ORANGEBLOG

This is a fast and dangerous new practice that ORANGEHAT is seeing on the internets: Website Framing. It’s been spawned from those URL shorteners for sites like Twitter, and has morphed into a nasty (and tricky) method of sharing links.

What happens is some websites (even some URL shorteners) take the link you’re sharing, and puts the site in their own (sometimes short) URL in place of the actual URL. Digg is the biggest and newest culprit to this deal, and since everyone else is upset with them, let’s use them as an example. Say something you’ve posted on your site it’s a hit, and someone posts it to Digg.com. If someone from Digg wants to view it, Digg provides them a short URL link like: www.digg.com/1234. The site then has a top header (or frame) and loads the site underneath of that, so you can view what you wanted. You’ve just viewed a framed site.

Here’s the rub though. And there’s two biggies. One: Site traffic is not making it to your site. People finding your article through digg’s short URL, aren’t actually going to your page, but Digg’s. Because of the frame, Digg gets the hits you should be getting. The second thing plays off the first. If you don’t get the hits, you don’t get the ad money from google (if you’re setup) – they do. The other sites are actually the ones making money because their site traffic has increased and then they call sell more ad space. That hurts businesses like us, because we’re trying to drum up traffic, and they get all the credit. It’s turning the internet into a big business: the workers bust ass, but the bosses get and take all the credit. And that’s just not right.

Now this is not to say all URL shorteners are bad – because they’re not. Any Short URL service that serves as a URL redirect (and that’s the key part) is fine. Granted these kind of services still need some work, and services like Twitter should provide their own solutions, but all-in-all, the idea is decent.

This new epidemic is getting out of hand and hurting the places that are serving up the content for these larger sites to share. Daring Fireball has a lot of methods to help let you block sites from using framework (mostly Diggbar, unsure if they work for all).

Fight the Frames. If you see a frame when you click a link – click out of it and get redirected, like you should be, and make sure your traffic counts and gets where it should be. Avoid services that use it whenever possible. Make the internet a safe and speedy place to find information, and let everyone get their share of the pie.

Repeat after me: Frames are bad. Frames are bad.

All together now!: Frames are bad. Frames are….

We tweeted this the other night, but thought it should get a little more light. It’s a spot promoting a new drink for Gatorade: Tiger Focus. But whose spot was it really? I missed the first few seconds, and when I saw it, I thought for sure it was a Nike commercial. It was only until I saw the Gatorade bolt on the sign (while Young Tiger was on his way to the “waterfall”) that I finally figured it out it was for Gatorade. I then wondered, does Nike own Tiger so much, that even when he’s animated, there still needs to be a Nike logo somewhere on his outfit. It’s the first time I can think of that a secondary logo wasn’t blurred out, taped over, or what-have-you. Plus it had equal (if not more) prominence in the spot over what was actually being sold.

“Papa” Nike must be watching his “son” closely – “Don’t be late for practice, home by 10, and no talking to strange wildlife creatures!” With that much prominence in a spot, it makes us wonder if Tiger’s name hasn’t been changed to Tiger Nike Woods.

The Interweb (see also “A Series of Tubes”) is aflutter with Social Networking. It’s everywhere, and it’s changing the way we interact with people on a personal level and, more importantly, business level. ORANGEHAT’s facing the same decisions as your business, so I, Paul (Owner of the HAT), thought I’d share with your our thoughts on this whole new way to reach people in a new series of entries focusing on Business Social Networking.

On today’s menu: Be Who You Are.

Having a social web presence allows for a dual-level of advertising. And in this post, we’re only focusing on setting up and choosing the right place for you. Getting a proper “ePersona” (as I like to call it) is the first step, and needs to be done before any real advertising can begin.

First thing’s first – Social Networking was designed for people, individuals, to interact with each other in new, compelling ways. You can find your old classmates, follow bands, share news stories, have video streams, share photos, heck even share your screengrabs. The rub here is that these technologies were designed for people, not really businesses. Does that mean we should ignore these as venues to broadcast and advertise – Not at all. ORANGEHAT is out there. It does however make us, as companies, take a step back and think about ourselves and our brand. The two questions we should think about are: Who are we targeting? How do you want to communicate to your audience?

Who are we targeting?
The main thing to figure out is if you’re targeting business, people or both. Then it’s the decision on how you want your audience to perceive you through these new medias. Finally, it’s choosing the right sites, and finding your “butter zone” of content maintenance and tone.

For business, being apart of LinkedIn is a no brainer. You’re probably on there already, but if you’re not, go over there and join (after you finish reading this of course). It’s a great place to work business-to-business networking, and a must-have for any person and company.

Onto people. MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are the big guns in this arena, and you need to decide if your company has a need for these sites (ie: do you need YouTube for video), and then setup your accounts accordingly. A younger demographic will probably lean towards MySpace, while a more mature audience will hang reside over at Facebook. Then there’s Twitter, which is an entirely different beast, and should be used if possible, but within reason (more below). And this is just scratching the surface of all the various media you sign up! But these are the one’s I think most people are focused on right now.

Of course there’s intermingling, so you will get some member overlap no matter what, and that’s not a bad thing. Helps intertwine you ePersonas together along with your company. In the word’s of Martha Stewart “That’s a good thing.”

How do you want to communicate?
Here’s my biggest pet peeve with business and social networking: A company pretending to be a person. If your business is not in any sort of entertainment field, or if your brand marketing would work in this fasion, then you shouldn’t be doing this. Unless you can find some sort of rationalization to act as a person online, you shouldn’t. You’re a business, so be that. Make social networking work for you, not change who you are just to accommodate this new technology. Be Who/What You Are. Period.

Where’s a good place to start? Facebook is a fan of ours, and what I like about it is there are Pages and Groups. Our basic perception of these are: Pages are for companies that want to talk like people. Groups are for companies that talk like companies. Similarly, MySpace Pages are just like Facebook Pages. The level of commitment to social media also plays into this decision. A page on Facebook/MySpace offers a ton of extra features and is more like a full personal profile. That means you’ll have to populate and maintain more content, more often to stay engaging. Groups are not as complex, and an easier way to get your name out there, with not as much heavy lifting. With a proper amount of time dedicated to social networking, and proper tone in your entries, you can make a Page appear more like a business and that’s great. But it’s a fine line. You don’t want to post just for the sake of posting, and then waste your time, and bore your audience and any potential new users. That’s why I prefer Groups. It’s not as much to worry about, because it’s not nearly as robust. Less is more.

The above is for nothing if you plan on marketing yourself more as a person on these sites. And if that’s the case, you should be doing something similar in the rest of your marketing as well. Remember, your tactics shouldn’t change your business model just because you’re online.

Twitter. Twitter is a great way to get short little “tweets” of what your business is up to. @replies are also a great way to help bring other business (or people) into the communication too. Very handy for company’s that just can’t dedicate the time to constantly blog. Short and simple tweets can be more effective and engaging to your followers than a blog.

Final Thoughts.
On all of these sites, tone is key. If you’re portraying yourself as a business, you should post and tweet like a business. Don’t let the more casual and fast-paced Twitter cause you to change your tone and how your business sounds. And don’t feel compelled to have to post something, if it’s not worthy of mentioning.

Picking your audience, and then following your company’s brand should make social networking a easy and fun way to extend your business into virtual world. Your business’ brand is more important than any social networking site. If it doesn’t fit – it doesn’t fit. If your business doesn’t fit any social site, then you may have to rethink your business identity and strategy. Marketing through social networking is part of advertising’s future, so adjustments now will help your future.

ORANGEHAT’s Strategy.
Currently, we’re on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. We’ve setup Facebook as a Group, since we don’t have much to really discuss, nor a very large user-base on the site. It’s a great starting point for us. Twitter we keep to short, generic bits of information: “Out to meetings.” “Deep in logo development.” Enough to show that we’re busy, but not enough to make it look like we’re Tweeting and not working. Flickr is a place where we plan to share our upcoming webapps, along with photography and possible fun stuff like desktop wallpapers.

Additioanlly, I have a personal LinkedIn account, and we plan to expand to a Company Page there in the near future.

Next Time: Working or NETworking?

Yes, we have a portfolio page to show off all of our work, but we think larger projects should get a mention here in the blog too. Plus there’s no rules that say we can’t do that (it is our site, so we can make the rules). About two weeks ago, we wrapped up our latest website design & development project for a Condo Association in Ocean City, MD.

For The Island at Hidden Harbour, ORANGEHAT coordinated transferring the domain, setting up the new sever, along with our a complete site redesign and development. The new site now sports a custom blog system, photo gallery and classifieds. But the main highlight of the site, is something you’ll never see – a custom Admin section. The Association wanted to be able to update their content on their own, and ORANGEHAT was happy to oblige. 95% of the content is available for them to update and customize. We created the look and design, along with all code – from scratch, because, well, that’s what we do.

They also got an early release of File’s Up! Which we plan on having more info on that project in the near future. More on that later.

Very happy with our latest project, and we look forward to the next!

I almost forgot about this! While at a local car show, I couldn’t help but chuckle at the graphic on a new Dodge Ram. On the bed, they offer these storage boxes (called RamBox), and for safety reasons, have to use a quick release – in case any small children decide to hide in there.

I couldn’t help my but laugh at the way Dodge made the graphic to show the use of this handle. I think the designers had a tad bit of fun with this. Well, let’s just let the picture speak for itself.

That’s our favorite new sound – the sound of Twitter. ORANGEHAT is now part of the social phenomenon. We’ve added a bubble to the main site, so you can see what we’re up to and see just what we’re thinking.

Love to have you follow us.

We had commented earlier about Tropicana changing their brand and packaging. We didn’t think highly of it, and apparently neither did most of the generic public either. Back to the classic – and that’s great thing.

I’m usually all for new designs – it brings a fresh look and attitude to the product/project. But, as with any good design, it also needs to do it’s job, and do it better than before. Our favorite orange juice – Tropicana, has fallen a bit far from the tree.

I had seen tentative designs for the new Tropicana package design (which the link actually looks better than the end result), and while we were out grocery shopping last weekend, I saw my first batch of them in person. Seen above, you can see the new design compared to the old. There is little merit in the more simplistic layout and look. It does distinguish it slightly from the other packaging around, but it doesn’t do it in the “we’re the best OJ”, but more in the “We look inexpensive”. The new logo is pretty nice – it’s simple and to the point – a cleaned up variation of the old that gets to the core of the logo’s soul. But that’s all the good I could squeeze out… I couldn’t resist the pun.

The focal point of the design is the new cropped glass of orange juice – which you can barely make out. The balance between that, and the rotation of the name of the juice is just…. off. I read “100% orange” before I read the brand of juice, which is a no-no. I’m going to assume that in time people will just recognize the package to be Tropicana, but I feel that’s a bit too far of an assumption. On top of that, the negative space below the logo does little in directing me to the remaining copy at the bottom and is really just a waste. Lastly, and this is the big one, the type of orange juice has become almost an afterthought. Above you saw the old “Light ‘N Healthy” bottle, below you see the “Some Pulp” in comparison to the new bottle. Take a peek, and I’ll meet you under the image.

Ok, now that you’ve seen both images – what do you see in the previous layouts? A very large color bar with easily readable text to help at a very quick glance distinguish which juice variant is which. Now, take a look below and see the difference between the new “Pulp Free” and “High Pulp” bottles… I’m warning you now, it may take a second…

The type is buried in the glass of juice and the only difference is the color of the text. It’s a much smaller font size and almost impossible to notice at a glance. I fear that there will be many little kids (heck even a big kid like me) upset because mom (or dad) made a quick glance and grabbed the wrong pulp’d OJ. What a way to start your morning, with a swig full of the wrong OJ! And as with my grocery store, the bottles easily mixed up, so you could have a “Pulp Free” in a “High-Pulp” area, and now it’s going to be much harder to tell. The old worked so well – you saw a big orange with a straw, and your appropriately colored bar and cap, and you were on your way – no reading needed – the design spoke and worked so well. It’s truly a shame that Pepsi has gone and done this to my beloved OJ.

But I shouldn’t be too surprised. This comes right off the heels of Pepsi doing a basically rebrand of every beverage they own. From the new Pepsi “pirate eye” logo, to the new Gatorade “G” bottles, they’re trying to be more hip and distinguish themselves from Coke I guess. Will we stop buying Tropicana, not likely. We are brand loyal like that, and we do feel it’s the best OJ out there. But a new layout without substance and meaning is just something that, like the drinks inside them, will go bad quickly.

ORANGEHAT would like to wish all of you a happy and safe 2009!

We expect lots of great things for the next 365 days – and hopefully beyond!

Cheers!

A few weeks ago, we hinted about a new web-application that we were working on, and we’re to a point where we’re ready to share…. well share details at least….

The software is called File’s Up! and is an FTP site web-interface. No more need for FTP clients (even though there some nice FTP clients), or using third-party sites to share files. You login, browse, download, and even upload, through a simple web interface.

Our need was for a nice way to deliver completed projects to our clients and vendors, as well as coming up with a way for them to share files with us. We have used other sites, but we wanted a better solution, and one that matched the look of ORANGEHAT. We’re a design shop, so what we do, and what we use, should be ours, shouldn’t it?! So we’re in a private beta testing phase right now while we finish ironing out the bugs.

As we were developing this system, we found that other agencies, companies, designers, or anyone hosting their own PHP-based website may be interested in using this kind of software. So we’ll be offering this system for a small fee that anyone can install on their own site.

So what’s next? Well, we’re in our closed private beta, while we continue to test and iron out the bugs. Then we’ll create some generic themes, a demo site, and then put it up for sale in the upcoming month or so.

We’re all really excited (and anxious) to finish up the site, and to be able to share it with the entire internet. Look for more updates in the upcoming weeks!