Blog: December 2005

Marketcast Work Progresses

December 21, 2005

Hop Studios has been doing work for Marketcast for about two months now.  We’ve been providing consulting advice relating to a novel and unusual blog-related project.

Marketcast serves an interesting role: they do research for the entertainment companies to determine how movies, tv shows, etc. are “tracking”—what the level of interest is from various demographic groups, various regions of the country, and so on.

They operate under the radar because, of course, information about how new products are likely to perform is extremely important and competitive information in the entertainment business.  So, we can’t say anything more about this project except that it’s been fun and well-received so far and I think that as blogging matures, there will be more companies looking to experts in blogging, design and online media, to address specific custom business needs.

Posted by Travis Smith at 3:45 PM | Comments (1)

More Dreamweaver Book Editing

December 18, 2005

Hop Studios’ favorite publisher, Wiley of “Dummies” book fame, is coming out with a new Dreamweaver book called Dreamweaver All-in-One.  They’re hired Hop Studios to do the technical editing on the book.

Technical editing means we are the ones who make sure the examples in the book really work, and the menu commands really say what the book says they do.  It’s harder when the books are being written at the same time as the software, because software development changes can mean last-minute adjustments to the book.

But the new version of Dreamweaver is out now, so this will be more straight-forward from an editing point of view.  If you can’t wait for Dreamweaver A-I-O, I recommend the already published book, Dreamweaver 8 for Dummies, written by Janine Warner with a few chapters by Susannah Gardner.

Posted by Travis Smith at 3:15 PM | Comments (0)

CBC Forums Flower

December 8, 2005

Today, Hop Studios started work for the CBC.  We’re going to be providing some moderation of one of their latest projects, one that’s a perfect with what we like to focus on—participatory media.  As you know, Canada is abut to have an election—it was called about a week ago and the campaigns will run about 6 weeks until the voters decide on Jan. 23.  CBC’s online coverage is excellent, and they’ve set up blogs for every one of the 308 ridings in Canada.  (Ridings are geographic regions that each elect one member of the House of Commons).

As part of CBC’s online election coverage package, they are encouraging residents of each riding to share their knowledge about the issues and events occurring in their area.  It’s partially an opinion forum, but also partially a civic space for information sharing.  It’s moderated by several people to make sure that the posts comply with basic decency and journalistic legal standards.  We shall see how successful it is—it’s already getting significant traffic and it’ll get even busier as the election day draws closer.

Interestingly, CBC is running it all with Typepad.  The design is pretty sophisticated, and looks nothing like a standard Typepad blog, but I assume that, as with some of our clients, it’s just easier to pay for a hosted service sometimes than to deal with the business and technical issues raised by hosting your own blogging solution.

Posted by Travis Smith at 2:54 PM | Comments (0)

Truthdig Hits Bedrock, Launches

December 6, 2005

Truthdig LogoWhat a humdinger of a week.  Last Monday we helped launch Truthdig, a Web magazine 11 months in the making.  I’ll let the site explain itself:

Truthdig is a Web magazine that provides expert in-depth coverage of current affairs as well as a variety of thoughtful, provocative content assembled from a progressive point of view. The site is built around major “digs,” led by authorities in their fields, who will drill down into contemporary topics and assemble packages of content?text, links, audio, video?that will grow richer with time and user participation. To offer frequent change and surprise, the magazine will also present a diversity of original reporting and aggregated content culled by the site’s editors and staff.

This is without a doubt the most complex site we’ve launched this year (well, that’s not true in every respect—we’ve launched sites with more complex CSS or programming requirements—but it is a huge site).  It’s got a significant number of sections and has a feature list as long as my arm:

  • print version of each story

  • multiple authors and access levels

  • announcement list and mailing list

  • moderated comments on each article

  • a beautiful, elegant layout thanks to Susannah

  • RSS feeds tracked by Feedburner

  • Web traffic tracked by Statcounter

  • a huge number of visitors just in the first week (I’m not supposed to tell you, but it’s six figures of page views already, and less than 1% of their traffic is from search engines, so that number is going to grow and grow and grow.)

  • Really snazzy layouts that format themselves dynamically depending on what elements are available

  • Staff pages that integrate with the articles on the site

  • an affiliate exchange called the Bazaar

  • intense security against hackers

  • and of course, plenty of room for growth

    Though it was a long time in the making, we’re particularly please with the favorable comments that have come in regarding the site.  Other, similar media projects have launched this quarter, and the consensus is, Truthdig blows them away.

    Posted by Travis Smith at 3:14 PM | Comments (0)

    Sweet! New Candy Blog Doesn’t Suck

    December 5, 2005

    Susie’s done an amazing series of designs with one of our newest launches, Typetive and its family of blogs: Candy Blog, Fast Fiction and Playwright.

    Candy Blog is the keystone of the site and the main traffic driver.  On it, Cybele May has a new review every day of an interesting new candy.  It’s not only a delicious read, but her photography is excellent.  She’s that rarity: a good writer who’s also meticulous and well organized.  Just look at how she’s categorized every candy by country, type, manufacturer and rating.

    There’s still work to be done on Candy Blog, but already the effect is noticeable.  She started six months ago using Blogger and free Blogspot hosting, and built a decent group of repeat readers.  But since her relaunch on her own server with our professional blogging software, traffic has climbed every day, her comments have grown and the number of repeat visitors is increasing, too.

    She was going to be successful without us, but Hop Studios has accelerated her growth measurably.

    The other two blogs, Fast Fiction and Playwright, or other outlets for her creativity, and they share a lot of the templating and features.  So she was able to get three blogs for a price that was only somewhat more than a single blog, and her software and hosting costs aren’t any higher.

    Most of all, we’re happy with the way these three ended up looking.  They’re fun, and for a topic like candy, that’s what matters.

    Posted by Travis Smith at 3:23 PM | Comments (0)

    MyBCRental Integrates Google Maps

    December 4, 2005

    Dang, has it really been a month since I last updated this?  Ironic, because we’ve finished so many projects that I ought to have been updating this every week!

    Clients can come from the oddest places.  Our landlord is a company called Sunstar Realty, and runs a Website called MyBCRental.  They wanted to add Google Maps to their sites, and couldn’t figure out how to do some of the advanced features that GMaps offers, so they contacted us.

    We helped them put together a working prototype, and integrated it with their existing rental listings.  Now when you go to look for houses and apartments on their site, you have all the functionality of a Google Map at your fingertips, with cool custom icons and integrated photos of the units.  It was a short and interesting project, and I think we’ll probably end up doing more work for them.

    Posted by Travis Smith at 3:12 PM | Comments (1)

    • From the Blog

    • Click to fill out the Hop Studios Quote Request Form



     

    Recent Blog Posts

    RSS Feed


    Archives