PixelMEDIA

If your company was acquired or you’ve launched a corporate community site, you may have already wrestled with how to Frankenstein something new into your web content & brand family. I say Frankenstein because after you’ve inconsistently bolted a few large changes to your beautiful web presence, it may not be as pretty or usable as it used to be.

We often see companies make large changes to their online properties to include their branded names, most popular content, and top converting transaction points without considering customers, impact to search rankings or prospective user experiences. Consistently publishing features and content can help boost your company credibility and scale web properties for the long haul.

Here are a few examples of corporate publication strategies for delivering content to users based on the audience, from the world’s largest corporate website:

Parent site: http://www.microsoft.com – Core competencies of who you are and what you do. Main navigation umbrella. Contains subdirectories (aka. folders) of grouped information.

Subdomain: http://support.microsoft.com - Focused on specific user needs. May have sub-brand opportunities and extended navigation options.

Child site: http://www.xbox.com - Extends the brand family, and delivers a different navigation and architecture to a completely different audience.

With change come opportunities.

To subdomain or not to subdomain?

What deserves a subdomain? If content is different enough from the core website content and is focused on specific user needs, then a subdomain may make sense. Support and community content such as intranets, blogs and extranets are usually no-brainers.

Publishing a subdomain may bring advantages to your search marketing efforts, as you are elevating deep content to the level 1 navigation. But how do you really know if you should invest in creating enough content to substantiate a subdomain, complete with its own navigation system?

Just the facts

Leverage your web activity logs to justify that your existing user community has real needs. Measuring brand equity in terms of return website visitors, subscriptions, and webinars will help you build a business case for gradual transitions and reduced drop. Stack that with your email lists, search marketing stats, direct mail, tradeshow and other offline channels to help prioritize online changes.

Get customers involved.  They are real people and can be very convincing on the big screen at a company meeting, responding to a scripted interview. Whether they are telling the camera what really stinks about your product or, more rarely, what they like about your support area, these folks are a goldmine of value proposition. You can get a ton of return for little investment by inviting your customer community to take a look at your website plans, designs and functionality, and share their feedback. They are there waiting for someone to show them that they are valuable (and to offer them free stuff for minimal input).

Got New Brand?

Many web architecture changes stem from new company brand initiatives. It may not be a one-step process to jam in two new product families of content under the corporate umbrella – even though that is what the acquisition strategy document says you have to do. If the user needs are very different, then content delivery may need to be tailored.

Rebranding is a hassle all in itself, so we usually ask for a media calendar to help guide your transition to avoid surprises, design and development re-work. Be a good corporate citizen and request the new brand guidelines, stylebook, or whatever the brand police are calling it. This should include web styles, high-resolution versions of your corporate and product logos, corporate imagery, iconography, and video - and not just pantones and print specs.

If none of these assets exist, or they are old or just poor, then you may have an opportunity to drive them yourself. If your team is the first to implement new and “improved” corporate guidelines for the web, then you may stand a better chance of publishing quickly and avoiding picky feedback from the brand police.  You can make the brand police happy, or better yet, completely unresponsive, by inviting them to contribute to your launch plan to include the live publication checklist to ensure their needs are accounted for.

Should you be purchasing your company’s branded keywords?

In any Pay-per-Click (PPC) campaign, it is important to decide whether or not you will be purchasing your company’s branded keywords. For example, a branded keyword would be “Dell,” whereas a non-branded keyword would be “desktop computer.” This issue often gets overlooked and, in the long run, can create a problem. There are both pros and cons to purchasing your branded keywords. In the end, the decision comes down to (more…)

I found the tidbit below while perusing news.com. This is especially interesting given the recent post I made regarding Target and the National Federation of the Blind, in which Target settled out for a cool $6M.

This is an email that a co-worker sent me the other day. It struck a chord with me, and I thought the topic was important enough to share with everyone; so thanks Norm.

You may have heard that Target.com and the National Federation of the Blind agreed to a $6,000,000.00 settlement and rigid, scheduled audits for having an inaccessible site.  As a result, many organizations may want to begin investigating their options for an audit to evaluate the accessibility of their own product(s) or web properties… 

(more…)

As a teen in the 80’s the Rubiks Cube was more than a puzzle, it was a personal challenge. I had friends that had managed to master it, without help, whereas I never got past the first few stages. The motto at the time was “you can’t do the cube”. Even it’s inventor, Erno Rubik, who first showed this puzzle at a toy fair, had not figured it out yet. 

Fast forward to today and the Rubik’s Cube is back, and with a new tagline - “You CAN Do the Rubik’s Cube“. This change in approach is a friendlier challenge - one of encouragement. And it’s supported  by a robust campaign to introduce the Rubik’s Cube into schools, summer programs, youth organizations and after-school programs, to start. (more…)

Back in 2002 - MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte had an epiphany. What would happen if every child in the world had access to a internet and network enabled laptop, chock-full of useful educational and productivity tools. Well out of this whimsical and seemingly daunting endeavor came one of the coolest and truly inspirational technology tools I’ve had the pleasure to work with.

I’m not breaking any ‘new news’ so to speak here — the OLPC program is well established, has had a wide-range of press and media coverage throughout it’s short life. However, the program is in it’s infancy… The amazing leadership team obviously has big plans for both the program and the device. From my position the challenges are more socio-political and logistically oriented than technologically.
(more…)

Tom recently touched on the larger IT initiatives and green concepts we’re exploring, but we felt there were smaller things we could do as well. Led by our front-desk administrative assistant, Breanne, we’ve started to brainstorm actions we can take without large budgets or extensive building renovations. And our discussions have us thinking more about what motivates participation.

While some may act because they care about the environment and its future, others not motivated by the inconvenient truth alone tend to adopt environmentally-friendly options when they are easy and cost-effective. So beyond having our carbon footprint audited and virtualizing with VMWare, what are we exploring to encourage participation at PixelMEDIA? (more…)

I’ve been working with a client who came to PixelMEDIA looking for an Information Architect to turn an existing desktop application into a browser-based user experience. They invited us to support their in-house programmers and a third-party visual design company. At the initial project kickoff meeting, it became apparent that the three parties at the table had wildly differing ideas on how the application worked and what the vision for the next version of the product should be.

But it also turned out, that the majority of the client stakeholders were puzzled as to what PixelMEDIA was providing. They didn’t understand what Information Architecture was, and hadn’t even thought about the overall user experience for the product. Yet, they had requested an IA. How odd. (more…)

Ah, the dreaded trend word. In the B2B space it’s a scary issue. They come and go before most even get a chance to embrace them. With Gartner and other “influencers” at the helm, tossing new fangled ‘everything’ around, it’s a genuine OMG issue.

I read earlier this year that 2007 was the year of Social, and 2008 is the year of Mobile. Holy crap. Are you serious? What happened to Web 2.0? Or is that now Enterprise 2.0, because anything that finally makes it into the enterprise took so long we needed a new name? I think we can thank Gartner for that - the new names for the stuff that needs some new focus. (more…)

There’s been a lot of chatter around the office, mostly email and hallway talk, about what this really means. I love that we’re talking about it. But what does it all mean? To go green, or be green? To us?

The movement is really quite quiet, with little steps here and there - on the people side it’s items like fewer lights (bulbs in and on), mugs not paper cups, car-pooling, 2-up double sided printing (I love that), less printing, making notebooks from scrap paper (of which there is lots), shutting monitors and desk lighting off, and a company plan for dry cleaning with a “green products” company. Small steps. But steps. Nothing drastic, but sustainable. Not a diet, but a lifestyle change. Very cool.

On the IT side there are some great strides being made as well. What I like to call big impact items. (more…)