Marketers are always trying to find that power demographic; the group that holds the spending power. For so long that key demographic has been the 18-49 age range, the poeple with more descretionary income to spend. However, the age demographic is changing to the Baby Boomer generation. Consisting of individuals born between 1946-1964, this demographic is now 76 million people strong, that’s 28% of the US adult population, and it is quickly becoming attractive to marketers everywhere, according to a recent Online Media Daily article by Peter Koeppel.

Traditionally, the best way to reach this niche market was through television, since they were the first generation to grow up with a television in their home. However, Baby Boomers are more tech saavy than we give them credit, and internet marketing in now one of the best ways to reach them. Read the rest of this entry »

When I first joined the LevelTen Design team in the fall of 2007, I came with a little bit of online marketing experience. I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to start fine-tuning our clients’ pay-per-click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaigns for maximize ROI as well as maybe sell a few web applications along the way.

However, with some experience and prior knowledge I was faced with one hurdle to jump. The company I had worked for previously dealt mostly with B2C clients and mostly web development applications. LevelTen Design on the other hand has a much greater mix of B2B clients as well as online marketing clients - and highly technical savvy ones at that.

The good news is the principles are roughly the same. Do what you already do best which is constantly prospect, stand out from your competitors and follow up with your clients, plus add a few steps. Develop highly targeted keyword lists, remember content is king, so write clearly and in layman’s terms for everyone to understand and make sure the design of your landing pages is cohesive to optimization and for goodness sake make sure your tracking ALL of this! Document,document, document! Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone in marketing has experienced it, the 2:00 pm creative push to brainstorm ideas for the next step in a campaign, the next big breakthrough. With coffee in hand, you stagger into an office only to sit there, staring at your colleagues staring back at you. Inevitably, the day might have beaten you, productivity has halted. Sometimes this creative and cognitive slump can be overcome with aid of caffeinated beverages, quick jaunt out of the office, etc. However, this reoccurring event has professionals asking the question, is the 8 hour day, Monday through Friday, in the office the best use of our time and what alternatives are available?
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Every since I was little, mashed taters have been my weakness. My favorite kind are the instant kind. So simple, open a packet pour it in a pot and add milk. Ten minutes later, “PRESTO!” I have a tasty treat that will do exactly what its meant to do, satisfy my craving. Well, in the computer world there is what I would call the “mashed taters” of APIs. They are called mashups. A mashup is a web program that uses data from more than source or API and creates one integrated tool.

Just like a pot when making mashed taters, mashups also have tools to create a masterpiece of goodness. Wikipedia calls mashup editors a WYSIWYG for mashups. In layman terms, it is an interface that allows the user to create data points, usually by drag and drop, into a web program. There are several mashup editors that can be found amongst the internet. Here are some that I have found with video to help explain the use of a mashup editor: Yahoo! Pipes, Dapper, and QEDWiki.

Because there are a unlimited number of APIs available on the internet, mashup concepts are unlimited. This trend is still a fairly new concept, and in a few years mashups should dominate the internet. If you want to see some mashups in action, Webmashup.com has a huge list of sites that use mashups. So go ahead, take a look and play for a little while. Just be sure to check out the alarm that uses your favorite Youtube video. From time to time, I may have to use it for making my mashed taters.

The internet has effectively eradicated designers’ pretenses for secrecy of technique, and opened an unparalleled forum for sharing knowledge.

Though many hoarders still exist out there, they are missing a large opportunity for self-promotion through the web. Aspiring designers web-search design terms to self-teach themselves Illustrator, Photoshop, and so on.

Many industrious designers caught on and have converted their profiles to the blog format in order to draw a fresh audience to their domain. By generating traffic, their ideas and talents are shared with the world, and their work is not only displayed but demonstrated.

nDesign Studio
Bitt Box
jlw Design

Web Designer Wall

And even though the competitive designer in me cries out: “NO! Don’t share your secrets!” The digital native in me reminds me that the difference between a seeker and a finder is vast, and the more we share, the more we grow!

Now there are plenty of expensive tutorial resources out there of course, my favorite being Lynda.com but unless you have a couple hundred to burn, you can find ample instruction for the best price, free!

On October 26th, Apple released it’s new “baby”.. the new operating system for Mac, OS 10.5 or as many people know it, Leopard. As any dedicated Apple fanatic would, I had this preorderd to ship to my door on the release date. This is the fifth major update to OS X and contains, by Apple’s count, up to 300 new features… such as major changes in the OS’s interface, updates to several of the OS’s built in programs, and improved security. While I don’t have the time to go over all 300, I’d like to touch on two of the key new features.

Read the rest of this entry »

I just released a new version of my png compression software for Mac OSX.

What’s new? Not much. I changed the name from the incredibly lame PngOptimizer to PngThing and got a new icon courtesy FastIcon.com.

PngThing.dmg (1.78mb)

The file size is bigger than the old version (360kb) because of the new icon. Again, this release includes both Growl and non-Growl versions.

Special thanks to Kevin for suggesting the update.

Being in charge of the LevelTen In-site Newsletter, I have been frustrated with the lack of consistency of the rendering of our newsletter in different email clients. Outlook 2007 strips away any CSS padding, margin, and float styles, which results in mashed-up text and inconsistent spacing. Gmail has even received bad marks on its rendering. Each email client offers different support for what features it will allow in emails.

Despite these difficulties, there is an established project that has come about to help set the standard for email clients and email designs. I first read about the Email Standards Project on the Campaign Monitor blog. Campaign Monitor is a program that we use to send out our newsletters and Campaign Monitor staff is leading the project. On the Email Standards Project website, they state their goal: “Our goal is to help designers understand why web standards are so important for email, while working with email client developers to ensure that emails render consistently.”

The project gives several reasons for why email standards are important. The one that sticks out to me the most is that having standards will remove the guess work from email design. This means I would no longer have to hear Nicholas’ (one of our web developers) curse words coming from the back of the room. Standards would create the peace of mind that an email design will look the same in all email clients.