ABOUT THE JOB

The Morrison Agency is looking to hire an Interactive Designer (not a print designer, or an art director), to service a number of accounts within the B2B category. Your job will be to design things for the internets, ie websites, rich media banners, widgets, apps, etc.

You’ll be tasked with concepting, designing, and (occasionally) helping integrate new interface designs. This spans traditional websites, as well as online advertising (such as banners and rich media) as well as interactive DVDs etc.

YOU’RE A GREAT FIT IF

• You have the experience designing contemporary user interfaces, that are both engaging, and intuitive.
• You know your way around the Adobe Suite like a champ.
• You have the ability to design online advertising, in the form of banners or rich media.
• You aren’t afraid to roll up your sleeves, and do minor front-end work, or animate a banner ad.
• You are able to meet deadlines, without losing site of the big picture, while maintaining excellent attention to detail.
• You can articulate yourself, and your design decisions, well.
• You are easily taught, and even easier to motivate.
• You realized “sight” and “site” were interchanged somewhere above.
• Above all else, you’re passionate about the world of interactive design.

If you think you have what it takes, forward your resume, portfolio, and Twitter username to jeremy@morrisonagency.com.

To give you a jumping point, here are three things you can start doing today:

Keyword Research

Content is king, in the world of SEO. This reason for this is pretty simple: search engines can’t list what they can’t read. The spiders they use read sites just like you and I, and use the content they read to determine relevance to the user – based on their search phrases. If you aren’t sure about the keywords you’re using, or want to find better keywords, check out Google’s Adwords Keywords Tool. Make sure you’re communicating using words your audience would use – rather than internal language.

Title Tags

Many don’t realize it, but one of the strongest things you can do to improve SEO performance, is to make sure your page titles (the text displayed at the top of your browser window) is in line with the text on that page. Often times, developers get lazy and have the tendency to just label all pages with the company name. For example, rather than “The Morrison Agency” title for our work page, we use “The Morrison Agency Work Samples”. The latter of the two is more descriptive of what is seen on the page.

Back-linking

One of the many ways search engines determine which sites to serve up in search results, is based on relevance – as mentioned previously. One thing you can do to establish perceived relevancy, is to let other people vouch for you. This is accomplished through getting other sites to link to your site. This tells search engines that you are a credible source of information, because not only are you saying what the user is searching for, but others link to the information you’re sharing as well.

Now, this isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list of SEO initiatives, but it should give you a little extra ammo with which to promote your site.

This SitePoint guide on CSS selectors has more in-depth information on how to select elements with CSS.

So for example, if you wanted to target the LI elements within this block of HTML:

<div id="nav">
	<ul>
		<li>This is a list item</li>
		<li>This is a list item</li>
	</ul>
</div>

The CSS selector would look like:

#nav li {display:block;}

So with jQuery, you would use that same selector ( #nav li ):

$('#nav li').css('display', 'block');

To preform this task with plain Javascript, you would have return all the LI’s into an array, loop through that array, and apply the CSS to each element. See below:

var LIs = document.getElementById('nav').getElementsByTagName('LI');
for(var i=0; i<LIs.length; i++){
	LIs[i].style.display = 'block';
}

Note that setting CSS with JavaScript is not something you would necessarily want to do. Separating behavior and presentation is a very important practice to follow. I’m just using it as an easily understandable example.

jQuery also offers ways to filter your selection. Some common filtering tasks (that I run into often) include:

• Adding zebra-styling to rows using even or odd filters
• Selecting all except for a certain element using .not()
• If using borders on lists, using first and last to remove top and bottom borders of first and last list items.

For a in-depth guide to jQuery’s Selectors, check out their API.

Recently, Facebook introduced a new profile category called “pages”. With that, however, has come a lack of understanding between the difference of Facebook “pages” versus Facebook “groups”. So I did some digging to see if I could help separate the two:

Groups: Essentially, groups are the online equivalent to and offline club. They can be open, they can be private, but the goal is to share information between a group of individuals pertaining to a given cause/organization/team etc. Each group has officers, who manage and maintain the group, with members that populate the group with photo’s, updates, and more.

Pages: The equivalent of creating a profile for a person, Pages are created for companies or organizations, and work very much like your profile page. All updates and information are posted within the news feeds of those that “like” the page, and appear to be posted from the page, rather than a user of the page (as might happen within the groups example above). Pages are ideal for organizations that want to post relevant information to those that follow them within Facebook. Additionally, page admins are anonymous, unlike those of groups.

“Facebook created Pages when we noticed that people were trying to connect with brands and famous artists in ways that didn’t quite work on Facebook…Not only can you connect with your favorite artists and businesses, but now you also can show your friends what you care about and recommend by adding Pages to your personal profile.” – Official statement from Facebook

Hopefully, that helps set you straight, if you were struggling to draw the line between the two. We’ve typically had an agency Facebook group, but have now transitioned this over to a Facebook page. Check it out, if you’re so inclined.

How many SEO copywriters does it take to change a lightbulb, light bulb, light, bulb, lamp, bulbs, flowers, flour…?

If you don’t get it, that’s okay… you’re probably better off not knowing.

Built using all the awesomeness allowed by PHP, JQuery, CSS, JavaScript et al – and then degraded for the sake of our IE friends – this new site provides a limitless canvas for us to share information, add new content, show off rockin’ new work, and partake in an ongoing conversation with those of you reading our blog (like you are right now).

This site is still young, and despite our efforts to QA, likely has issues that we’ve yet to notice. So please bare with us over the next week as we massage and finesse all the little details. If you happen to notice any on your own, please be sure to share them with us. Look for a new rockin’ mobile site in the coming weeks.

Songs and praises are welcome in the comments

For anyone that’s not aware, Google launched Buzz in early February. Buzz is a new social networking platform that is meant to start conversations about the things you find interesting. The most interesting features are: that it’s built into GMail, you can connect sites you already use, see updates in real-time, share publicly or privately with your followers, and the capability to see photo/video thumbnails with each post. Sounds Awesome, right!

Well…maybe. Now that the privacy issues have been hammered out let’s take a brief look into if it really “works” for users.

The social media landscape is filled with many players. Of course, the ultimate powerhouses are the same as they were 2 years ago, Facebook and Twitter. Personally, I don’t see this changing anytime soon. So where does that leave Google’s stamp on social media?

I’m still trying to figure that out, and I am not alone. A quick Twitter survey from my followers indicated that, users are not sure how it fits it into their digital lifestyle or if it fits at all.

Using myself and a host of friends and colleagues as examples: we all use Facebook and Twitter. So why use, Buzz? In fact, most of the people I follow are posting from Twitter or Google Reader without actually “using” Buzz at all.  Their posts look strangely familiar, oh yeah, I already saw them on Twitter. So what value does Buzz have for me?

Social Media users are struggling to find relevance in the noise. So a platform that pushes comments of your friends friends, seems to add to the noise. However, Google intentionally made Buzz different because it wants Buzz to evoke a different type of interaction. For example, after posting a Buzz about the use of the service. Several of my followers commented, a friend from college, a freelancer (that I’ve never physically met) and a family member. Don’t get me wrong, this can be achieved via Facebook and Twitter, but with Buzz, the conversation is in my face as it happens. This point will dictate whether Buzz lives or dies in the coming months.

So what does all this mean? Simply potential. I wouldn’t write off Buzz just yet, nor would I jump on the band wagon singing praises. We will just have to wait and see.

Go ahead, try it out and then chime back in here. I’d love to hear your thoughts on Google Buzz.

Good question. Tricky answer.

I tend to follow the belief that social media works in three forms:

1. Socially – friend to friend
2. Promotionally -as a tool, in conjunction with an overarching promotional campaign
3. Proactively – a way to reach out, and build your brand

Let’s take a minute and go through each one of these, albeit at a high level.

Socially

This one is pretty self-explanatory. Essentially, social media works great for friends to connect with other friends, exchange notes, and share photo’s. At it’s root, this is what social media is all about. And it works brilliantly this way. The tricky part, is how does a brand insert itself into this picture, and leverage the potential opportunity successfully. Hopefully, that makes a little more sense in the next two points.

Promotionally

I think this is where social media really gets it’s best use, from a brand perspective. When used as a communication tool, in conjunction with online advertising and marketing initiatives – geared towards a given objective – social media provides a solid foundation to insert ourselves into our consumers’ lives (in an non-salesy way).

Proactively

Whether you’re a brand looking to field nasty “tweets” (a la Comcast), provide information (like Wachovia), or a sports figure looking to provide inside information to your fans (@martinhavlat), social media provides a bedrock of opportunity. You’ve got a quick way to access key segments of your target audience, and speak to them directly, in a casual environment.

The point here, is that social media isn’t a tool to make money. Rather, it’s a tool that poses as a doorway into the lives of consumers. When used properly, as in the points mentioned above, it can prove to be a highly valuable piece, to a rather complex puzzle.

Or maybe we’re talking about social media campaigns, and worrying about the number of friends, or followers of our associated Twitter profiles, Facebook Fan pages, etc. We get so caught up in these numbers, that we forget one simple thing…

Those numbers are created by people just like us. In some cases, we’re one of those numbers being tabulated.

How do you respond to a banner ad? When was the last time you were wowed by an email campaign? What was the last website you visited that was simply intuitive, and gave you exactly what you wanted, while delivering a glowing user experience? That’s what I thought. What about what the user wants?

The facts say it all: less than 0.05% of banner ad are ever clicked, and email click rates measure in the low single digits. The moral? People don’t want to be spoken to, they want to be talked with.

Our goal, as marketers and advertisers alike, should be to engage our audience, excite them to act, and provide them with memorable experiences, rather than to gimmick them into our way of thinking, or hand out short-term incentives to complete a form. To be clear, my point isn’t that any of these methods – okay, aside from banners maybe – are bad, but that we need to approach them differently. We need to utilize them differently. And we need to measure their effectiveness differently.

Next time you take a look at these reports, pay attention to things like referrals, average time on site, requests for information, and social mentions. Take a look at organic site traffic, from people who are sharing you with their friends. Why these numbers? Because they represent engagement, traction, and stickiness. Just like us, our visitors/users/customers/guests want to be engaged, and rewarded for action. We should be looking for ways to do just that.

James also sits on the board of a non-profit organization, Triple Play Foundation, which is aimed at helping underprivileged areas by using sports as a way to encourage responsibility and community service.

Combined with a love for all things design-related, and a serious “nerd passion” for the internet, James is a force to be reckoned with.