Blog: April 2006

Find-A-Sweetheart Finds a New Home

April 26, 2006

logo_kathrynlord.gifFind-A-Sweetheart has been a sweetheart of a client, and owner Kathryn Lord has been growing her site for years.

She finally outgrew her Blogger/HTML pages/Contribute system, and we moved the whole site into ExpressionEngine this month.

We didn’t change the design hardly at all, other than by adding some of the features EE has that Blogger doesn’t—categories, most obviously. We also made page titles more descriptive.

We took special care to make sure that all the old URLs will still work and forward to the new pages.  It will be interesting to see if traffic and search engine ranking changes at all based on the new URLs.  It will also be faster and more reliable for Kathryn to publish—no waiting for Blogger to move files around.

Posted by Travis Smith at 1:33 AM | Comments (0)

Retainers and You: When Is a Retainer a Good Idea?

April 24, 2006

Recently, we at Hop Studios raised our rates in order to stay competitive and to better handle the increased demand for our services.  As we did this, we mentioned to several clients that it was possible to arrange a lower rate if they paid a retainer, and though there was interest, there were enough questions that I thought I’d put together a short blog post about what a retainer means.

What is a retainer?
Well, it was a little plastic-and-wire tooth-stretching device that I had to wear in my mouth at night when I was a kid.  But more relevant, I think, is the other definition: It’s work time you reserve from Hop Studios, paid in advance, for which you pay a discounted rate.

How does it work?
Think of it like season’s tickets to a sports event.  You pay less in advance to buy a whole series, but if you don’t use them, they just expire.

Here’s an example of a basic retainer: you pay us a retainer for 10 hours a month, for 12 months. We give you a 20% discount on those hours. Note: These are not exact numbers—it’s just an example.

You pay us at the beginning of each month.  That month, we would be available for you to perform that work, (within reasonable constraints, of course—no midnight calls!)  As a retainer customer, you would get priority over people who call us up with last minute requests.  If you don’t give us 10 hours of work in a month, at the end of the month, that time is still used up, and we start fresh with 10 hours the following month.

So, it’s like a project?
No, a project quote from Hop Studios gives you a fixed price for a specific bit of work.  A project gives you price protection like a retainer: If we take too much work to finish, we don’t charge you extra.  But a retainer agreement doesn’t specify the work we’ll be doing in advance. We simply keep track of the time we spend on your requests. It can be anything from search engine submission to photo gallery creation to blog migration.

Why is this good for me, the client?
It lets you budget more accurately.  You get priority, you get better service overall, and you end up paying less. It also locks you in at a lower rate in case we change our rates—but we don’t plan on doing that again soon.

Why is this good for Hop Studios?
Well, we can do a better job of estimating our monthly work load, we end up with smoother cash flow, and so we can staff appropriately and reliably.  In a retainer situation, everyone benefits.

When isn’t this a good idea?
It’s not for everyone.  If you think there will be a big variation in the amount of time you need from us from one cycle to the next.  If you can’t afford to pay until the work is done.  If you just don’t have that much work.  If scheduling work in equal parcels over time just doesn’t fit your style. If your Web site has a limited time span and you need the work done immediately.

So, I’m interested.  What now?
Contact us. We’ll work out a plan that fits your needs.

Posted by Travis Smith at 7:13 PM | Comments (2)

Improvements at Truthdig

April 16, 2006

Truthdig LogoIt’s been just a short time since we updated you on Truthdig, but the site just keeps on improving.  Some of the newest changes to the site:

  • They served their 1 millionth unique visitor
  • They added a section called “The Truthdig Interviews” which has conversations with some interesting luminaries, often with audio as well as a transcript.
  • They added all sorts of great merchandise to their store: shirts and bags and mugs and buttons and more.
  • They added a Paypal service for ordering Robert Scheer’s new book, “Playing President,” directly from Truthdig.  It will be signed by the author; that’s pretty cool.
  • And of course the things you don’t see are important, too: We designed a new way for the staff to sort and filter the stories so they have more flexibility on what goes where on the front page without having to touch the HTML code, and they can reorder every part of the front page in about 1 minute now, instead of the ten minute process it used to be.
  • We’ll also be moving them to a bigger, better server to handle the traffic they’ve been getting.

There are some other tools coming soon that will leverage the readers’s interest and allow greater interactivity.

Posted by Travis Smith at 1:33 AM | Comments (0)

Bristol Industries Site Relaunch

April 14, 2006

logo_bristol_industries.gifBristol Industries needed four Web sites in one, to handle four of the companies that make up their wide range of service offerings.  This includes environmental & engineering services, design and building services, construction services and fuel systems services.

They contacted Sonya Senkowsky, a long-time client of ours who runs AlaskaWriters and knows a lot about the process of building Web sites, having gone through the process a number of times herself. Sonya came and asked us if we would be the “legs” while she was the “brains” of the project.  We agreed—sometimes it’s fun to just be the legs.  She was the direct contact with Bristol and kept the project moving smoothly; she helped them think through design and branding issues, and also worked with them to develop copy for the site.

Meanwhile, we built the site in EE, used the multiple blog capabilities to handle the overlapping content, created a staff directory and a job application system, and launched the site on a very speedy timetable.  Thanks to the designer who worked with Bristol, each company is color-keyed so you can tell instantly which part of the site you’re in.

Another nice touch on this site is the rotating slideshow photos on each company’s home page. I tend not to like slideshows when the information is serial—like a catalog where you have to wait for the right product to show up, or that TV station that shows you what’s on but you have to wait until it’s displaying the right time.

However, in this case, each image is designed to give you a different view of the types of projects and services that the company offers, and it means that the images can be bigger and more compelling—which is nice because a single picture of a piece of equipment or a job site doesn’t give you as good an idea about what the company does.

Posted by Travis Smith at 1:36 AM | Comments (0)

Wisdom Sources Turns Wiser

April 12, 2006

Thanks to Susie’s book, Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies, we’ve been approached more and more often by people who are trying to market themselves.  And thanks to Kathryn Lord, a client and friend who’s a romance coach, many of those people are coaches and counselors.

embrace_blog_logo.jpgOur latest site to launch is Embrace Your Creative Spirit, which I think is a beautiful design by Susie that really captures the essence of what the site owner, Linda Sandel Pettit, is trying to teach. Linda offers a popular, life-changing program called “Embrace Your Creative Spirit: Eight Ways to Be an Artist of Life.” It’s taught via emails and conference calls, which makes it accessible to anyone who can get to her Web site.

To create the nice headers dynamically, so that Linda can update every aspect of the site herself, we relied again on a system called sIFR, which uses dynamic Flash text.  It’s pretty handy, though a little tricky to set up.

Linda’s site needed to integrate with the products she sells with her shopping cart solution, 1shoppingcart.com, and with the blog she writes.  Take a look and I think you’ll agree that you feel more creative just looking at it.

Posted by Travis Smith at 1:28 AM | Comments (0)

Candyblog Switches Servers

April 6, 2006

candybloglogo.gifOne of our clients, Candyblog, was nearly a victim of its own success recently.

Since we re-launched that site with a new design, traffic has grown immensely, the owner has:

  • added well-paying advertising,
  • had various popular contests, and
  • has gone to New York City on a “candy trip”—I’m jealous, aren’t you?

But the increased traffic caused a problem on their old host, which wasn’t prepared to handle the load.

So they moved to our recommended provider, Nexcess.  (And yes, if you follow that link, we might end up getting credit for referring you.)  Nexcess can handle anything, and they do it politely!  Nexcess made the transition from the old server to the new one as painless as possible, and Candyblog is running even faster now, reporting on the last of the Easter candy even as we speak.

Posted by Travis Smith at 1:36 AM | Comments (0)

Meeting Rose

April 5, 2006

We got a chance to meet Rose Levy Beranbaum, the author of The Cake Bible and a passionate blogger at the site we built for her, Real Baking With Rose.

Rose was in Seattle recently to be the MC of a cookbook awards show, and she drove up to Vancouver to eat at Tojo’s, a local sushi restaurant that’s well worth the trip.

Susie and I joined her for dinner.  It wasn’t baked goods, but was nevertheless delicious. You can read all about it on Rose’s blog. I took photos of almost every course!

Posted by Travis Smith at 1:33 AM | Comments (0)

From the Blog

  • Click to fill out the Hop Studios Quote Request Form



 

Recent Blog Posts

RSS Feed


Archives