Domain7

Orange Day 2010!

At Domain7, we know how important it is to support our local communities. One organization we are proud to partner with is UGM, one of Vancouver’s best non-profits. Our friend Kevan has some exciting news to share about Orange Day 2010:

The 2010 games have been an unforgettable experience that increased the fun in Vancouver by 1,000,000,000%.

At Union Gospel Mission, we want to keep the fun and camaraderie going for good, and use our collective energy to bring hope and help to our neighbours in need. That’s why we need your help to bring back our Orange Day Campaign in 2010! Orange Day started because we’ve always given out oranges at our annual Easter dinner. Yeah, we’d serve over 3,000 scrumptious ham dinners to our hungry, hurting, homeless guests, and at the end of it, everybody gets an orange.

It’s like saying: take hope home with you. You can start over. You can get off the street. You can reconnect with your family. You can peel back your addictions and discover a fresh life awaiting through recovery.

We have programs that can help you achieve all of these things. The Orange Day Campaign is about experiencing all the free fun our city has to offer, and donating whatever you would have spent on a day/night out to UGM to help make the lives of people living in need in our city better.

Here’s a breakdown:

Go out and have fun (- don’t spend any $) + share your experience online (+ donate what you would’ve spent to UGM) = Help transform our city into a fun place for everyone!

The Orange Day Campaign starts March 27 and we need your help to get the word out. So “Squeeze the Day” and tweet (use #orangeday to tag your tweets) and blog now!

Here’s some helpful links for you to clicky clack over to and learn more:

• Orange Day on Facebook
• Orange Day 2009 Photogallery
• UGM’s 1st Orange Day 2010 Blog Post
• UGM’s Twitter Page

We will have a few fun events to get people connected and excited about during the lead up to Orange Day like a Tweet-up and a Photowalk. Details about those and the official Orange Day website will be hitting the interwebs soon. Thanks for making our city such an amazing place!

Advice For Students... And the Rest of Us

Recently I was asked by my alma mater to visit the university and chat with a group of students who are involved in media on campus, like I was myself as a student newspaper editor back in the day. (I am apparently now one of those old alum who has something to come back and share with the young’uns).

Before going, I posted a note online asking for advice on what my colleagues and friends would share with these students - things they wish they had been reminded of as university students. I really appreciated the wise feedback from my friends and fellow alum, and so off I went and shared a few thoughts with these eager beavers, including:

1. Take the time to cultivate relationships: If you have a mentor, instructor or employer who has inspired you or helped you, they will likely continue to be a great resource to you down the road, so take the time to connect and express your gratitude. If they go out of their way to refer you, or give you helpful feedback on your work, thank them with a hand-written card, a coffee delivered in person or a gift certificate.
2. Don’t be afraid to fail: In other words, don’t be afraid to take risks. It frees us up to think more creatively, to fail in some cases, and to then rule out options that don’t work and move on to the next. Too often in our attempts to speed up processes, or avoid looking bad, lead us down the path of least resistance. And it’s pretty boring there.
3. Put yourself out there: Ask to meet with or job-shadow someone you admire and respect if you’re interested in their line of work. Get LinkedIn to your fellow students, instructors, alumni and employers, because they’ll scatter quicker than you think after graduation day. Set up a simple website showing off your credentials and samples of your work. It’s all so easy but most of the students were too busy in their day-to-day routines to think about doing so.

As I left campus, inspired by the students’ creativity and keen interest in finding their way in the world, I realized that the discussion we had could just as easily have been about how to promote yourself, or your company, at any stage in life, and reminded myself to go do all the things I’d just told them to do.

A Case for Automated System Integration

Software running on a modern computer may be the most complex engineering feat humanity has yet achieved. That is until we start considering a bunch of different software running on a cluster of different computers. In our internet era we deliver enormous value, more rapidly, employing smaller teams using relatively inexpensive infrastructure. We’ve leveraged several trends to arrive at this accomplishment. These include processes by which we collaborate, dynamic programming languages and automation. I focus on automation in this article.

In information technology (IT) pre-history we used sticks and rocks to acquire, install and configure computers individually and by hand. No two computers were ever exactly alike. This was creative and fun for a time. Alas, the quantity and variety of tasks people asked of these ancient machines continued to increase dramatically. We soon found ourselves with too few sticks and rocks. We were sad.

And then someone invented the internet. Once everyone agreed the web, with its hypertext transport protocol (HTTP), was an excellent way to share ideas we began rethinking how we manage computing at a planetary scale. Fast forward a decade — Amazon, Google and many more companies delivering value via the web have popped into existence. In order to make it all work try imagining insanely large computers (i.e. data centres) composed of an absurd number of smaller, cheaper computers (i.e. servers). Rather than maintaining these machines individually, using our diminishing stick supply, we write special software orchestrating the entire show.

I rely on Opscode’s Chef to automate any and all infrastructure I happen to come across. Chef is an “open source systems integration framework”. It is written in Ruby, a dynamic programming language, and implements a domain specific language (DSL) describing elements commonly used when creating and arranging computing infrastructure. Chef gradually collects your organization’s knowledge into a single, consistent description of your operations. As people join your organization simply reading through these cookbooks is enough to learn about the big picture. There are several publicly available cookbooks including my own: http://github.com/dje/cookbooks

As an example let’s imagine you need an extra web server or thirty to handle an unexpected traffic burst. You may be maintaining your own hosting infrastructure or more likely renting someone else’s virtualized infrastructure (i.e. Amazon, Rackspace, Linode etc.). In any case, after starting a new computer (a.k.a. instance or node), your first step is to install Chef. Step two, run a selection of cookbooks “converging” this system to become a web server. There is no step three. Voila! — your site survived this spike.

Of course the devil is in the details, but in an idealized case we have a complete set of cookbooks tying all of our infrastructure together into a functioning whole. If we happen to lose a data centre to a meteorite, or find a better hosting deal, building up our entire operational infrastructure is just a button press away.

It may have crossed your mind that this sort of scale doesn’t apply to a small organization. However, small groups have as much, if not more, to gain by using automation. We have far few resources and personnel. By focusing our development skills in an operations context each of us is exponentially more powerful.

I don’t believe this removes demand for professional system administrators. Nor should it frighten developers used to keeping operations at arms length. I do believe it enables these responsibilities to blend resulting in a fantastically more capable and sustainable organization.

TEDxEdmonton

I am live at TEDxEdmonton to get an inside look at some of Canada’s creative, technological and design experts. If you want to follow along, check out the live blog that I will be covering here:

Understanding Analytics (Part 2)

My last post imagined how valuable a Sears manager would find a small device that tracked the activity of every shopper who wandered into his store. Turns out, that device exists online, and it may be the biggest edge the web has over physical marketing. It’s called analytics.

Domain7 sets up all new sites with the most popular analytics software, Google Analytics. A few lines of code inserted into every page of your site lets you track the following visitor information:

Visitors

• Number of daily visitors,and what percent are new to your site
• Number of daily pageviews, and the average pageviews per visit
• How much time the average visitors spends on your site
• The bounce rate (percentage of visitors who leave the site after viewing only one page)
• The physical location of visitors (down to the city level) and their primary language
• The operating system and browser program they’re using
• How many visitors accessed your site through a mobile device, and what kind of device they used

Sources

• What sites are linking to yours, and how many visitors they’re sending
• What search engines are sending you traffic
• What people typed into a search engine to get to your site
• How well your online advertising campaigns are doing
• Content Popular pages, by number of views
• Top landing pages (first page visitor arrived at)
• Top exit pages (last page visitors viewed before leaving)
• Site overlay showing which parts of your layout generated most clicks
• What people searched for on your site, if you have a search box
• Which files people are downloading

Content

• Popular pages, by number of views
• Top landing pages (first page visitor arrived at)
• Top exit pages (last page visitors viewed before leaving)
• Site overlay showing which parts of your layout generated most clicks
• What people searched for on your site, if you have a search box
• Which files people are downloading

For Another Time

This is just the basic data you get without configuring anything. What we’ll save for another post or two: what to do with this data, and how to track specific goals.

Understanding Analytics: A Parable (Part 1)

You are the new manager of your local Sears. You’re eager to increase your sales, but you need hard data before you start tweaking things. (Trial and error works, but it’s a slow process. You guess wrong almost as often as you guess right.)

One day your regional manager invites you to join a special pilot program. A tiny chip embedded in each shopping basket will track shoppers’ activity to the minutest details, including:

• Who recommended your store to them
• What they walked in looking for
• How long they spent in each department, and in which order
• How long it took them to find what they were looking for and check out
• Why they walked out without buying anything

You spend your Saturday mornings studying the cumulative data.

There are more charts and tables than even your data-starved heart could want. You learn some surprising facts:

• Shoppers who walk through the fragrance section are 29% less likely to purchase men’s clothing
• You’re losing $900 a day because long checkout lineups are causing people to leave their full baskets in frustration and walk out
• Shoppers who come in through the outside entrance stay 12 minutes longer and spend $21.34 more than those who come in through the mall entrance
• The full-page jewelry sale ad you placed in the local paper was a complete waste of money

Armed with this knowledge, you start tweaking. In fact, over time you tweak everything: the number of checkout lanes, the bathroom signage, the most prominent items in your flyers, the number of shelves in your displays. But there’s no guessing: you tweak only one thing at a time, and each Saturday you review your data to see if it worked.

Over the weeks and months, your revenue steadily increases, and you become one of the most profitable Sears locations in the country….

Now, jerk yourself awake.

Even if the technology existed, the cost would be astronomical-at least for a bricks-and-mortar store. But you don’t manage a Sears outlet, you’re running a website. And you can collect this data about your visitors for next to nothing. In fact, you’ve probably been collecting it already.

Stay tuned for next time when we talk about how to use your analytics data to make your website hum.

Graphex 2010

Two of our Lead Designers and professional members of the Graphic Designers of Canada, Stephen Bau and Michelle Sourisseau, represented Domain7 at the Meet the Judges Graphex 2010 kick-off last Friday, Feb. 5. The event, co-sponsored by Domain7 , included a lecture by five of the world’s most influential authorities in communication design as well as a debate with audience participation and the ever-popular cocktail hour.

The event took place at the perfect spot for this aesthetically astute crowd - District 319 , a former Asian movie house turned contemporary private event lounge on Main Street. Guests were ushered down a red carpet and through a side door, and after mingling and appies, settled into the screening room for the main event.

The judges included: Rolando Diep (Landor Associates, Mexico City); Louise Fili (Louise Fili Ltd., New York City); Julia Hoffman (MoMA, New York City); Mark Randall (Worldstudio, New York City); and Matt Warburton (Emdoubleyu Design, Vancouver). Each judge gave a brief schpeal about their work and professional history as a designer followed by a reflection on the past two years in the design industry, and projections of what’s to come. Afterwards, the open mic discussion revolved around the evening’s theme: “Reflection/Projection.” Check out our Flickr page for more pics

Follow Stephen and Michelle on Twitter for the latest info from the design world.

Stephen - @bauhouse Michelle - @msourisseau

Domain7 acquires Washington DC Marketing Firm

Domain7 is growing yet again - this time across time zones and south of the border!

As of this month, we’re excited to officially announce the recent acquisition of Washington, DC based marketing firm, Joint Venture Communications.

This strategic acquisition will extend Domain7’s marketing and communications capabilities, and enable us to better serve our clientele in the US and in Canada, east of our headquarters’ Pacific time zone. Joint Venture’s expertise in advertising and brand development provide creative solutions for both the private and public enterprise markets.

With a growing number of international clients, we’re always seeking opportunities to expand our core business across North America. Joint Venture’s high-level marketing experience and talented team are a perfect complement to the Domain7 team, helping us service all our clients with as much availability, expertise and attention to detail as we do our local clients.

Ken Joy, Creative Director at Joint Venture, is also excited about the opportunity: “This is an exciting milestone for our company, and we look forward to accelerating our growth with Domain7. Ultimately this is a win for our clients, as the level of web expertise that Domain7 brings to the table is substantial.”

The addition of the Joint Venture team brings Domain7’s in-house team of experts to 29 and counting in our thirteenth year of business. Watch for new team photos to be added to our website over the next couple of weeks. And as always, please feel free to contact us with any comments or questions.

Why We Love Drupal

We’ve spent 12 years building our RouteOne platform, and we’re proud of it. But over the last year, we’ve also needed something with the more advanced features that some of our clients require.

So we turned to Drupal, the web’s leading open-source content management platform. It’s a tool to build and manage many different types of websites, including blogs, online stores, and social networks.

Here’s why we love it, and why you might, too.

1. Drupal is open source. That means the wider Internet community is free to modify and distribute Drupal’s code as they wish. There are no license fees, and the software continually improves to meet the needs of real users.
2. Drupal has a huge community. It’s used by over 175,000 websites, including the White House, Nike, FedEx, the UN, NASA, Harvard, MIT and many other prominent organizations. There are thousands of developers around the globe who build Drupal sites, create Drupal modules, or help improve Drupal’s core code.
3. Drupal offers thousands of free modules. Do you need to build an online store? send out email newsletters? create a social network? There’s a module for your needs. That frees up your budget for design and customization.

RouteOne isn’t going away. For basic and intermediate sites, it’s perfect. But we’re happy we can now provide a more advanced and fully-featured solution for our clients who need it.

Help For Haiti

credit: AP Photo/Ricardo Arduengo

Two of our clients, Hungry for Life and Childcare Worldwide have people on the ground directly in Haiti providing aid. If you would like to donate directly to the emergency response teams, please check out both websites and help out estimated 100,000 people affected by earthquake.

• Donate to Childcare Worldwide
• Donate to Hungry for Life