Blog: January 2005

Professional Bloggers Association Site Launched

January 21, 2005

probloggers.gifHop Studios launched a site today for the Professional Bloggers Association (bet you can’t guess how we got involved with that!). This was a rush job so that the association, which has just started up, could have a Web presence in time for the Blog Business Summit being held in Seattle next Monday. Rush jobs are always a challenge, but this one was especially tricky: The group was still deciding on a name on Tuesday!

While we’re pleased with the professional-looking result, we look forward to redesigning the site once the association has a more fully realized vision of where they are going.

If you’re thinking about launching in phases, keep in mind that the first version can be very simple, like this one, but should definitely include a mechanism for gathering the email addresses of interested visitors.

Posted by Susannah Gardner at 1:44 PM | Comments (1)

Where Are Our Clients?

January 19, 2005

It’s a common question since Hop Studios moved from Los Angeles to Vancouver, Canada: Where do our clients live and work?

In general, they’re all over the map.  There are some clients we’ve never met in person, and others that we’ve known for years (we’ve been doing Web design since 1995 in one way or another).

Here are the states and provinces our current clients inhabit:

  • Alaska
  • Arizona
  • British Columbia
  • California
  • Illinois
  • Maryland
  • Mississippi
  • Nevada
  • Pennsylvania
  • Washington
  • Washington, D.C.

Looks like a good road trip, doesn’t it?

Posted by Travis Smith at 1:34 PM | Comments (0)

New Voices Launches Today

January 10, 2005

Today we launched a rather ambitious site: It’s of fairly large scope, and its goals are even bigger.  The site is New Voices, and it’s a grant-funded citizen’s media project that seeks to underwrite “the start-up of 20 micro-local, news projects with $12,000 grants” and then foster then as they achieve sustainability.

The site’s main purpose right now is soliciting grant requests, though there’s already several good case studies on the site.  More will follow, along with updates about the project’s grantees.  There’s (of course) a blog for the site, written by the program’s executive director, Jan Schaffer.

The site will have a companion site that we’re also doing, more on that later. New Voices is administered by J-Lab at the University of Maryland and supported by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, in case you were wondering.

Several Web sites mentioned the launch today, Dan Gillmor’s Grassroots Journalism, Etc. and Micro Persuasion, among others.

Posted by Travis Smith at 6:00 PM | Comments (1)