Selling marketing to businesses in today’s online marketplace can be somewhat of a daunting task. The level of experience and knowledge that business owners and individuals have of the Internet can range from a client saying, “Now a browser is like Internet Explorer….right?” to a client saying, “I need a viral social online marketing accelerator to generate a boat-load of traffic to my site!”

More times than not, I deal with the first client in which I have to shift into education mode. Sometimes it’s easy to get bogged down with “selling the meat rather than the sizzle.” What I mean is that often times marketers spend a great deal of time explaining the “what we do” or feature selling, rather than focusing on the client’s needs and providing results that will produce real pocket jingling proof.
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Hard evidence that blogs can make a difference.

The people over at Elizabeth Arden changed the Ad campaign to slightly less resemble the monodonation’s charity branding that Chris Sloan posted about earlier this month.

While still a major rip-off, at least its nice to feel effective as bloggers!

I’m sure it was the least they could do to avoid shelling out Britney’s hard earned cash with impending lawsuits.

One of the many results of Jacob Nielsen’s recent eyetracking research, emphasizes previous research showing banner blindness on websites. The concept of banner blindness summarizes that website users rarely look at anything that resemble ads.

To perform the eyetracking research, Nielsen and his colleagues implemented cameras and infrared emitters hidden in the computer monitor. They then generated videos and heatmaps to study eye movements across webpages.

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TIME Magazine recently dedicated 12 pages to exploring how service and volunteering can transform America. The Special Report, Time To Serve - The Case for National Service examines why service is important to America, highlights activists already making waves on the ground, and proposes a 10-point plan to create a “universal national service” in the U.S.

TIME Managing Editor Richard Stengel asks readers to imagine volunteerism as a public service. What, for example, would happen if devoting a year or more to national service, whether military or civilian, became “a countrywide rite of passage.” That is, what if there was a universal national-service in the U.S.?

In his article, Stengel proposes specific ideas on how Washington can help make this happen, including:

• Making National Service a cabinet-level department.
• Expanding existing national-service programs like AmeriCorps and Senior Corps.
• Creating separate corps focusing on education, health, the environment, and emergency response.
• Instituting a “Summer of Service.”
• Starting a national-service academy.
• And creating a national-service Baby Bond and a Baby Boomer Education Bond to encourage young adults and retirees to get involved.

Thought-provoking stuff, to be sure — and especially important in an election year, says Stengel: “The next President can harness the spirit of volunteerism that already exists and make it a permanent part of American culture.”

Typography has been around since the printed word was invented. The above image is an example from iso50.com, where amazing work is collected, created, and  discussed.

“Typography: The art or process of setting and arranging types and printing from them.” When this definition comes into the mix with web design, we experience why it is such a vital part of the front-end design.

Learning and experiencing the rules of typography enable a designer to effectively break these rules. But without this prior knowledge, rules are broken without any intention, and result in super ugly sites!

Craigslist is often cited as a prime example for the ugly/undesigned site success story. Guess what, that’s because you can’t see past the visuals. Does that mean it fails or is poorly designed? Well, no, just one piece of the puzzle is missing. Fortunately for Craigslist, the other pieces are so strong that they are able to overcome it. Craigslist succeeds despite its graphic design failure.
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There are many template engines freely available for php, so many in fact that it can be overwhelming figuring out which one to use. During my journey of trying to find a template engine that I liked, I found a lot of debate about the usefulness of template engines that use their own template languages. After researching this for a while, I decided the best course of action would be to write my own that was template language free.
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There are certain times of the year that everyone feels compelled to give. Even if they don’t want to. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Birthdays, Valentines Day, at church, and Anniversaries just to name a few. But what about the 350 something other days of the year? Are we just giving to ourselves or do we really even pay attention to what’s happening in the world around us? We may talk about, sure, oh yeah, ” Next year, I’m definitely going too give to blanky blank charity or volunteer some of my time.” But when do we really make it important enough to commit to doing so. Now don’t get me wrong, I know someone is reading this right now saying, “Hey, I give…. I did this _____ and this____ and I gave to _____.” Then kudos to you, but to all the successful companies and people that have the ability to give, are you? Are you helping make a difference in someones life that is less fortunate? Well, I hope you do. Level Ten has had the opportunity to work with some great non-profits from the National Breast Cancer Foundation to the United Way and after being touched first hand by the people and their stories, decided it wanted to get involved in multiple ways.

On November 15th, Level Ten will launch the first of many tele-seminars that will reach out to Non-Profits and share our knowledge and expertise on subjects from Search Engine Optimization to Viral Marketing. We also launched a series of monthly seminars that will offer local companies and individuals the opportunity to meet our staff and ask those mind boggling questions of “How do we get to…….” so they can start implementing ideas and strategies to start seeing results instead of theory. Level Ten is also putting measures into place to pick certain non-profits to donate to from a partial of the proceeds of holding the seminars. Several of my colleagues and I are participating in a Leukemia walk and several other incredible opportunities to reach out to those less fortunate and really help make a difference, in people’s lives and in our community. I think we forget sometimes that it is OUR community that so many of these people live that need our support. So give today, give something, even if it is a hug!

On a recent project, I ran into an issue where the main navigation needed to be centered and flexible enough to add and remove menu items through a CMS. For those of you not familiar with CSS, this creates an immediate problem: you can not center a block element without first knowing its width. The normal technique is to use auto left and right margins (margin: 0 auto), that are then calculated based off the element’s width. But what happens when you don’t know the width of the element?

Well this plagued me for a while, and unfortunately I didn’t word my google searches well enough to turn up any definite answer. So I reverted to using an arcane Javascript function that would grab the width of each menu item and then apply that width to the containing element. However, this caused lots of strange problems: weird flashes if you were hovering over the menu on page load, strange issues that could only be fixed with CSS overflow and z-index, and more. And you should all know my love/hate relationship with Javascript by now. However, after doing some proper research, I found a simple solution using CSS, also known as Shrink Wrapping.

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Ever hear the phrase don’t re-invent the wheel? Sure we all have and as a design company we understand the importance of inspiration, but when does “inspired by” cross the line into blatant theft of concept? I’m not going to get into a LevelTen ripoff rant, I’ve done that several times before, but I did want to look specifically at the new Britney Spears Believe campaign. Darius over at YoungGoGetter.com was kind enough to post some great thoughts on the subject and it really got me to thinking about the difference between stolen ideas and inspired ideas.

Essentially, I see it like this inspired design is drawing upon your knowledge and experience to come up with unique ways to expand upon an existing concept that may belong to someone else. Stolen design however, is essentially what Elizabeth Arden did to mondonations iBelieve concept. Let’s face it, with something that blatant, lawsuits are inevitable.

Following in the footsteps of the guys over at YGG, I encourage you to let Elizabeth know what you think about their work.

You can easily fill out their contact form online, or send a personal letter to the postal or email address below.

Elizabeth Arden Consumer Affairs
309 South Street
New Providence, NJ 07974
Phone: (800) 326-7337
E-mail: consumer@elizabetharden.com

*Send a copy of your emails to Ward Bingham (ward@mondonation.com) at mondonation to let him know he has your support.

Content syndication, social bookmarking, and now the elimination of global poverty? Web 2.0 meets philanthropy on GlobalGiving.com where the Web “unleashes the potential of people around the world and make positive change happen.” GlobalGiving connects donors with social and economic development projects around the world and makes it easy to share the love with everyone in your online social network.

GlobalGiving is a unique collaboration between two entities, a US 501(c)3 registered non-profit and a social enterprise, ManyFutures, Inc. It was started in 1997 when World Bank executives Mari Kuraishi and Dennis Whittle created the Bank’s Development Marketplace, a first-of-its-kind event where people from around the world competed for World Bank funds. The event’s success unveiled the enormous potential of a global marketplace for philanthropy, and participants asked for a real marketplace that was open year round and operated virtually. Mari and Dennis saw the brilliance of this idea, left the World Bank and launched GlobalGiving.
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