Hot Design

WordPress is a great platform for creating your blog, but should you create your entire website using WordPress? Having created both blogs and entire sites on WordPress before, we’ve learned that there are some good reasons to use WordPress to create your website, and some good reasons to use another solution.

Here’s a quick rundown of the good, the bad, and our experience using WordPress to create websites.

Software: Frequent upgrades, plenty of plug-ins, large user base

• Good: WordPress is an open-source project and there are plenty of developers, so security flaws get patched quickly and new features and plug-ins appear regularly. The large, helpful community of users can help you fix problems. If you’ve had the problem, chances are, someone else has too.
• Bad: Plug-ins can sometimes stop working when you upgrade WordPress to the latest version. Since plug-ins are often developed by individuals, mostly volunteers, fixes aren’t always done immediately.

Functionality: Built-in search, search engine optimization (SEO)

• Good: WordPress has a built-in search function and facilitates SEO. The search function is easily added to all pages of your site. WordPress allows you to tag all contents, create custom keyword-rich URLs, and allow trackbacks and pingbacks, all of which help your site to be found in online searches.
• Bad: WordPress search is limited — results are sorted by date, not relevance, and there are no advanced searching options. For a more robust search function, you should install Google Site Search on your WordPress website.

Platform: Based on PHP and MySQL

• Good: Allows experienced developers to completely customize sites.
• Bad: Not as easy to customize for non-developers or those who know only HTML. WordPress has its own PHP syntax and functions that create a bit of a learning curve, even for experienced PHP coders. Also, you can’t just preview a post in your browser without having a WordPress testing server set up.

Design: Plenty of templates

• Good: Even if you don’t hire a designer to customize your site, there are enough templates so your site won’t look like everyone else’s site.
• Bad: The templates are not designed to further your brand. You may find one that is similar to your current branding, but it won’t match exactly. You might want to start with a simple template, which takes care of a lot of the drudge work of setting up the site. Then, to customize the template to match your branding, you definitely should be (or hire) a web designer/developer. If you want to make some pages in your site look significantly different from a regular “blog” structure, you will need to spend a lot of time working with style sheets and PHP.

Updates: Content Management System (CMS)

• Good: Can be used as a simple CMS, and it is relatively standards-compliant. Adding new content doesn’t require much training and there are many plug-ins you can use to add CMS functionality to your site.
• Bad: With some work, you can turn WordPress into a CMS, but WordPress is not really a full-featured CMS. For example, WordPress won’t keep you from introducing bad code if you use Word to write your posts instead of WordPress. It also doesn’t do workflow management or track user roles.

Overall, creating a website with WordPress is straightforward, especially if you are happy with an existing template.  However, if you want to customize the look and functionality of the template, you’ll need to have robust web development skills, or hire a developer.

It’s important to keep in mind what WordPress does well, and what it does only with great effort, so you can have realistic expectations from the beginning. As long as you want your site to leverage WordPress’s strengths, such as blogging, posting frequent updates, and sorting by date or alphabetically, WordPress is a good way to go. But if you’re looking for a straight CMS, highly customized page layouts, but few of the blogging features of WordPress, you’d probably be better off going with a straight CMS solution, not WordPress.

What would you add to this list?

You don’t need to be a brain surgeon to put together a social media marketing plan. But you do need to make sure you’ve got the right stuff to make it work. Creating a successful online marketing plan takes bright ideas, good hearing, a big heart, fast hands, a funny bone, and stamina.

Bright ideas
Before you get started online, you should develop objectives, goals, and strategies for your marketing efforts.

Good hearing
Don’t make a move until you listen and monitor what’s happening online in your market, including following all mentions of your company or brand, your competition, and industry keywords.

Big heart
You should plan on sharing your passions and company culture as part of your online outreach. And be as helpful as possible by sharing your expertise and knowledge with others.

Fast hands
Be prepared to put your writing skills to the test by creating plenty of valuable online content.

Funny bone
Make sure what you share is interesting and funny—and be prepared to take a ribbing for your ideas once you join in online conversations.

Stamina
Any social media marketing program takes a long time to bear fruit, so be prepared to keep the energy up in the long run.

For more information on planning a social media program, check out “5 steps in a social media marketing plan” and read how to get started with Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

With so much being published about the use and misuse of augmented reality (AR), we thought it was time to remind people of the most important thing about new technologies: the fun that you can have with them!

What is augmented reality?

Augmented reality is the combination of real-world video with virtual computer-generated imagery. Using a webcam, an AR app can capture an image on video, recognize objects in the real world, and let you interact to with the application through your video camera. The results are a mixture of the real world and a virtual world, or, an augmented reality.

We have had hours of entertainment sticking our friends’ faces on dancing elves with Elf Yourself. We’ve been mesmerized by AR projects, such as the GE Smart Grid and tobi.com’s Virtual Dressing Room. But at Scott Design, we wanted to create an AR app where you could combine video of yourself with something fun and beautiful.

Introducing the Augmented-Reality Snowstorm

We’re pleased to announce the launch of the Augmented-Reality Snowstorm, where you can put yourself or your family in a virtual snowstorm. Instead of just adding yourself to a piece of art, or playing around with a business app, you can add a peaceful (or not so peaceful, depending on your preferences) snowfall to your life.

All you have to do is download an AR marker, visit the Augmented-Reality Snowstorm, and hold the marker up to your webcam. Your video camera shows your image and picks up the image of the marker and it begins to snow on you. You use the marker to control the snowstorm by twisting and turning it, plus you can add more flakes or make the snow fall more quickly by using on-screen sliders. When you’ve got your snowstorm just how you want it, put down the marker and just enjoy the snowfall.

Don’t have a webcam? No worries!

If you don’t have a webcam, you can still have fun with the Virtual Snowstorm. Instead of using the webcam and marker, you change the snowstorm using a series of on-screen sliders.

More holiday fun

When you’re done making it snow on yourself, you can go back inside and visit the Scott Design Holiday page and play with the Snowflake Designer, curl up by the Virtual Fireplace, try your hand at Snowbash, and send out your holiday greetings using Special Delivery. They’re all part of our collection of online apps designed for just one thing: having fun!

We wish you happy holidays and a prosperous new year!

The Scott Design Team

Scott Design has been awarded an Innovator Award in the 2009 Summit Emerging Media Award competition for the online application Special Delivery.

The Summit EMA competition is based on the premise that advertising is consistently at the forefront of the technological evolution of communication. “Those involved in today’s emerging media technologies are the leaders who are establishing tomorrow’s avenues of advertising communications.” Said Jocelyn Luciano, Executive Director for the Summit International Awards (SIA). “Most communication professionals recognize that established avenues of communication can be reliable and safe.  Developing and engaging in emerging media technologies, along with creative messaging and market awareness, is often a difficult criterion which makes earning a Summit EMA a significant achievement.”

Special Delivery is an innovative application that lets you easily create your own web pages to share with families and friends. You can select backgrounds, add messages, include animations, and even add a slide show of your photos. You can use Special Delivery to make an online holiday card, send a party invitation, or just design a creative fun web page. You can then send a link to your page through e-mail or on your social networks. We created Special Delivery as one of the fun online games that we create each year.  You can play the other games on the Scott Design Holiday page.

Scott Design’s Special Delivery web application also won a Platinum International Marcom Award, a Silver Davey Award, a Bronze ADDY Award, and a Bronze Horizon Award. Special Delivery was a semifinalist in the 2009 Adobe MAX Awards.

For the latest information on recent awards, visit the Scott Design Awards page.

We’re getting into the holiday spirit at Scott Design and wanted to share some free games we’ve created: Special Delivery, Snowbash, Snowflake Designer, and the Virtual Fireplace.

Special Delivery: Create your own holiday-themed web pages

Design and share your own one-of-a-kind holiday pages in minutes with Special Delivery. You can make a holiday page, send birthday wishes, invite friends to a party, or create a page just for fun. Upload your own photos, include music, select from beautiful backgrounds and borders, add animations, and write messages. It’s a free, easy, green alternative to traditional cards! Create your holiday greetings.

Snowbash: Can you stop the snowmen?

See how many snowmen your gingerbread man can get without harming the innocent pink bunnies in the award-winning Snowbash game, Best-of-Show at last year’s Silicon Valley ADDY awards. Play Snowbash.

Snowflake Designer: Design your own beautiful flakes

Select the number of branches, the shape of the crystals and their complexity, and watch as your snowflake grows right outside your window! Make some snowflakes.

Virtual Fireplace: May your days be merry and bright

Just because you’re stuck at your computer doesn’t mean you can’t gaze into the hypnotic flames of a crackling fireplace. Have fun decorating the mantle for the holidays, or just kick back and imagine the warmth! Curl up by the fireplace.

Happy Holidays!

We hope you have a lot of fun and hope you share your Special Delivery online greetings, as well as the games, with friends and family.

All our wishes for a wonderful holiday season!

Whether you’re working on the corporate website, e-mail programs, social media, advertising, collateral, or other marketing activities, there are some things that are typically better done in-house, and some that are better done by an outside agency.

Reasons to use an agency might include any or all of the following: Your staff doesn’t have enough time; you don’t have the right expertise to implement all the pieces of your marketing strategy; you want to get a new perspective or tap a unique thought process attainable only by working with a creative team outside of your company.

Also, partnering with an agency for at least a portion of your marketing can lead to cost savings and improved quality in your marketing. Finally, you should especially look to an outside agency for development of creative work, since that’s its expertise.

But are there marketing activities that you shouldn’t leave to an outside agency? There are no set rules about what you should do in-house and what should go to an outside agency—that depends on your own resources and budgets—but below are some suggestions.

Keep decision-making, legal procedures, and marketing analysis in-house. Here’s an expanded list of activities best kept in-house:

• Draft content development
• Design direction based on branding guidelines
• High-level strategy and goal-setting
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In Hollywood, having a good stylist is as important as having a good publicist. Many celebrities rely on their stylists not just for style advice, but also to create an entire public image for them. Stars need help creating a positive, cohesive look in interviews, at special events, and whenever they’re out in public. As soon as they leave the house each morning, celebrities project an image to the world.

As chief marketing officer, you are responsible for “the celebrity styling” of your company—whether you manage it yourself or delegate the task to a brand director. You should make sure your company has a strong, cohesive brand no matter where your company appears: your website, e-mails, landing pages, social media sites, online communities, trade show presentations, news releases, sales presentations, and corporate collateral. Every piece of your marketing must be coordinated to make sure you present your company’s best face to the world.

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Last night’s SVAMA panel explored how marketers can use social media for business-to-business lead generation. The answer in a nutshell: create remarkable online content and lead prospects to that content through Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Panelists included Brian Halligan, CEO HubSpot, and author of Inbound Marketing; Mike Linton, formerly the CMO at eBay and at Best Buy, now writing for Forbes.com; and Zack Urlocker, from MySQL, now part of Sun Microsystems/Oracle. The panel was moderated by Lilia Shirman, author of 42 Rules for Growing Enterprise Revenue, and MD of The Shirman Group.

Brian kicked off the discussion by contending that a winning marketing professional today is half marketer and half content creator. A marketer today should create content, optimize it for search and social media, promote the content on social networks, and analyze the results to concentrate on what generates the best results. His caveat is that the content needs to be “remarkable” so that it gets spread from the original recipients to others, extending your reach to new prospects.

Zach was able to get a huge increase in leads in his group at Sun through a series of refinements, including the creation of informational content (white papers, case studies, etc.) and an optional registration form for each piece of content. His team optimizes everything they do around lead generation, noting that each page on a website or blog should have a call to action—otherwise, why have that page?

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