New blog design in progress. Excuse the scaffolding. This is just a short about section where you can describe yourself and your site. You'll want to keep it fairly long because there are some layout issues that arise if the area is below a certain width.
CandyCollective in association with TwoStep Presents, The Rogues Gallery & Trans ‘08 proudly present a whole day of creative events culminating in a special edition of SweetTalk.
Exhibition launch & live-drawing (+ DJs)
When: Saturday 26th July, 4-8pm
Where: Waterfront Foyer
w/ Gavin Strange, Klingatron, WASTE, Richt, Sums, Danleo, Filth + more tbc
Free
Special Edition SweetTalk
When: 8.30pm
Where: Waterfront Studio
w/ Ben Drury (Mo’Wax Creative Director), Gavin Strange (JamFactory), M&E & more to be announced
£7 (available from Waterfront Box Office)
Image from Andy.
Martin Murray’s Interactive Return was bought by Publicis QMP yesterday in what is viewed as a good move by the Irish advertising agency to expand its digital skills.
Ta to Maryrose.
Wonderfully vibrant and stylish fashion and advertising photography from Nick Hitchcox.
As the title says we have move office into a larger space here in Drogheda.
You will now find us in Units 1 & 2 in the new Chamber of Commerce building on the Dublin road. It’s directly across the road from our favourite eatery The Black bull but I am not sure that is a good idea :)
Our new contact details are as follows.
Phone: 041 9830152
Skype: spoiltchilddesign
Address:
Units 1 & 2, Broughton house
Dublin Road, Drogheda
Co. Louth, Ireland
As Toddle gets closer to going live and the trip to Silicon Valley looms we have been looking closely at what kind of investment we might look for and how exactly should we structure ourselves in preparation. Our goal for Spoiltchild is to build great products, grow them to great businesses and then spin them out on their own. An internal incubation space. With Toddle coming out we would like(but don’t need) a cash injection to help bring the application to market relatively quickly. If we do pursue investment in Toddle how should we structure the company to do that. If its to be just Toddle should we spin it out to its own Limited Company now with Spoiltchild Ltd as the main shareholder . What would be the Tax implications of transferring a new product with no revenues between companies. Or do we look for investment in Spoiltchild Ltd itself combined with the other products we have in the pipeline for future release? Is BES attractive to all Irish investors or only some. If we look for more then the current BES limits would an investor invest some through BES and the rest outside it?
I guess its time to talk to an expert. Any suggestions?
Unfortunately I am going to have to miss Design Week this year. We won the Web2Expo competition run by web2ireland.org so myself and Bartek will be over in Berlin for the conference. Thank you for the tickets guys and if you are attending and want to meet up give me a shout.
I was honoured to be spending last weekend in the Dublin offices of Irish International BBDO as one of the judges for the 2007 Irish Creative Advertising and Design (ICAD) awards.
The process of narrowing down the entries was carried out over 2 day with Saturday spent choosing the awards short-list and those for exhibition only and Sunday spent in some heated debate over who should go home with a Gold, Silver or Bronze Bell or none of the above if the standard was not there.
As part of the New & Mixed Media Jury we had to look at work in the following categories:
Below the line
Ambient Media
Direct Mail
Sales Promotion
SMS/Mobile Campaign
Miscellaneous
Interactive Advertising
Banners
Viral Commercial
Viral Commercial Campaign
Interactive Design
Website
Interactive Kiosk & Installation
Electronic Publication Design (DVD, PDF etc)
Miscellaneous
Experimental New & Mixed Media
I found the whole process very interesting to see from the inside. I had heard rumblings in previous years about awards for the boys and how it was more who you knew then the standard of your entry however the reality was very different. The agency who submitted an entry was not revealed, and one judge on each team was brought in from an international agency to ensure impartiality and oversee the process. Of course Ireland being a small country its impossible not to have some connection somewhere but where that happened the particular Judge was asked to leave the room for the duration of that piece being marked.
The winners will be announced at the end of November at the awards event in Dublin and an exhibition will follow.
Oh I must mention ITSA4 restaurant in Sandymount. We were kindly treated to dinner there on Saturday night and I have to say it was some of the most delicious food I have ever tasted. Recommended.
The guys over on Web2Ireland.org are running a very nice competition for a couple of tickets to Web2Expo Berlin.
Quote:
So we decided to tackle a problem that we and most other Irish designers have.
The problem is that getting a clients feedback to a design is a difficult, prone to misunderstanding, and time consuming process as they try to describe the different parts of your design.
The solution is a simple web service where you can upload a design and the client can comment directly on the image.
Here is a quick demo of how it would work.
Closing date is midnight tonight so fingers crossed.
Introducing Rude Ball. A do it yourself Spot the Ball game creator and marketing tool. A fun little product.
A big welcome to Jackie O’Sullivan to the Spoiltchild team. Jackie is coming on board as studio manager to help make everything run a little more efficiently and business like. Jackie brings the current number up to four.
Just a note that we are looking for a full time senior WEB designer at the moment. Its an opportunity to work in a really creative environment on some interesting low and high profile projects. If you know of anyone suitable please let us or them know.
We are close to closing on some office space ending our 2 years as a virtual office. I am absolutely delighted to be honest. I would like to say it was an experiment but it was really necessity born out of being a cash strapped start up. While working from home has its benefits, to grow effectively and work efficiently there is nothing better then being in the same room. It will also be great to have a dedicated work space and a clear differentiation between work and home life. Its been a big focus of mine over the last 6 months to improve work life balance.
However when we move we will be keeping all our organisational tools as they are. So here is an over view of what we use.
First of all is email of course. Simple, fast and everyone can use it. We have the key accounts, info, support etc. forwarding to a Gmail account for everyone to read. I will show you shortly how the team get access to that.
Next is Basecamp from 37Signals. This is our main project management tool and I would be lost without it. It manages our internal projects and those with our clients. Its simple, effective and every client we have thrown it at has picked it up straight away.
We have a particular way we structure a project that works for us.
Through settings we place all the main project links on the dashboard for easy access. And we categorise message under the following headings.
I have a simple effective trick, set up a few Google alerts for your key search terms and let Google deliver your market research to you. I then use Basecamp for copying and pasting links and notes to build up a full picture of the market. It means that when I hopefully bring on a marketing person in the future I can just direct them to that link on Basecamp.
We use the to-do list for our project plan and split it into point versions containing key features.
We then check these off as we work and it gives the team a nice sense of reward and satisfaction often in a long project as new versions are released.
This is then linked to the milestones to we can plan specific delivery dates.
We don’t tend to use Writeboards much.
On Basecamp we have also created a dummy team member with managed access so that we can get a controlled live RSS data feed from it.
Instant communication.
37 Signals have integrated their great Campfire chat app into Basecamp. While we love it and could easily use it we actually use Skype instead because we started on that before campfire came about. On Skype we have one shared private discussion between the team that we keep open all the time. Everything is recorded if needed and we can also share files instantly for comment. If things get complicated to discuss over text chat its an easy matter to start a call. Lots of our local and international clients and suppliers also use Skype. For ease of use and cost its an easy choice.
Tracking and stats
For tracking websites we use a combination of 4 tools. Google Analytics of course for detailed analysis, Mint for an instant overview and RSS feeds (its purpose you will see in a minute), Crazy egg for web apps and see where users are clicking on a design and AWStats just to double check stuff and keep an eye for hotlinking.
Accounts
I have tried quite a few accounting packages and for reasons I put down to my own shortcomings I have not been able to get my head around. I seem to have some kind of mental block when ever accounting terms are mentioned. So I created my own.
Using Google docs and spreadsheeds I created a simple spreadsheet to record my accounts in with a simple “Money coming in” and “Money going out” and a few simple sums to take that data and split it into monthly in, out and forecasting cashflow.
So a simple free online accounts system with from google. It tracks changes, who by and I can simply share them with the accountant when needed. The cashflow is based on Ryan Carsons example.
Pulling it all together
Lastly to tie it all together in an instant one page full overview we use Netvibes.
Netvibes is a web app to create a personal webpage. We use it to create a live dashboard for the entire business and websites by the use of RSS feeds.
As you can see we have 4 columns covering the 4 main parts of Spoiltchild and the apps. First we use the netvibes gmail widget to pull in the above mentioned emails. Everyone in the team can see when there is a new enquiry or support email and act accordingly.
We take in the RSS feed from the dummy team member in Basecamp so we can see any updates happing on projects.
Using the RSS feeds from Mint we can instantly see who is talking and linking in to our various websites and what pages are becoming popular.
We use another simple web app caled Domain Log Book to track our domain names. This gives us a RSS feed into Netvibes tracking all our registered domains, when registered and are about to expire, the current Google rank and rank in Alexa.
And lastly we use RSS feeds from our own blogs and forums to see when someone posts and replies so we can be straight in there to interact with them
For each application we run we have chosen 5 main blogs and 5 main discussion forums who are influential in that market to interact with. We have a second tab in Netvibes where all these are stored and we check in regularly to interact and contribute to and by association promote ourselves.
Again we pull in RSS feeds so we can monitor all of these at once.
And that’s it, that is how we manage our projects and sites.
Conn from Edgecast Media has put up the podcast featuring my talk from The Irish Business Women Conference.
Its a short 10 minutes in the second half and i talk briefly about how Spoiltchild Design got started, the ups and downs and where we are moving the business to.
You can listen to the MP3 here.
Listen to all the podcasts here.
I try not to just throw up links to others content but after the recent posts on pricing Seth Godin sums it up today with a simple post.
Quote:
Maybe the reason it seems that price is all your customers care about is…
... that you haven’t given them anything else to care about.
.