Allow us to introduce you to Epstein and Hassan, otherwise known as The Black and The Jew Comedy Hour, and the website we just created for them. You can subscribe to their podcast on Itunes there and see where they’ll be performing live.
Aren’t those photographs wonderful? These two are hilarious, edgy and, in the way of all great comedy and social commentary, their humor is informed by a craftily observant eye on the universal experience. Think George Carlin. Think Lenny Bruce. Plus, spend five minutes with them and you’ll see they are in loooove, which adds a wonderfully gentle underpinning to their razory repartee.
Barack Obama made history yesterday by becoming the first African American President. His entire campaign was flawless and can easily be a case study for a marketing and advertising class. His internet marketing was especially brilliant. His YouTube page has had over 20,000,000 channel views (John McCain’s page has just over 2,000,000 views), and his Facebook Fan Page kept supporters (over 3,000,000) up-to-date with daily updates on the his upcoming events, appearances and speeches.
Barack Obama was lauded with having an amazingly seamless and beautiful website, far superior to any of his rivals. Obama is so web 2.0 that he instantly connected with the youth of our nation reaching out for support in very nontraditional ways. Obama has also started a new site, Change.gov allowing ordinary people to feel included into the happenings of the government.
This brings me to the new whitehouse.gov website. Obama and his team certainly understand the importance of branding because the new White House website matches the look and feel of change.gov, his youtube page, facebook page and campaign website. CNN.com posted an article about the website this morning. The website is very interactive including a blog and allowing people to contact the president via email (500 characters max. meaning you can only say “I love you” so many times). The website is so clean and sophisticated to puts past websites to shame. Here are a few screen shots from past Whitehouse.gov home pages.
December 1998 (Remember the internet was still new)
We just launched a redesigned and re-structured web presence for the Cherry Lane Theatre. This marks the end of the first phase of development (phase 2 will involve completing a site-wide CMS as well as the implementation of a new, cohesive branding message that will tie together the various elements of the Cherry Lane identity and community), and is a great point on which to head off for the holiday break, if you ask me.
We’re happy with how things have turned out so far, and are looking forward to a fabulous new year with some exciting platforms and projects in store. Stay tuned.
Jeffrey Zeldman—as always, it seems—speaks the truth:
Most clients are good clients, and some clients are great clients. But some jobs are just never going to work out well. Herewith, a few indicators that a project may be headed to the toilet. Guarantee: All incidents taken from life.
Perhaps my favorite—though they’re all great (and true!)—is this:
17. Client begins first meeting by making a big show of telling you that you are the expert. You are in charge, he says: he will defer to you in all things, because you understand the web and he does not. (Trust your uncle Jeffrey: this man will micromanage every hair on the project’s head.)
With all due respect and reverence to Wordpress, the awesome open-source content management system that powers this blog, as well as a number of sites I’ve personally had the pleasure of working on, there’s a new kid on the block that just might have what it takes to pull me away from the tried-and-true, and venture out into uncharted waters.
I’m talking about CushyCMS, a super-simple system created by Stateless Systems (of RetailMeNot reknown). It’s designed primarily for web designers looking to add a no-fuss way to allow clients to update content on their sites. For each element in the HTML that the designer wishes to give permission to edit, s/he need only add a simple class="cushycms".
No fussing with PHP, no costly time spent trying (in vain) to enforce style conventions and convince content editors not to randomly make things bold, italic, purple, and struck-through, or attempt to explain how to keep the code clean and semantic and valid. Stress-free, beautiful, and highly user-friendly.
CushyCMS is obviously not suited for every project. The fact that it’s a fully hosted solution makes things simple to set up, but gives you less flexibility down the line than something like Wordpress or Drupal, for example. But for the right client, CushyCMS seems like it would take a huge amount of hassle out of the process and let designers focus on designing, and writers focus on writing.
I’m excited to give CushyCMS a test run in the coming weeks, and will definitely write about how that goes. The site is in private beta right now, but should be open to the public on April 15.
Here’s a great introductory video from TechCrunch that really highlights how simple CushyCMS is to set up and use.
