Blog: April 2007

Hop Studios Logo Survey

April 13, 2007

Hop Studios is currently developing a new logo and brand identity.

We value your advice and we would appreciate your assistance in helping to shape our brand for the years to come. Please answer the following 5 questions, which should take no longer than about 4 minutes.

Click here to take the 4-minute survey.

Posted by Travis Smith at 1:20 AM | Comments (0)

Knight New Media Center: What a Difference Three Years Makes

April 12, 2007

One of the earliest sites Hop Studios was hired to manage was the Western Knight Center, an organization that offered training to professional journalists in a wide variety of subjects.

The WKC site used ExpressionEngine version 1.0 beta, if I remember correctly, and we had to do all sorts of PHP craziness and custom database development to make it handle the relational data of the training programs, the speakers, the attendees, the calendar, and the application process.  There were approximately 4000 lines of PHP code needed, and an entire admin system was built to handle some of the site’s functionality.

Five years later, the Western Knight Center relaunched as the Knight New Media Center, with a specific focus on content and professional growth training for journalists working on multi-platforms.  They needed a new site for a fresh start, but that site needed much of the underlying functionality that existed on the WKC.

And once again, we decided on ExpressionEngine to manage the site’s content.  This time, however, the amount of custom PHP code is probably only 150 lines, and there has been no custom database programming needed.

It’s really amazing to see how much the tool has changed to help us do our jobs.  And it’s also quite interesting for us to compare how much time and effort and custom development was necessary to do a site five years ago, compare to doing it now.

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

Congratulations, Truthdig! Three Webby nominations!

April 10, 2007

Our favorite news client, Truthdig[1], just received three nominations in the 11th annual Webby awards.  Three nominations is pretty rarified air, as you can see from the press release:

The BBC received the most nominations (5). Other multiple nominees include NPR (4), NYTimes.com (4), Salon.com (4), Flickr (3), JonathanYuen.com (3), LinkedIn (3), The Onion (3), TruthDig (3), WeFeelFine.org (3), and Yahoo! (3).

Truthdig is nominated in the categories of Politics, Political Blog, and the one we’re really proud of, News, where it’s up against some realyl heavy hitters: the BBC, Salon, NPR and Reuters.  I would say that Reuters budget probably is about 80,000% bigger than Truthdig’s, and this nomination is a wonderful reflection of the fact that you can do excellent news online without the budget of big media (if you hire Hop Studios!)

I was tempted to just write a five-word blog post about this, because the Webbys are known for allowing the winners to say only five words.  I guess attention spans really are shorter online….

[1] And no, I’m not just saying that because I’m writing a blog entry about them—we really do love working on Truthdig, and think that they do amazing work.

Posted by Travis Smith at 10:31 AM | Comments (0)

Hotel Industry Pros Have a Place to Go: VacantReady

April 5, 2007

VacantReady Logo I’m very pleased to introduce VacantReady, a site dedicated to hotel industry professionals.  It’s run by Chris Clarke, an enthusiastic Energizer Bunny of a client.  He’s already busy patrolling the new site’s forums, posting daily on the blog, and in general bringing a level of communication and community to this underserved niche.

Chris’s site is powered by ExpressionEngine and is using all of its features, including the metaweblog API which allows him to post a photo on Flickr, and then automatically also submit it to his site’s blog.

He also did something very interesting—he started blogging on his site before the design was even started, and then used the platform to solicit feedback from the very community he was going to be serving (see this blog post). He really understands what it means to build a participatory site, and to include the audience in the process.

This site was another join collaboration between Hop Studios and Work Industries. I expect that if you look at the site again in 6 months, it’ll be three-times as built out and busy, but even on launch it’s a wonderful merger of design (check out the rotating header graphics!) and content.  We’re confident that the site will be a great starting point for his efforts.  Congrats, Chris.

Posted by Travis Smith at 12:12 PM | Comments (0)

Flickring the News

April 4, 2007


Flickring the News

Flickring the News is a thought experiment based on a design riddle we posed to ourselves not too long ago.

“What if,” we asked ourselves, “news sites were built for sharing instead of for telling?”

This is what evolved from that question.

What we hope we will demonstrate here is how any traditional online media site could effectively jettison the historic print layout model (aka the bath water).

In its place, we suggest using the design model of any successful social media site to give power to the reader and focus to the individual story instead of the home page. We think this amplifies the best features of news exchange and online community (aka the baby).

Please, share your comments below, after you’ve read our proposal here.

Posted by Travis Smith at 9:53 AM | Comments (7)

eMarketing Hits The Asphalt

April 3, 2007

Alexandre Brabant dropped by the Hop Studios design garage looking for one of our historic specialties: the redesign!

His Search Engine Optimization(SEO) business had outgrown the original eMarketing101.ca site and needed to be switched into high gear. Happy to oblige, we got that sucker up on the rack and popped in a new engine, specifically the fuel-injected ExpressionEngine from EllisLabs, and installed a blog, the SEO version of a nitro system!

The drag reducing, ultra-light fiberglass page design slid neatly into place. We even detailed the blog to include custom icons for each category! Integrated Search, google ads, a glossary and testimonals rounded out the package.

We are all pretty happy with the site here at the garage, and with Alexandre providing abundant blog fuel, this one will be tearing up the road for years to come!

Posted by Matt Gardner at 6:08 PM | Comments (1)

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