BigTuna Interactive

Concepting for Conversation

admin — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 21:20:32 +0000

To kickoff the tracks at the 2011 San Diego Ad Club Interactive Day, Josh Rose spoke about the creative process and the new social consumer. Key learnings:

Consider the conversation, not just the content. Comments can have a greater effect on the brand than the original content.
Feedback from social media should be part of the creative process. Tools like hootsuite, tweetdeck, Lithium, etc are great for social monitoring.
Causes can be great engagement tools.
Some creative campaigns have a hook. These would be unique product tutorials (will it blend) or jib jab like tools where customers participate in the creative process.
For crisis management, stay on track by asking your team open ended questions to help find creative solutions. “What if this never happened, what would we do.”
Focus on making headlines, not reading headlines.

On a whole, Josh’s presentation was solid. It was great to get some behind the scenes look of some wildly successful campaigns.

We’re Hiring!

admin — Mon, 16 May 2011 23:17:37 +0000

BigTuna Interactive is currently looking to fill an internship position! We are an extremely fun Interactive Agency located in the heart of Mission Beach. This is a great opportunity to learn and network with some of San Diego’s Brighest!

Responsibilities:

Help to manage day-to-day social media campaigns, email campaigns, SEO, search marketing campaigns and day-to-day activities. Duties include entering/developing email content, keyword research, online advocacy, social media posting, writing editorial, community-outreach efforts, promotions, etc.

Help manage presence in social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter, and other similar community sites, posting on relevant blogs, and seeding content into social applications as needed.

Manage, update, and edit content through various content management systems (WordPress, Drupal, ExpressionEngine, SAP, Shopify).

Skills and Requirements:

A college junior, senior in Marketing, Advertising, Communications, Graphic Design, Interactive Media or related discipline
Fluency in Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator
Flash animation experience a plus
Good verbal and written communication skills
Marketing/Advertising course work
Knowledge of HTML/Web Dev is a huge plus
Must love the internet
Willing to learn Online Marketing
Must be socially adept and have an interest in Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare and other social networking platforms.

What you will learn:

You will have access to cutting edge web tools. These include the pro toolkit from SeoMoz, usability tracking software Silverback and Userfly, and social media optimization program ScoutLabs.
Access and exposure to larger agencies in San Diego, Northern California and Las Vegas.
Mobile Marketing from Treeline Interactive, BigTuna Interactive’s strategic partner.

Included in the internship program is a membership to Ad 2 San Diego, the Young Professional section of the San Diego Ad Club.

Details:

This internship is for a maximum of 10 hours a week. Flexible hours. School credit or paid compensation.

Please send your resume to jobs@bigtunainteractive.com

SXSW: Steven Krug Usability Session

admin — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 23:03:37 +0000

Author/Usability testing guru Steven Krug gave a closing presentation at the 2011 SXSW Interactive Conference. We’ve been a huge fan of Steven Krug’s principles since we first his book, “Don’t Make Me Think”.

Key usability principles:

3 testers are plenty
Have the observer be monitored from a different computer
Dont be too fussy to make sure the testers are from your target market
Record the sesssion. We use Silverback for our usability tests

No big reports are needed, just actionable recommendations
Make sure that you have the tester talk their way through what they are doing
Dont ask them additional questions during the process. Stick to your usability script
You should keep a consistent usability test schedule and test early and often.

Steven did an actual test of the SXSW conference schedule. He facilitated the script and had the tester talk about what he was trying to accomplish. He closed by suggesting how to fix the problems that were brought up during the test. Your motto should be

“what’s the smallest change we can make that we think might solve the observed problem?

In most cases, you dont have to do a major redesign. You just have to consistently fix the small changes, which can be developed faster and more efficiently.

SXSW: Q&A with Google and Bing

admin — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 18:24:34 +0000

SEO legends Matt Cutts and Duane Forrester with Journalist Danny Sullivan headed up the Monday afternoon all star panel at SXSW.

To summarize:

Matt talked about penalities and said that 30 days can be a normal “minor” penalty. These may be if your site got hacked and malicious code got inserted. If you have hidden text, or other poor man’s spam tactics.
Matt emphasized the importance on creating new, original cool content. If you can add value and build your reputation, the more likely you are going to get quality links in return. He further emphasized having cool applications or widgets on your page can be another great link baiting strategy.

Danny brought up a great point that anytime you have to consider if a link is spammy, it is a red flag and you should not do that tactic.
Duane said the site age is just one of thousands of criteria for ranking. He said that a new site can rank well if they get a lot of social signals. Matt said that reputation and topicality are huge factors for ranking. He also said that social signals are being incorporated and they will continue to look into building social into their algorithm.
Bing launched some new webmaster tools applications that are worthwhile to check out. Our San Diego SEO company uses these tools and we are really impressed.
Matt mentioned that .org’s can pull from more resources than .com’s. Other .org’s may be more likely to offer a link to a fellow .org.
Matt gave a solid analogy about how automation, and content management systems can really get you into trouble if you don’t follow best practices in your development.
In general, Online Marketers most important metric should be conversions, not rankings. Duane really hammered home that ranking is not a metric and ranking reports are worthless and ultimately sugar pills. Danny had a funny joke that said the only people who should do scraping are when Google scrapes Bing and Bing scrapes Google!

Even though SXSW really messed up by not providing a bigger room for this panel, it was a great session!

SXSW: HTML5 – The Web is Dead

admin — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 21:22:18 +0000

The Sunday, 3:30 session at SXSW’s Designer/Developer track was “HTML5 – The Web is Dead, baby”. HTML5 is a technology that we have utilized for iPhone development at Treeline Interactive, BigTuna Interactive’s strategic partner.

To start the HTML5 discussion, Emily Lewis mentioned that her favorite aspect about HTML5 is that it provides a more semantic markup for front end development. Its format really gives a consistent page structure, which will remove code bloat, thus making it more search engine friendly. The tagging hierarchy is clean and search engine spiders can understand content easier.

Presently, HTML5 is perfect for mobile applications. You can build a mobile app, which will work consistently across all platforms with HTML5 very cost efficiently. Erik Klimczak stated that gaming is a great application for HTML5. He also said that TweetDeck for Chrome is better than the Adobe Air TweetDeck platform. The HTML5 markup makes the pages load faster in the Chrome browsers.

Branden Hall, CEO of Automata Studios spoke how HTML5 can be used in substitute for flash. This will make the page accessible to both users with disabilities and for mobile platforms. Charts and other data formatting can be stylized on the fly with HTML5 as well.

Our policy for HTML5 is to strictly use it when the project requires its markup and it can be used to help the client achieve their business objectives. It should not be used for marketing or coolness purposes!

SXSW: How Print Design is the Future of Interaction

admin — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 16:20:43 +0000

9:30 panel: Mike Kruzeniski, Creative Director for Microsoft gave a steller Saturday morning presentation for How Print Design is the Future of Interaction. He started with a great history of UI design, and then incorporated best practices of print design, as now applied to web design.

Key learnings:

Icons are only useful if everyone understands what it means. This is a great principle to follow.
Grid based designs speed up your development systems as we as increases the user experience. It helps form the appropriate amount of white and negative space. We’ve been a huge fan of a modified version of the 960 grid system for our web designs.
The Flipboard RSS reader provides a print page like interface and provides a cleaner RSS reader experiencee.

In summary, Mike spoke often about Paul Rand’s quote regarding how bad design is now become common design. This is a quote that you should show clients whenever they want a glossy or reflection-like layout, circa 2008!

Spif Monkey Microsoft WebApp

admin — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 18:48:38 +0000

The Redesign of BigTunaInteractive.com

admin — Mon, 31 May 2010 23:18:49 +0000

After three weeks of usability testing, we are proud to officially announce the re-launch of BigTuna Interactive’s site! The features of this site are a product of our San Diego web design skills that we have advanced tremendously over the past few years.

Here are some images of the old site. Please click on them for a full screen graphic.

We used these technologies and design techniques on the new BigTuna Interactive website:

CSS Sprites

We really went nuts with CSS sprites on the redesign. Sprites are images with various usability states. These states could be either current, active or hover. Sprites are a great way to increase page speed and reduce server calls. In the past, you had to use javascript to accomplish the effects of sprites. However, you can develop them using strictly CSS today. The first sprite that you will see is our navigation.

The navigation of our old site had a drop down menu. However, after researching our analytics, we saw that the drop down navigation was not used and that we would be better off by simplifying the navigation.

The footer is also blinged out with two different sprites:

CSS sprites also increase usability by showing the visitor that they are on a clickable object.

jQuery

jQuery is a clean, unobtrusive javascript library that allows you to add flash-like interactions to your site. We are a huge fan of jQuery. jQuery allows you to pack meaningful content on a page; yet, you can still keep the layout integrity. This is great for search engine optimization. You will see jQuery interactions on the following pages:

The contact form on the right sidebar, the hover states for the images in our portfolio, and the fancybox image galleries are also triggered by jQuery.

Icons and custom graphics

Icons are consistent throughout the entire site. They serve as descriptive indicators of what the visitor will be clicking on. You name the page, you’ll see some icons!

We also gave each services page a custom designed header graphic. This graphic was created in Photoshop and Illustrator.

Improved Portfolio section

The portfolio section for Interactive Agencies can be one of the trickiest page to lay out. We gave each of our products a thumbnail image, and an icon to show what services we performed. You have the option to check out all our our portfolio items directly on that page, through a fancybox modal overlay image gallery, or you can click directly to that page for more information.

Contact forms

We decided to put the contact form, fixed right to the visitors browser. Once clicked on, this contact form expands to include all of our pertinent contact information. On our old site, the contact form was in the footer and was hard to find. This is an absolute no-no for web design!

All of the site forms are connected to various databases, which allow us to manage the flow of information more efficiently.

Search Engine Optimization

I often tell our clients that there are two things that you need to be successful at seo:

Links
Pages

This redesign allowed us to add another 30 pages to the site and create an information hierarchy that is scalable.

Please let us know what you think of the new site. Like all good websites, your job is never finished. You should be consistently conducting usability studies, checking your analytics and optimizing the site for conversions. We plan on practicing what we preach for our clients with this site!

Iomega Social Media

admin — Tue, 04 May 2010 19:19:13 +0000

Writing Plugins for WordPress

admin — Sat, 01 May 2010 16:40:08 +0000

There were several plugin sessions at WordCamp San Francisco. Naill Kennedy, Joseph Scott and Michael “mitcho” Erlewine gave two different presentations during the morning esssion.

Naill Kennedy gave a high level overview of writing plugins for WordPress. Naill’s main points were:

Why would you write a plugin for WordPress? First of all, it can serve your own needs. Google and Salesforce.com just developed new plugins that integrated with WordPress. This allows you to improve customer engagement outside of your original site.

A second reason to write a plugin is to increase traffic back to your site. In the plugin admin center, you are given a link back to your site. While this link is not indexed by the search engines, it is a great way to drive traffic back to your site. You do get a link from the WordPress plugin directory.

WordPress Plugins can also increase your user experience. Plugins allow you to add or subtract items to a page, or add filters to a page. An example of this is on WordPress com, whenever you write WordPress with a lowercase “w” or “p”, it automatically capitolizes the letters.

Shortcodes have been integrated into WordPress for the past couple of versions. For Youtube, instead of typing in the full embed code, you would simply write a short snippet. Or, in WordPress version 2.9, you can actually just write the link, and WordPress will embed the video directly for you. This is done through the oEmbed plugin.

Joseph Scott spoke about WordPress Plugin security. His main points were:

Don’t trust external data
Make sure data is properly escaped.
Don’t allow injections in HTML
Don’t forget about the search form: as a test, enter script type=”text/javascript”>alert(‘hi’) end script and see what happens.
Use core WP functions whenever possible
Add caching for expensive processes
Make use and add your own actions/filters
Minimize DB row or options and use a unique name

Joseph also gave some don’t:

Include wp-config.php / wp-load.php / wp-blog-header.php
Ignore WP core options

Michael “mitcho” Erlewine was the last plugin speaker at WordCamp SF. He really emphasized borrowing, adapting and using hooks for your WordPress plgins.

We have developed plugins for our WordPress clients and intend on writing some public plugins in the near future.