Time marches inexorably on, and that naturally leads one to think of the most significant harbinger of the passage of time: Birthdays! We celebrated the anniversary of the birth of our numbers guy, Jeff, with chicken potpie (the Amish kind; not those silly “meat pie” things you get from the freezer section) and carrot cake, which naturally led us to talking about a very different kind of cake…

Cake: Easy as pie

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

CakePHP provides a very robust MVC platform for web application development. Designed to work with PHP and one of many database engines, Cake can be deployed and executed very quickly relative to many other PHP frameworks. Cake can also be extended through many publicly available plugins, components, and helpers to make site production faster and less error-prone.

Let’s make a deal!

Jeff Burkholder, Inbound Marketing Analyst

I shared with the group information about Facebook’s new “Deal” offering for businesses. This is coupled with Facebook’s Places offering, and offers similarities to Foursquare, Gowalla, and even Groupon. Most importantly, though, any Deals that people take advantage of will automatically be posted to their feeds, so friends will also see the details of the deal. This is very intelligent on Facebook’s part, as it instantly brings a great deal (no pun intended) of visibility to the new offering.

Bigfoot(-ers)

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

An article from Six Revisions shows that website footers can be optimized to engage visitors even more. Contact forms, “about me” sections, news feeds, and social media feeds are some of the things that were not usually placed in the traditional footer, but are now added in many website footers. So be creative with the footer space when you’re building a website. Keep the size of the footers sensible though. It is best not to make your visitors feel like they are visiting another whole page when they see the footer.

Minority report

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

Salsa now outsells ketchup in the USA, and that was a central message in my deliverable for this week’s resource Friday. I brought the team up to date on marketing to the quickly-growing and very important minority segment of USA’s population. With the minority market now 35% of the US Population and few digital agencies delivering strategies to reach these receptive people groups, YDOP needs to step up to the plate.

I provided some interesting facts from a recent presentation I attended by Jose Villa and we discussed ways that our team could bring this value to our clients, particularly for mobile marketing. In ten years 50% of our population 18 years of age and under will be minorities. This has huge ramifications, especially for our higher ed clients.

Practicing what we preach

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

When you have an announcement that people would genuinely appreciate hearing, blogger outreach can be a powerful tactic. I briefly reviewed the nuts and bolts of how we identify interested bloggers, how we reach out to them, and what we do to make it a piece of cake for them to share the announcement with their readers.

We also discussed elements of YDOP’s social media strategy, which centers on giving away a lot of good stuff, especially insight and information. Stay tuned for more announcements on that over the coming weeks.

In our ever-expanding quest to redefine exactly what “Friday” means — well, that and the fact that part of our team isn’t going to be around tomorrow — we decided to hold our Resource Friday on Thursday this week. Outside, it was raining hard enough that we saw the horses begin to pair themselves up, two by two. But inside, we munched on turkey barbecue sandwiches from Hitz’s Farm Market and talked about all things internet-related.

Motivating to continue the process

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

When a web visitor finds your site and learns about your product or service for the first time, how can you motivate them to take the next move? How can you get more booking, more completed check-outs, more sign ups? According to Chip and Dan Heath in their fascinating book, Switch, one important technique is to show progress. We listened (via iPhone and speaker) to a case study involving rewards cards. When participants were given cards that already had two wholes punched out of their ten required beverage purchases, they were far more likely to come back for the eight more cups of coffee than if they received a card with eight, all yet un-punched. People are motivated when they feel they’ve already made progress and that they are making progress.

That’s why it is so important to have great design for check out processes, online surveys and long forms. People need to understand that they’ve already made progress and are successfully finishing a task. It may not be enough to have a status bar – you may need one that is tainted with encouragement. Users need to feel that they have made progress very early in the game, that they are making great progress, and that they can enjoy finishing. It is a powerful motivator; not to be ignored.

Google Instant and SEO

Jeff Burkholder, Inbound Marketing Analyst

I shared with the group an article I ran across on HubSpot about SEO in regards to Google’s new Instant feature. The long and short of it? Nobody really knows the full impact Google Instant is going to have on search engine optimization tactics, but there are a few notes to keep in mind.

• More important than ever is making sure your results are within the top three results on Google. People aren’t going to scroll through all the results anymore; they’re just going to look at the first page and keep refining their search until they find what they’re looking for right at the top.
• Page titles and meta descriptions are vital in capturing the user’s attention.
• Keyword research is key (heh) in not only making sure that people find you, but that the right people find you.

The article goes into even more detail on this, and we at YDOP will be looking to see how we can use this information to better serve our clients.

Rest your eyes on these better contacts (pages)

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

Today, I shared this nice compilation of creative contact forms from Web Designer Depot with the team. There are some things to consider when designing your contact form:

• Make your contact form not intimidating. Lionways is using a realistic looking postcard as its contact form. It is fun and easy to use.
• Keep your target audience in mind. If your target audience is an older demographic, make your contact form as clear as possible. For example, guiding the users on what or where to fill the info, like Electric Pulp does, is great for older audiences. Or something fun like Vince Mazza’s contact form is very appropriate for a young and hip demographic.
• Stay true to your branding. Give your contact form a personality by carrying out some element from your branding, like Il Frutteto.

And remember, it’s all about the user’s experience.

Quick hits on social media

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

LinkedIn announced a new major featured, called Signal, that is currently in limited beta testing. Signal looks similar to the Facebook news feed or Twitter search results, with the addition of simple and powerful filtering tools, so users can get to the status updates they’re looking for. By the looks of it, it won’t intrude on the current LinkedIn experience. Instead, it will be a supplemental way of viewing and navigating information shared on the site.

Lawyer Cris Hoel spoke at Podcamp Pittsburgh earlier this month on key points bloggers should keep in mind. While many were more relevant for political or news bloggers than business bloggers, I shared some points that we should keep in mind as we set up blogs for businesses and consult with them.

(How) are you being served?

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

Continuing with mobile development…

Most change for development on a mobile platform has to do with design, but creating a new design template needs a way to determine whether a user is accessing the page via a mobile or full-size browser. The $_SERVER[HTTP_USER_AGENT] variable in PHP allows you to check what browser the user is using, which can then be combined with other PHP code to redirect the user to a mobile-based site.

We’re slowly getting the band back together, as Jeff rejoined the team, fresh (or not so fresh, as the case may be) from his camping trip. This week, we really delved into the things that make us unique as individuals, and more powerful together than the mere sum of our parts.

Logo Design

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

LogoLounge.com is one of the websites out there where you can see a compilation of logo trends from year to year. In recent years, I’ve noticed more logos are going towards 3D effects and web 2.0 style. While they are appealing to the eyes, they might not be easily applicable to different media. One of the rules for creating a logo is that it should be easily used in web and print, or in full-color and one-color, and there is a good reason why it is a rule. The 2010 logo trend that I see on LogoLounge.com has been influenced a lot by colors and transparency. Then try converting these logos into one color (ie. screen printing, embroidery, logo on merchandise, etc). Most of the logos suddenly lose their identity and personality. Some people say that in this era, technology is more advanced and there is less need to make the logo one-color. While it is true that what used to be done in one-color now can be done in full-color, it is definitely going to cost the company more money.

On the other hand, we are in the process of updating the YDOP logo, and I have been working on the logo development. Our new face is coming soon, so stay tuned!

Long-Tail Blogger Outreach and Facebook Landing Tabs

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

Chris Abraham wrote an article recently for the Agencyside blog outlining his agency’s method for conducting long-tail blogger outreach. I shared with the rest of the team how we can incorporate his tactics into the blogger outreach work we already do, and how we can use our existing tools in the additional ways he suggests. I also pointed out the few tips in a new article on Facebook landing tabs that supplement the information and ideas Astrid has shared in past weeks.

Content Is King

Jeff Burkholder, Engineer/Analyst

For my Resource Friday a few weeks ago, I had talked about one of the new features of the latest build of Safari: Reader. Basically, this feature extracts the content and specifically related images from a webpage, and allows the reader to see it in a clear, uncluttered format, superimposed over the old one. This removes ads, styling, and anything else that can prevent the reader from seeing the article itself. Well, just this week, a company called Flipboard released an app for the iPad that does the same thing as Safari Reader for Twitter and Facebook. This app pulls in feeds from your accounts on those sites, as well as news, photos and information from all sorts of other sites, and puts it into a magazine-themed aggregator with an intuitive interface, but without all the different stylings and ads. I pointed out to the group that as these style-neutral aggregators become more and more commonly used, it’s going to be important to remember that the content on a website is just as key as the way it looks. Potentially, even moreso, as we move forward.

In semi-related news, I pointed out that most email programs, both online and off-, now feature snippets of the text of the email in the email list. Because of this, it’s becoming more and more important to make sure that your email starts out with something that will interest the reader, and not just “Having troubles seeing this message in your email?”

Super Mario Whiteboarding?

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

In addition to its extreme gaming success, the Wii’s accessories are capable of much more than Nintendo’s limits. Brian Peek, a software developer, created a library in C# to interface with the Wiimote. This library takes advantage of the ability to pair across Bluetooth with a computer, and expands the functionality of the Wii Remote significantly. Some of the features available for polling are:

• All input press and release events (aka user presses Up on the directional pad then releases)
• 3 Axis (including positive and negative results on each) values on the accelerometer to see which way the Wiimote is moving
• IR sensor data (capable of tracking up to 4 IR points simultaneously at a resolution of 1024×768)
• Access to controller add-ons such as Nunchuck data

By having access to this, many applications can be implemented through the Wiimote. One common application is a whiteboard, which can be set up using a Wiimote and up to 4 IR emitters (typically added to markers to give a natural feel) and a projector. The Wiimote faces the projector and provides an interface to the computer–very similar to how a mouse would work) by pointing at the Smart Board. It is moderately easy to implement and provides great functionality.