In the past, it was pretty clear who you went to for developing and implementing a cross-media marketing campaign — the ad agency. You went to an interactive firm when you only needed web work, or you had to integrate complex web applications that traditional agencies could not effectively manage.
Today, the web-based projects are a critical component for major marketing initiatives. The lines between ad agency, interactive agency, and web development firms overlap. So when it comes to online marketing efforts, who do you go to? Do you go directly to the ad agency? Or do you find a company specializes in custom web development, design, and consulting? Do you separate out the web portion of your project and hand-pick a specialized web company? Or do you let your agency find their own vendor?
Good questions. Here’s a few indicators you may want to consider working directly with a company that specializes in web development:
You need more than a public marketing site. If your project involves anything more than a public-facing website, there’s a good chance the traditional agency is going to be lost.
You want to streamline your business processes through web applications. Ad agencies won’t help you build web-based software to manage your members, for example. ArcStone, on the other hand, can build you a member management system with online dues payment, member communications, and more, all integrated into a public facing website. (That’s just one example - the possibilities are pretty much endless.)
You want to implement search engine marketing. Agencies don’t typically build SEO into their campaigns. SEO campaigns are their own special beast — they can be very time-consuming, the rules are constantly changing, and they require specialized skills that ad agencies typically don’t cover.
You need a full-service solution. Using five different agencies for your design, programming, SEO, email, and hosting can be a logistical nightmare. If you find an agency that accomplish all of your online objectives, you’re going to save yourself a heck of a lot of time, money, and headaches.
You need heavy interactivity and broad support. Agencies are great at designing the generalities of the user experience but struggle with the details. A development company is going to follow interface best practices and bring years of experience to the table. A typical web development shop has done hundreds of different user interfaces and has a good idea of what works and what doesn’t. Another example of a sticky interface issue is multi-browser compatibility. The intricacies of modern browsers makes it very difficult to make a consistent user experience across all the major browsers. Web developers have special expertise in scripting and style sheet languages that agencies don’t.
ArcStone is a great fit for clients who need custom web solutions or a full-service technology solution provider. We do web consulting, development, design, hosting, email, search engine marketing, file management, email marketing, and more. We’re interactive, we’re programming-heavy, and we excel at building custom web solutions to help streamline business processes.
Ad agencies recognize that most mid-sized to large organizations have some form of online most often need to sub-contract out web development work. It’s a good system, as long as the web portions of the project are pure marketing. Introduce anything else and the traditional agency is out of its element.
The web is a complicated enough beast these days; don’t trust your marketing guru with your web technology. It behooves businesses and organizations to recognize the strengths and weaknesses in both types of firms.
I had the pleasure of hearing a talk by Jillian Perez recently. The subject was “thinking wrong”, a thought process that forces the mind out of cookie-cutter style problem solving and unlocks your creative potential.
Surprising, Innovative, And Down Right Brilliant Solutions
Although Jillian discussed thinking wrong mostly in the terms of graphic design, the techniques can be applied to many situations. Most projects tackled at work or home will require a problem solving thought process. When this process is gone about the “wrong” way, it can yield surprising, innovative, and down right brilliant solutions.
Keep reading for more insight on thinking wrong and my personal take on thinking wrong techniques.
This week Sun Microsystems announced an agreement to acquire MySQL, makers of the most popular open source database platform. This comes much to the dismay of open source zealots and sweaty nerds everywhere, who are afraid their beloved dolphin may end up in Sun’s enterprise tuna salad.
Sun has had a rocky past with the open source community, and tends to garner mixed reviews when they attempt to make inroads into open source.
Continue reading for more insight into Sun’s past open source shenanigans and what this deal might mean for the future of web developer’s favorite database platform.
Local software / tech pioneer and serial entrepreneur Dan Grigsby makes a compelling case about the depth and value of Minnesota’s contribution to the software industry. According to Dan, Minnesota has a quietly innovative and expert software development work force - with major players opening development offices here like Microsoft, Oracle, etc. Dan states that Minnesotans can get the work done for about half of what it costs on the coasts (I don’t know if it’s half, but I’d agree that there is probably a steep discount).
With the weaker dollar (and even without) does it make sense for coastal businesses to outsource software development to the Midwest? Is Minnesota ready to capitalize on this movement? Are we ready to support and assist software entrepreneurs and truly foster the software industry in MN?
No, we’re not. I have not been impressed with local associations or any state agency sponsored effort to promote our software industry.
If you look closely at where future innovation and good jobs will be had in the 21st century - you’ve got to bet on the Internet and software. Yet Minnesota does not have an organization dedicated soley to moving software ahead. This has got to change.
Have you grown tired of the same old two-dimensional web browsing? If so, this should really pique your interest. If not, I think you’ll be equally impressed. Read the rest of this entry »
Many have suggested, and I agree, the iPhone is bad for web developers. Travel back in time with me to 1997. Microsoft releases a relatively competitive browser, for free, that can render standards based websites well.
With the help of Microsoft’s excellent marketing, the new browser quickly became a hot platform to develop for. However, some features developers were utilizing were specific to IE, and broke compatibility with other browsers.
Today a similar situation is brewing with Safari 3 and the iPhone. Although the iPhone is supposed to render standard sites well, many iPhone-only sites are popping up.
Thus, the suffering of web developers everywhere continues…
It’s now official, Apple will be releasing a SDK (software development kit) for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It will be dropping in February, I assume to coincide with Valentines day, as this announcement amounts to a love letter from Steve to Apple fanboys everywhere.
There has already been some interesting software developed without Apple’s blessing or official SDK. However, with the support of Apple, developers will no doubt produce better applications, and be able to access some of the iPhone’s advanced hardware. Also, users needn’t fear turning their phone into a $400 paper weight just so they can play Tetris.
Not every Mom and Pop shop will get their wares into the phone though. In order to keep out the wrong element, Apple is planning on implementing digital signatures for third party software. Although this is standard practice in the handset industry, I am curious to see Apple’s spin on it.
One of my biggest complaints about PHP5 is that you can’t do genuine object overloading, you can only fake it using the __call() method and its brethren. The crappy part about __call() is that if you want to do anything complex, you end up reinventing the wheel in a big if, elseif… else block, or maybe a switch statement. It’s not well suited for real overloading, Java style. We’re better off just using func_get_args() at the top of a method and choosing different paths based on what we find in the function arguments. But that too can get overwhelming. I thought of a solution which I find interesting. I’m not saying it’s right, or even a good idea, but it comes as close to real overloading as anything, is quick enough to use, and demands strict variable typing. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m learning that projects built on agile frameworks (like ArcSite) can really unfold almost by themselves–once the database is written, the objects fall out of that. Once the objects are written, controllers and web services basically write themselves, and once you have a controller, you’re ready for the template.
I was pleased this evening to get to spend some time developing ArcSite’s web services layer–it’s going to be really robust and easy to create and use.
I’ve posted a little snippet of Austin demo-ing ArcSite. ArcSite enables our clients to browse to any page on their web site, click a button and edit text, images and links. It is infinitely customizable and will work in any design.
