ScottPelland.com

Author Archive

Publishing, marketing, creating effective messages and engaging audiences is something I’ve been involved in for more than 20 years. Now, along with IT and design genius Eric Boettcher, I’m thrilled to announce the formation of Applied Imagination Media, where we think we have come up with a better way to make business web sites.

When we think of innovation, we usually focus on new technologies, but innovation within a business model can be just as effective as a means of creating a new market or shifting market demand from traditional sources to the new model.

Eric and I didn’t set out to create a new model for the web design business; We looked at the current model from the perspective of the customer (having been customers ourselves in the past) and noted some dysfunctional practices in the industry. The most glaring problem was that most web design firms assumed that their clients came to them knowing not only what they wanted on their site, but that what they wanted was the right mix for their business and goals.

We found just the opposite to be true. Clients know the importance of an Internet presence and they generally know the types of services they would like to offer online, such as an online shop or contact point. But most clients need expert help to decide how to achieve those goals. What it comes down to is offering a complete plan that includes effective messaging, presentation, and functions that will help their site become visible and engaging. Read the rest of this entry »

I love HootSuite! HootSuite is a non-affiliated, 3rd party Twitter client that lets you manage all your Tweeting from one dashboard. You can easily shrink URLs and schedule Tweets to publish whenever you want. For testing your marketing messages, however, HootSuite has another function that’s as cool as the site’s little owl icon. Stats! I love stats. HootSuite’s stats show you how many clicks you’re getting for your Tweet-embedded links. I love being able to see what messages resonate with my Twitter following. I love being able to see traffic day by day. You can examine the stats on each Tweet, check out traffic by region or look at overall traffic for a specified period of time. This is a super tool for anyone wanting to squeeze more information and learning out of their social networking acctivities. Show this to a client and they’ll love you.

The Internet is built on text. The foundation of the web was built with HTML (hypertext markup language) which provided tools for presenting text on a computer screen. That legacy remains the foundation of all Internet activity today. Of course, images, video and all sorts of graphic embellishments have been added to web site presentations, but images remain essentially invisible to computer search engines because computers aren’t very good at recognizing visual context. The fact is, computers don’t really even understand words, but they are very good at recognizing strings of letters and matching one string to another, which is the basis for search engines. (It’s also a pretty good reason to use spellchecking.) We can make images visible to search engines by attaching word tags, but in the end it’s still a matter of using words to communicate.

I’ve spent the past week making some major updates to The Imaginary Game News Network that I hope you get a chance to see. The Front Page has been completely revamped with some help from Eric Boettcher, and I’ve tried to help visitors dig down into the site’s rich backlog of content by building a more magazine-like interface with multiple features and secondary stories. Let me know if this is working better. I have quite a few additional changes and improvements in mind, so be sure to stop by periodically for a laugh.

I’ve also created a second, much shorter URL for reaching IGNN–assuming you don’t have it bookmarked (which inconceivable). Now all you have to do is type: www.IGNNite.com. Short, sweet, hot and sassy.

As I continue to work on IGNN, I love hearing from readers, so don’t be shy.

This is a warning (or maybe just a caution) to anyone out there thinking about starting a web site or a blog. I recently began work on a game-related web site called The Imaginary Game News Network. I thought, how hard can it be? I’m a writer. I speak Photoshop. I spent 20 years writing about games. Man, I even enjoy building 3-D models and rendering scenes. There are plenty of tools out there, most of them free. And code; that’s just words and fiddly bits, right? Now, after two months in which I’ve battled Romanian spammers, wrestled with CSS, Tweeted my heart out to gain viewers, snarled at my dog to sit still so I could snap a picture that would turn him into the image of an evil alien overlord, it’s truly amazing that I can remember how to wake up in the morning. Every assumption I made going into the project was wrong…staggeringly wrong. On the other hand, it’s been one of the most engaging experiences of my life. (You can skip to the end for the pay-off if you like, otherwise, pull up a chair.) Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft’s bold leap into motion-controlled gaming through the image-capturing Project Natal technology suggests a potential future in which we may all dress up to play video games. Project Natal will have the capacity to not only translate a user’s motions into game-controlling actions, but also to capture the user’s image and display it within the game’s graphic environment. The result could be games in which you view yourself moving around within the game world. In such a game, you would become the star, the game’s protagonist, and that will bring with it a whole new set of game playing considerations. Imagine seeing yourself in a future Final Fantasy title charging into battle on a Chocobo’s back or sprinting toward the end zone in Madden; if you’re wearing whatever you currently wear to play games–jeans, PJs, underwear (I don’t judge)– you might look pretty silly in the context of the game. It won’t take long for gamers to catch on that they’ll have to look the part to really get into the game, and that will open up an entirely new era of interactivity. Read the rest of this entry »