Standing up this site presented several interesting challenges. FocusPTF serves a range of clients, from people contending with workplace injuries to hardcore athletes looking to maximize physical performance. We needed to respect that audience range, creating a site that was both reassuring for someone recovering from trauma and highly credible for competitive types.

Ongoing interaction with the client throughout the design, development and content creation phases ensured that we produced a site that adhered to our messaging and interaction fundamentals while always respecting Rich’s vision. We think we nailed it.

Rich, between Mike’s quest to break par and Jay’s jiu jitsu tournament prep, you can count on seeing us in the Focus waiting room with some consistency.

Quite often, when a client wants to kick off their web presence, they come to us before nary a pixel has been positioned. We get to build it from scratch, and that’s fine by us. In other cases, we’re in damage-control mode. Prospective clients have an existing site that has mutated in to an uncontrollable atrocity. It’s been on the slab too long, with dozens of interested parties chiming in on how it’s supposed to look, what it’s supposed to do, and the messages it’s supposed to communicate.

What we have in that case is a first-class Franken-site. Like Mary Shelley’s monster, it consists of somewhat-viable parts that have been stitched together, bolted on, and assembled with a haphazard urgency that makes the result a nightmare of incongruent content and conflicting functionality.

What’s the cure for such a site? Sometimes you can salvage the guts and start a rebuild. Sometimes it’s best to drive a stake through its proverbial heart and let it die.

Check your site. If you have an immediate, easy sense of what you want a visitor to learn, and what actions you want them to perform, you’re probably in good shape. A good test? Get someone who has never seen the site to click over. If they don’t do what you want within about three to five seconds, you might have a site that’s more monster than masterpiece. Might be time to go back to the lab.

Money quote:
” . . . the business owner turned do-it-yourself web site creator, even armed with a simple site creation tool, almost always lacks the split personality traits required to view the project properly.”

What are those personality components? Strategist, Designer, Developer, User, and Marketer.

Whether you plan to revamp your site yourself, or you’re working with an agency, keeping those five concentrations in mind can be the key to site success. In fact, they’re an ideal means of measuring whether or not your agency is up to snuff. If it seems like they’re lacking in one, they probably won’t deliver the results you deserve.

Definitely worth the read.

One of a series of ads in a campaign for the Hillcrest Loop

There’s a definite approach to government work. You pick up the alphabet soup lingo, you write with painstakingly passive voice, and images of people shaking hands in front of the Capitol building get sprinkled around like bailout money. Where the approach to government clients tends to be rock steady, the approach to commercial clients can be much more rock-and-roll.

That’s not to say the creative liberation is somehow preferable; often, working within the tightly defined set of protocol and diplomatic expectations common to government and B2B audiences actually forces you to be more creative. True, the final product will still be buttoned down, but making it effective with those formal trappings is an undeniable challenge.

Still, a tangible, consumer-oriented product (as opposed to an agency objective or company service) really allows you to let the reigns out. It broadens potential vocabulary for writers (slang? sure dude!), lets designers play with an expansive color palette, fonts, and image effects, and gives developers real liberty to introduce edgier effects and functionality. It also helps if the product in question happens to be incredibly cool and the Loop is that and then some.

Right now, our Loop efforts have concentrated on print ads and point-of-sale promotion. We’re looking to begin some Web presence enhancements soon. It’s been a blast tapping that quadrant of our collective brains, and we’re looking forward to stretching out even further in the year ahead.

Mosaic Legal Group Website

Some of our best friends are lawyers. Seriously. In fact, we just completed a new site for our friends at Mosaic Legal Group.

Official launch took place just after Thanksgiving. It involved a fair amount of new content and meticulous attention to the site’s look and feel, as well as a branding effort that worked up what we think is a pretty snazzy new logo.

Working with law firms (in my experience anyway) has always been its own particular brand of challenge. Attorneys tend to be pretty bright and they have surprisingly strong creative streaks as well. That makes for feedback by the bucket-load and additional ideas aplenty, but it’s our job to assimilate all those notions and intentions, apply them accordingly, and come up with something that pleases the whole crowd.

That said, please feel free to share your thoughts on Mosaic’s new site. And remember that you’re under oath.