Frye / Wiles Blog Archive for the ‘Client Education’ Category
We’ve been a bit quiet on our blog recently, but we’re still here - just working on some longer-term projects. Hopefully we’ll get more blog-active pretty soon, but work comes first!
Anyway, I thought I would share one of the things we are working on - the 2011 Los Angeles Film Festival. As some of you know, we started working with Film Independent, the parent company of the LA Film Fest, last year on the 2010 Film Fest website. That worked out well, and we’ve been doing lots of little projects for them in the meantime, including web support for many major events such as the 2011 Spirit Awards.
Since we have a good handle on the Film Festival part of the business, we were asked once again to handle the web presence for the event for 2011. Film festival websites are interesting projects, because they are quite transient and impermanent. They generally go through multiple phases aimed at totally separate audiences (sponsors, members, general public, and then time-of-event news reporting and sales). And then, as quickly as they show up, they become mostly irrelevant shortly after the festival is over. All this makes for interesting work! Anyway, here’s an early phase of the site - the micro-site to support pass sales. Check it out (and all future phases) at http://www.lafilmfest.com We’ll update as new phases go up!
Every once in a while, there are breakthroughs that are revolutionary in their simplicity and focus. Twitter is an example that comes to mind. For me and in my work, Balsamiq Mockups is just such a breakthrough.
In the world of User Experience Design, there has been some really interesting research and publication on the importance and immense value of sketching in the web and application design process (for more on this, I recommend Bill Buxton’s life-changing book Sketching User Experiences). People, it seems, have a different psychological reaction to sketches during the concept development and experience design process. When something seems quick and rough, people collaborate and think. When presented with ideas that are too fully formed, people will approach them as being complete ideas, and as such will make black or white decisions about them.
(more…)
Dear Frye / Wiles Clients and Associates:
First of all, thanks again for all your business this last year, and happy holidays to all! It’s been another good year for us, and we’re looking forward to working with you on lots of exciting projects in 2009.
We wanted to let you know that Frye / Wiles will be on a skeleton crew from Dec 25 to Jan 5 so that our staff can get some much-needed rest and time with their families, so if you have a slight delay in contact us, please bear with us. All email and phone messages will be checked, but the response time may be a little less than instant.
Thanks, and have a wonderful holiday season!
Google has a lot of powerful search features you probably aren’t using!
We talk about Google a lot around here…but how many of you actually know how to use it? Of course, anyone can run a simple search for, say, komodo dragon underwear. But you can save yourself a lot of time if you use Google’s simple search commands to narrow in on your search before you hit that search button.
(more…)
Take a look, we got text, we got illustrations we got staff!
The whole point of this series has been to educate our customers and potential customers about what it really takes to build out a webstore, because quite frankly, most people have no idea how big of a process it actually is. Once we get the site designed and built, and the security and credit card processing is working, we get to the fun* part. (more…)
As you probably surmised from my old-timey padlock photograph, this episode of my Ecommerce series is all about security.
(more…)
We here at Frye / Wiles use the term “Results-Oriented” a lot, and for good reason - we could rattle off all the technical mumbo-jumbo in the world to our clients, but in the end, what is important to them is the result they get from hiring us. So, going against our instincts as nerds, we have forced ourselves to approach all projects (and in-project details) with the results-oriented mentality. Results and ROI for our customers is what we are working toward. With that in mind, I’m going to jump right into Part 1 of my illustrious series, “What’s Involved in Ecommerce” (see the Prologue first if you haven’t read that yet and feel lost at this point)
(more…)
photograph © Ellen Denuto
There is a lot of confusion out there as to what it actually takes to design, develop and manage a webstore. It is actually very common for us to get phone calls from people wanting to build fully customized ecommerce solutions for, oh, say $250 (not kidding).
Which got me thinking, why is this? (more…)
You may have noticed that we here at Frye / Wiles post in our blog a lot. Why, you ask, do we do it? Are we really that full of ourselves?
Well, yes. But that’s not the reason. When it comes down to it, Google (and the other major search engines) loves blogs. They prioritize indexing on blogs (and other sites that are updated very frequently), to really a quite ridiculous degree. (more…)
