Our prime commitment is still the use of multi forms of cost effective media so our customers can get their message out and tell their story and in turn sell their product or service. The above are aspects and tools we use in web, print and portable media and we hope to carve our special niche in our market by providing expert services our customers are seeking.