Totally Zen is a blog dedicated to yoga, healing, relaxation, and natural living — maintained by Philadelphia yoga instructor and massage therapist, Stephanie Churchill.

After a couple initial attempts collaborating with other designers and developers, Stephanie was referred to me by another client. We started the project by discussing the pros and cons of her previous blog theme and software. Much was good; some was bad; and a number of key features were missing.

The Blog Platform

As a blogging platform for the relaunch, we decided to use the newly released version of WordPress, 2.5.1. The price was right; WordPress is a free, open source blogging package. Furthermore, it’s insanely easy to use. The new 2.5 release also has a beautifully revamped administration panel controlling a bundle of new or improved features. Since I’ve used and installed WordPress for clients for three years, I can attest to its value, and this new release is a gem.

New Features

As I mentioned, the old blog was missing a few key features found on better blogs. Here are some of the new capabilities supported by the relaunched Totally Zen blog:

• Search
• Flickr badge
• Most popular posts
• Most recent comments
• Tag cloud
• Video support
• Automatic image resizing
• 125 x 125 pixel ad support
• 300 x 250 pixel ad support
• Gravatar support
• Special “Widescreen” format for homepage images
• Feedburner support
• Asides (mini-blog) support

(more…)

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It’s almost Summer again! The Center City District is organizing a series of Sips Happy Hours June through August for thirsty downtown Philadelphians—great happy hour deals at participating bars and restaurants throughout Center City.

Center City District markets these events through regional publications and websites, such as Philly.com, Philly2Nite, Philadelphia Weekly and WISQ. This set of banner ads will support the Sips Happy Hour and get the word out to Philadelphians. Each graphic was designed in the visual style of the events’ print advertisements and other collateral to form the final piece of unified campaign across all media.

A cold drink with friends on a hot Summer’s day is a nice thing! Maybe I will see you there!

Services Provided:

• Banner Ad Design
• Image Optimization

Download the full campaign sample sheet (PDF, 525 KB) and take a look up close.

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Hudson International Group is a national consulting and engineering firm headquartered in the Philadelphia suburbs. Their specialty is litigation support and insurance investigation with deep expertise in engineering, environmental studies, architecture, construction, science and business.

Hudson International Group needed to update and expand their online presence while maintaining their established branding and its relationship to their printed collateral. For this project I teamed up once again with Donnelly Creative Services who provided key web design and creative services. The new website was rebuilt from the foundation up and will provide Hudson International with a strong foundation for future search engine optimization and direct email marketing efforts.

Best wishes to everyone at Hudson International Group who worked hard to make this project a success!

Services Provided:

• Project Management
• Information Architecture
• Web Development (Valid XHTML and CSS)

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Year after year it has become increasingly difficult for marketers to reach their audience using email. On a typical day some of my older email accounts may receive over 200 spam email messages. Even emails with a compelling, well-crafted subject line are destined to become just another unread annoyance. Nevertheless, email marketing remains inexpensive, and, largely because of this, an effective way to reach and grow an audience over time — when managed properly.

The best way to successfully market via email is to ensure people wish to receive your message in the first place. To accomplish this, you must be effective at developing your permission-based email marketing and contact lists. Commonly, small business owners overlook this simple task. Many small business clients (and even some large corporations!) I’ve worked with over the years share this tendency — having made only minimal efforts to build and maintain a proper customer contact list, or email address list of interested parties.

Building an Email Marketing List for Your Business

To begin the list building process, you’ll need a mechanism for gathering email addresses. At a minimum every small business website should offer visitors the opportunity to sign-up for mailings, newsletters and other email updates in a simple and unobtrusive manner. In additional, the same sign-up opportunities should be presented to purchasing customers whether online or at the physical point-of-sale. As your list grows, first to a few hundred, then a few thousand and eventually to tens of thousands of subscribers, you will possess an increasingly effective marketing tool — dramatically extending your ability to reach your audience, affect customer actions and create sales. (more…)

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For over 20 years Prime Image has engineered and manufactured professional electronics for the broadcast industry. Their gear is used by the majors, including ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX and NBC. Prime Image has a superior product line, but wanted our assistance to position it clearly in a unified voice.

We started with their most public marketing effort—their Web presence—reworking it strongly to reflect their proper market position. Marketing messages, product descriptions, were strategized and developed or rewritten on deadline.

The site launched on time and ready for a major tradeshow!

Services Provided:

• Marketing Strategy
• Information Architecture
• Copywriting
• Copyediting

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Early in every website development project, there comes a time when you need to decide upon the information architecture. For a modestly sized marketing website, that means the creation of a sitemap. Generally, I like to accomplish this with a client over a nice cup of coffee or a couple productive stakeholder meetings. Sometimes however, because of schedules or distance, it is difficult to meet face-to-face. In these cases constantly emailing MS Visio or MS Word documents back and forth can be a bit inefficient. In searching for a better option, I ran across a free Web 2.0 style application known as WriteMaps.

In the words of WriteMaps creator Scott Jehl:

“WriteMaps is a free web-based tool that allows you to create, edit, and share sitemaps online. As a WriteMaps user, you and your team will be able to build and access your sitemaps from anywhere, without having to rely on proprietary desktop apps and static files.”

How it works

Building a sitemap

After you create a WriteMaps account, you are able to create one or more project sitemaps.

View the Workspace

Click the image below to view a full size version of the WriteMaps workspace containing a few samples pages.

Adding pages to your sitemap

WriteMaps provides a simple method for creating and deleting pages from your sitemap–click the green plus icons beneath any page to create another page linked to that page, click the grey “x” icon to delete a page. New branches are easily created or destroyed.

Page Info

Every page you create contains editable fields for the planned URL and notes.

View Options

While building your sitemap, you can work in either an indented outline or tree structure view. You can even toggle the view back and forth as you work allowing you to more easily work with sitemaps of varying structure. The zoom feature allows you to scale the workspace to get a better overall picture of your work, while in either view you can “rollup” and hide a branch of a sitemap to fit more on the screen.

File Options

WriteMaps allows you to save and reload working versions of your sitemap files. Additionally, you can export a compliant XML sitemap for post-launch search engine submission, or export or import a WriteMaps backup file to protect your data.

Collaboration and Sharing

Perhaps the best feature of WriteMaps is its ability to publicly share sitemaps with your team or client. Furthermore, you can allow other users to edit and resave the sitemap. This allows for a limited form of real-time online collaboration while, for example, conversing over the phone, Skype or chat. WriteMaps does not provide password protection of these public sitemaps files, instead relying on a long, random-string URL to cloak it from prying eyes.

Shortcomings

While offering a number of admirable features, WriteMaps does have several drawbacks. For instance:

• Display of longer page names are often cut-off prematurely (at around 30 characters in outline view mode and 16 characters in tree view mode)
• Resizing the browser window or switching from tree to outline view or back can lead to broken visual relationships between pages in both Firefox and Internet Explorer
• Sitemap page load time can be annoyingly high with larger sitemaps (30+ second for a sitemaps of 35 pages). A server upgrade conducted by WriteMaps on April 3, 2008 has improved responsiveness at least marginally.
• Font size of the page names are not editable (however overall size of icons and page names can be increased or decreased using the zoom function)

Summary

Although the application has a few drawbacks, WriteMaps can be very useful, especially for smaller sites. The collaborative capabilities are easy to use even for an uninitiated client or colleague. In many cases sitemaps for small to medium sized sites (10-50 pages) can be completed more easily using WriteMaps than MS Visio or other illustration software.

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Center City District organizes great events in Center City, Philadelphia. This time it’s the April Gallery Night. Spend the evening of Friday, April 18th exploring Center City District’s galleries with special exhibitions and complimentary cocktail receptions from 5-8:30 pm. It’s a wonderful opportunity to see Philadelphia culture in action.

I was happy to support Center City District’s online marketing of this event by designing a set of banner ads for use on regional event and media websites. Each banner ad or header graphic was designed in the visual style of the event’s print advertisements and other collateral yielding a unified campaign across all media.

Hope to see you there!

Download the full campaign sample sheet (PDF, 460 KB) and take a look up close.

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Dambuster Deicers are the brainchild of regional businessman and roofing professional, Ray Nocella. These patented deicer products were created with one purpose in mind: to stop winter ice from forming on roofs and causing expensive water damage to homes and commercial buildings. Their innate simplicity, easy of installation and effectiveness was a great foundation upon which to build a wide variety of online and offline marketing vehicles geared to drive direct sales and generate high levels of supplier/distributor interest.

(more…)

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For many years Center City District has organized the Center City District Restaurant Week event where participating Center City restaurants offer a “price fixed” multiple course meals to their patrons. It is a great chance to try out those new restaurants you’ve been thinking about. I usually get to a couple every Restaurant Week.

(more…)

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Over the Holiday break I had some free time and decided to create a Holiday e-card to send to friends, clients and colleagues.

Sending out the email allowed me an opportunity to test Campaign Monitor’s HTML email validation tools. Later on I’ll be bloging my in depth review comparing the email testing and validation tools offered by Campaign Monitor and MailChimp.

(more…)

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