Inspiring clients to take risks and stand out

Over the last several years I have done probably hundreds of web designs. Here at Optiem, we typically we do at least two different designs to present to a client. First of all, our contract usually states that this is what we will provide, but on a more practical level, it really gives the client something to compare and contrast when they are looking for a new design.

If we have done our job correctly, we already have a very strong understanding of the client's "aesthetic". So our designs are targeted to reflect that. But as designers this can sometimes leave us wanting... wanting to push the envelope more... to stretch our wings.

So recently, on those projects that have the potential, I have been trying to provide a third look. But I try to make that design something that is really out there. Something that no one else in their industry is doing. Something that really sets them apart and is a differentiator. But these are usually hard to sell to clients.

How do we comfort clients enough that they are willing to be more aggressive in the design of their web sites? For many companies, taking a conservative, "proven" approach is the safest and easiest path. And when dealing with a larger group of decision makers, it is much easier to get consensus on something a little more traditional.

My goal is to get our clients to see the web with different eyes. With a twist. To take a "risk" and put a site out there that is a really different approach or concept. To be a leader in their respective industry. To have something that no one else has. So when someone visits their site they say (or at least think) "now this is different. Who are these people?".

This requires some forward thinking by the person or people picking a design. But I feel in the long run this kind of thinking could really pay off. Being a trend SETTER as opposed to a trend follower is what really makes for success. Sony created the Walkman. They set the trend in personal music devices. Of course Apple has really run with that in recent years. But Sony enjoyed a great deal of publicity with the whole Walkman trend. They launched a whole new product line.

I guess there are people out there that are uncomfortable sticking their necks out to be different. To take that "risk". But the gains can be really worth it. From a marketing and brand standpoint, this has the potential to elevate a company into a whole different realm.

I remember back in the dot com boom days that kids were starting companies in their parent's basements. They would design really hot web sites with flashy logos and give the illusion that they were really something. And in fact, many of them BECAME something. Of course there is far less risk in being a kid in your basement and acting like you are a multi-million dollar company. As opposed to a multi-million dollar company pretending they are a kid in their parent's basement. But too many multi-million dollar companies are unwilling to look less than polished and buttoned up. Too bad.

I digress a little here. But this is just to say that we want to try to get our clients to look at opportunities to stand out. And doing the same old thing as everyone else is doing isn't enough anymore.

The beauty of the web is that you can change it immediately if it isn't working for you. It isn't like you have printed 100,000 brochures and all of a sudden the company logo changes and those boxes of brochures become door stops.

So, take a risk or two with your design. Push the limits of what you have done before. Use the limits your competitors stopped at... and start there.

Reality Rejects!... Our Latest Video Project

From my friend Clyde's blog:

Optiem recently launched a new online video series for our client Insurance.com.

The concept behind this series, Reality Rejects, is a send-up of the reality TV genre, shot and edited in the style of mock-umentary shows like The Office and The Larry Sanders Show.

The premise behind the show is that each of our contestants has had a failed attempt to get onto another popular reality show, be it Survivor, The Biggest Loser, Beauty & the Geek, Americas Next Top Model, Dancing with the Stars, etc. and have now all come together to compete in a Bachelorette-style competition to win the affection and company of Jessica, as she and the final remaining houseguest will go on a weeks vacation together once the competition has concluded and a winner is chosen.

Jessica will be eliminating one houseguest each week, based on her judging of the outcome of that weeks competition.

The first episode, Meet the Contestants introduces the cast members, Rick, Barry, Hank, Danny, Candi and our host, Jessica, as we see them move into the Reality Rejects house and interact for the first time.


You can view the video at any of the following sites:

The May The Best Win blog

Our YouTube Channel

AOL Video

Danny's MySpace Page

Enjoy!

Building the Social Media Newsroom

One of my former coworkers used to call himself a "recovering attorney". He had realized the folly of his way and at some point escaped the grip of "The Firm".

I am a recovering journalist. I have a degree in journalism, worked at that profession for a decade and finally escaped it a fews years back. What I learned from that decade of experience has really helped shape work I do now for clients. But as I sit here today, I wonder if we haven't been missing the mark all this time.

Recently I have been involved with part of a team here at Optiem that has been working on the concept of a social media newsroom. The idea is actually a very simple one, but one that for some reason has eluded many of the web clients I have dealt with over the years. And although I have been looking this solution right in the eye now for a few weeks, I still marvel at the simplicity of the idea. And I keep asking "why didn't we do this before?"

We have been seeing a lot of buzz about this concept and we have been sharing a proof of concept (see the link above) for this "social media newsroom." We are currently working to make these social media newsrooms reality for several of our clients. They are very excited about it.

So what IS a Social Media Newsroom? As my coworker, and fellow "thought leader" Vince Bank puts it...

"A social newsroom is about tearing down barriers between companies and respective publics, including members of the press. It's about fostering seamless, simple communication between media and organizations. And it's about organizational transparency, responsiveness and accessibility."

And quite honestly these aren't high and mighty words or concepts. These are in fact really easy and simple things to achieve. All we are really doing is providing an aggregation of all the relevant information available about a company on ONE web page. And you probably wouldn't be surprised to hear that these kinds of pages do REALLY well in the search engines.

So what kinds of things can one find in a SMNR? Here are but a few of the items you might find...

• Easy to use and locate directories, bookmarks and other social sites such as de.lici.ous, Technorati, and Flickr.
• All kinds of rss feeds available from the company
  
• direct access to top-level management through several social channels such as LinkedIn
  
• Press Room materials such as a repository of print-ready documents like high resolution company logos and photographs, whitepapers, and brand guideline documents
  
• a firm's blogs and blogroll
• access to company events, schedules and calendars, and
  
• a highly adaptable format, easily customized to a client's goals and needs

We at Optiem are excited, obviously, about the idea. And our clients are actually chomping at the bit to get their social newsrooms up and populated.

This is just another one of those examples where the simplest of ideas may indeed be the best. And I'm happy to say that we are among those leading the way in this simplicity.

As a journalist, finding accurate, easy to digest information was always the hardest part of the job. Social media newsrooms make it possible for anyone looking for information about your company to get it all... in one-stop-shop style.

XHTML Services and the Future

At Optiem, we are always keeping our eyes out for talent. As the Creative Director I am charged with keeping our work visually appealing, on message, within brand and under budget. We also must be creating pages that are high-quality, cross-browser compatible W3C Valid XHTML with fully realized CSS markup. A tall order for a designer.

We have a great staff here at Optiem, but finding this kind of talent in Cleveland, Ohio has been no easy task. And as I talk to my local counterparts I find that they have similar issues as well. We see great designers, but they have no experience (and in some cases no desire) in coding. And although we are indeed a specialized area of design, there is a constant need for this type of cross developmental thinking. We also see a fair share of developers who would be designers... if only for this little thing called "talent". Not something you can pick up in a Web Design for Dummys book at Borders.

Recently I have seen a lot of these ads for Design to HTML services. One of them that I visited recently (http://www.psd2html.com) offers a complete, validated and fully compatible coding service for as low as $153. That is hard to ignore. Especially, when factoring our relative workloads here, the desire to stay on message and create COMPELLING design, that development of these more mundane parts of a web project can be costly... not only monetarily but also creatively.

This smells a lot to me like the off-shoring did a few years ago. On some levels, it is repulsive and takes away jobs from people right here in Cleveland. Or at least some would argue that. But on other levels, I can see the reason why people would want to buy cheap, clean OVERNIGHT code for their web sites.

In the case of PSD2HTML they deliver the coded page in EIGHT hours. Now frankly, and our clients know this, we have to schedule in time to work on the variety of projects that we work on. So coding up a proof of concept for a client could cost us eight hours of OUR time. I won't get into what that costs our clients, but it is considerably more than $153.

This all leads to the value question. We provide a service to our clients that is customized. And although design to code shops spend specific time on individual projects, they don't know the end client or their specific businesses. I don't know how important that is one the message and design parts are established. But I do know what we do is of value to our customers.

Would we go to a design to code provider for work? I wouldn't rule it out in a pinch... of course that can be said about most things. But I think in general, we like the control we have to make our client sites perform the way we feel they should. And our clients deserve that.

No disrespect to the code for hire guys at all. But you will always be able to find someone to do almost anything cheaper and faster than the next guy... the question is, when does the quality suffer?

SEO vs Design... again

Back a few years ago, before SEO was an issue, us designers had to grapple with other enemies... like browser-safe colors (for you youngsters, we could only use about 216 of them), or page load speeds on dial-up connections.... or making our pages work in the ridiculous AOL specific browser.

Then, a few years after that, SEO came. In fact, it came just as some of those other things were going away. Just when you think things are getting easier, more fun things always seem to come into play to challenge and infuriate you. SEO did just that for designers.

I remember the first site I built that had to be SEO "friendly". We placed a bar at the top of the page that had a nice descriptive bit of text in it. It came at the very beginning of the code. Our thinking was that this would make this page more relevant than others that didn't have such genius foresight. Perhaps it did. But what it did for sure, was have an impact on design. And it is still having a very profound one today.

Recently, I have been working on a tweak to a client's site. They perform very well in the search engines due to the concerted efforts of the SEO/SEM staff here at Optiem. But when it comes time to refresh or even redesign a site, the SEO people get a little sensitive. They don't really like us to REMOVE things from the page. So the effort to streamline or simplify a design that has lost it's lustre over the years is somewhat thwarted by the need to stay the course for SEO.

So this recent project has me trying to "clean up" a client's design while not removing any of the stuff the SEO people think is helping. So we are asked to keep these elements but retain them lower down on the now scrolling home page. To me, this is killing any chance we had at a graceful design solution.

As a designer, this offends my design sensibilities. I know we need to accommodate SEO. Like I said, back in the day we used to put indexable text all over the page. I used to tell our clients that it was like a teeter-totter... which direction would you like to lean? Toward design? Toward Search Engine performance? Or kind of hover in the middle. Today it isn' that simple. And we do have other options now that let us do better design (CSS, AJAX, Flash) and still maintain some very good SEO results.

But I feel like I am jousting with windmills here sometimes. Where the Search Engines are the windmills and I am the lonely rider doing battle... never to win.

As designers we have always had to take into consideration the delivery system for our message. In print, we were concerned with paper quality... or with Pantone colors. And, we have always had to work within the specifications of our clients. If they want it brown, then it is brown. No matter how much we hate it.

SEO has definitely taken a bite out of design in the last several years. But as we find ways to work WITH the search engines and not have to be so literal in our interpretation of their needs, I think we will be able to continue to do quality design and serve the needs of Google.

Has anyone else had similar design experiences? When you start a new design for a client, do you have to determine what level of SEO you are going to design the site to? How has SEO affected the WAY you design? More indexable text? Better tagging? More creative CSS? AJAX?

Our old nemeses are retired now. The 216/256 color palette. The crackle of the modem. But new ones have taken hold. And these are ones that don't seem to be going away as readily.

And so, the battle continues in design departments across the land.