We were thinking and talking (simultaneously) the other day about what it takes to build a meaningful web presence. What I heard then and have consistently heard for many years is this: good content. Said one friend with 11 years of site-building experience, “The content, especially the copy, is always the problem… always holding things up.” Kind of like, “the dinner wasn’t very good until the food was served.” Sounds obvious enough, until you witness what must really be happening in the site development process. The functional, designed shell of a web site is in the control of the designer and his/her many guides and helpers, including clients, strategic thinkers and just about anyone else. How the site looks and links and engages and interacts with the visitor is the designer/programmer’s responsibility. Read the rest of this entry »
We are a communication strategy and creative firm, providing content for all forms of media, from original idea through final production. It’s our job to see and understand things from many angles, usually from the perspective of others, especially that of our clients and their customers. But we draw from a view all our own. Our view of business is not from the guest-bedroom/home-office technology command center. Our view is not from Madison Avenue, nor Wall Street, nor 4th Street, nor the proverbial Main Street. For 15 years our view has been “the” street — an increasingly rare vantage point for marketers, from which we see business realities and challenges in action every day in varied ways. People, culture, design, music, technology, innovation, advertising, ideas, media — they’re what make business run — and they’re at their best at street level. As time permits, we and our guest-bloggers will share what’s going on here with us and around us. Our hope is that it will help add perspective to your day, to your work, and to your life.
There is a lot to like about doing business on Airport Road in our home community of Columbia-Tusculum photo, on the eastern end of Cincinnati. Traditionally referred to as the East End, it’s a diverse, urban neighborhood —one of the region’s oldest actually, dating back to 1788 — with an interesting character and energy. Columbia-Tusculum is a mix of new retail, new and older residential and office development, emerging out of one of Cincinnati’s oldest industrial neighborhoods, where steamboat and railcar manufacturing once thrived. Humble residences share the block with 1940s storefronts and other commercial properties, from small offices to machine shops, small manufacturers and distribution businesses. The hills rising above the main road, Columbia Parkway, feature some of the finest, most colorful rehabs of circa-1800s homes in the city. At the far eastern end — in an area once known as “Turkey Bottoms,” is Lunken Airport, established in 1930 it is still considered one of the finest municipal airports in the country. Everything from private, recreational aircraft to ad-banner planes to blimps to corporate jets fly in and out of Lunken daily, characterizing this end of Columbia-Tusculum as active and vital.
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There is much talk of the value of “engagement” in communications, particularly online, where marketers are finding they can influence their prime audiences — interactively, communally, in real time — in ways other media can’t. My son’s participation in the Cincinnati Regional Science Olympiad, a science project competition among Greater Cincinnati high schools, showed me a form of engagement — interactively, communally, in real time — which I hadn’t seen before. It was interesting to me because most, if not all, enthusiastic gatherings of high school students are centered on athletic competition. But this was science…the proverbial slide-rule and pocket-protector crowd.
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