Creating Powerful Media
I create visual media and web applications to recruit, educate and inspire.
To ensure success, I guide my projects through three clear phases.
1) Clarify Objectives
Powerful communication only comes from a clear strategy. If you have one, I need to know what it is. If you don't, we need to create it.
Here are 5 questions which can help:
- Who? - Who is the target audience?
- What? - What are we going to communicate?
- Why? - What result are we going to create? Purchase of a product? Formation of a movement? Fundraising?
- Where? - Where is the communication going to happen? Mobile? Web? Social Media? Print?
- How? - What are the actual mechanics?
2) Plan
With a clear strategy, we create a plan. The plan could be for a complex web application or it could be a simple outline of a budget, talent needs and logistics for a shoot. It might include visual mock-ups either online or in print.
I share the plan for feedback, and respond to the feeback with a refined plan. We continue the cycle until we have an agreed plan.
3) Develop
This is the phase where I am doing the front and back end programming of actual web development - Or, in the case of photography, I am shooting, editing and delivering.
The devil is in the details. But managing technical details to deliver something awesome is what I do well - this is why I've been developing web applications for over a decade and have been trusted with big assignments in difficult locations from big clients such as National Geographic and the New York Times.
Here are some of the details you can count on me for:
- Programming for the web: PHP, Perl, Javascript, jQuery, Python/Django (currently learning), HTML, AJAX
- 3rd Party Web Apps: Drupal, Wordpress, CiviCRM, ecommerce integration, custom CMS solutions, email marketing/listservs (PHPlist, Mailman), ImageMagick
- Integrating Visual Design: CSS, Photoshop, Flash, Image production, in-browser design flow, wireframing.
- Server Admin: FreeBSD, Linux, LAMP server admin (Apache, mySQL, PHP configuration)
- Data: MySQL database development, data mining, XML & JSON parsing, D3 and Raphael for data visualization, Google maps, online mapping
- SEO, SMO: No web application is complete without search engine optimization and social media optimization. Clever Facebook, Twitter API integration is as essential as good metadata and creating content relevant links across the web.
- Analytics: Google analytics, Webalizer, Urchin, etc.
4) Evaluate
After the launch of the application or delivery of the images, I evaluate the results. Facebook and Twitter metrics can be tracked, compliled and presented along with web/mobile traffic analytics and success of SEO and SMO campaigns.