We recently wrapped up a large project with Clear Ink to build a new Small Business Product Chooser for Cisco. The result is an interactive tool that gives small business owners and IT staff a way to determine the best Cisco network hardware and software for their companies needs. The Product Chooser guides users through different product configuration options, asking them questions and offering simple descriptions and diagrams. At any point in the experience the user can change their mind and explore other sets of options. At the end, users are presented with a set of recommendations that they can compare side by side and proceed to purchase the products online or get in touch with a local reseller.

Test drive the Cisco Small Business Product Chooser.

A few weeks back we got a chance to help Engine Company 1 create a microsite and online campaign for Bare Escentuals’ new cosmetics line called BUXOM. The BUXOM Confessions website invites visitors to make confessions and submit words to the BUXicon for a chance to have a BUXOM lip polish named after them and other prizes. The site also introduces the BUXOM Babes and gives visitors the ability to purchase BUXOM products through Sephora.

Visit BUXOM Confessions.

Other shops and businesses in the surrounding blocks will also be open from 6 to 10pm with art shows, live music and comedy as part of the event.

Please RSVP on Facebook or send me a message if you plan to stop by.

See you then,
– Mark

Vine Street Interactive Open House
Date: Friday, August 28, 2009
Time: 4:00pm – 8:00pm
Vine Street Interactive
1150 Vine Street #15
Cincinnati, OH

(across from Park+Vine, 2 doors north of the Segway Store)

We’re looking for a Web Developer who is:

• Friendly, flexible and patient with non-technical people
• An expert at creating pixel perfect HTML and CSS from Photoshop files
• Excited about helping start a small business in Over the Rhine’s Gateway Quarter

Bonus points for people who are strong in our important areas:

• Adobe Flash development (ActionScript, animation, audio, video, AIR and CD-ROM)
• Open Source Content Management Systems (Drupal, Wordpress and Expression Engine)
• Front-end web development (Javascript)
• Back-end web development (object-oriented PHP, MySQL and other technologies)
• Internet marketing and technology strategy
• Information architecture and planning (site maps, wire frames and use cases)
• Technical project scope, estimating, work flow and resource scheduling
• Technical team management (on-site and remote / staff and contractors)

To apply send an email to hello@vinestreetinteractive.com with:

• The subject “Web Developer”
• A one or two sentence elevator pitch about how awesome you are
• Your annual (full time) and/or hourly (part time) salary requirements
• A link to a good example of a site with clean HTML and CSS you’ve coded
• A link to your resume with contact info

Great! Here’s our time frame for hiring someone:

• 9/2 – Deadline for applicants
• 9/7 – Interviews begin
• 9/11 – Interview complete
• 9/17 – 10/1 – New Web Developer starts

Look forward to hearing from you!
– Mark

Hi [ name withheld to protect the innocent :) ],

Unfortunately there isn’t a person you can call to change your search engine rankings. Rankings against different keywords come from a variety of factors:

Keyword uniqueness and density: The word “business” has 2,930,000,000 results on Google while “Mark Celsor” only has 2,310. I can create a web site that repeatedly talks about “Mark Celsor” and it will be much easier to have the top result than if I created a page about “business”.

Authority of web site: This is a combination of the age of the web site and the number of other sites that link to it. Yelp is a very popular and well established web site, so many people link to it and search engines consider it to have a high level of authority. A small web site that was launched last week with very few other sites linking to it would not have much authority in Google’s eyes.

There are also hundreds of smaller subtle factors that influence rankings.The process of tweaking these factors and the quest to get higher search engine results is a huge business. In 2008 over $13.5 billion were spent on search engine marketing and optimization. In the 1990s it was possible to just buy top search results from the search engines but Google changed the game by focusing on providing organic results based on authority. It is still possible to buy advertising space on the margins of Google search results for particular keywords but you can not pay them to directly modify the actual results. Google’s minimum for these types of ads is around $50 per month and you essentially bid against other people for ad placement. As a point of reference, during the presidential campaign the candidates were spending around $100,000 per day on these little Google ads.

In reference to the “Under Construction” message that you see on the search results. This will eventually go away. Google picked that text up from the site during the time before the real site was built. Eventually Google will index the pages of the site again and replace the message with real content. The frequency at which Google indexes different sites is tied to the site’s authority and how frequently the site’s content changes.

I hope this helps build a better picture of how search results work. For the short term I would recommend getting real happy customers to write positive reviews on Yelp and other sites. Keep in mind that fake super positive reviews on sites like Yelp are quickly identified and can create backlashes, so be careful and authentic. Also make sure that your listings on all these sites include a link to your web site address to build authority.

Cincinnati-based internet start-up ShareThis makes a popular widget that thousands of web publishers embed into their pages allowing visitors to share the content using email, Facebook and dozens of other online services. I worked at ShareThis as a full-time employee helping plan and develop a redesign of their widget, simplifying the user interface and adding new functionality. I worked to design flow diagrams, wireframes and clickable prototypes to refine usability. The new ShareThis widget is currently being rolled out to all users and is already available on select major web sites like Boston.com and AccessHollywood.com.

Read more about the redesign and watch a video demo in the Mashable article:

ShareThis Goes Tab-Free for Faster Sharing

Last Thursday the big CES Consumer Electronics Show kicked of in Las Vegas. I had an opportunity to work with Alejandrino Partners in San Ramon, California to produce a 2-minute video promoting SanDisk’s new Mobile Ultra 16GB memory cards at the show. The video ran on a big video wall display at their booth during the show which expected over 15,000 visitors.

This project was a lot of fun to work on. Like the work I did for Adobe earlier this month, it was yet another departure from the online world. Again I used Adobe Flash, but this time for very different type of product, bringing together videos and animation to produce something much less like a desktop application or a web animation and more like a television commercial.

(Please excuse the YouTube video quality.)

Adobe decided to take a modern spin on traditional, paper, “picture of the day” calendars with the “Places I’d Rather Be” calendar widget. It’s a simple application that you can install on your computer that shows a different beautiful photo from locations around the world for every day of 2009. It also lets you drag in and caption your own photos and make notes on any day. The program runs on OS X, Windows and Linux using Adobe’s AIR runtime and I put it all together using Adobe Flash working with a great group of people from Receiver Studio and G2 in San Francisco and New York. The project was a lot of fun to work on since developing a desktop widget is a departure from the online work I normally do.

Install Adobe AIR and “Place’s I’d Rather Be”

At the end of this year I had an opportunity to help produce Flash home page features, banner ads and HTML emails for Roxio’s holiday and launch campaigns. I worked with a team led by Digerata in Walnut Creek, California to create several dozen pieces to promote Roxio’s Toast, Creator and Easy VHS to DVD software products.