UnbridledBlog

Unbridled Brain Launches Affinity Circles Redesign

Another gap in the blog, another site successfully launched :)

Excuses, excuses.

During our absence from the blogosphere Unbridled Brain launched the Affinity Circles site on June 29 to wide acclaim and great client happiness. Affinity Circles came to us looking for a new way to talk about their evolving business model. Their old site didn't speak to what they had become - both the leading provider of exclusive social networks for established membership associations seeking to promote exclusive networking opportunities among their members and a revolutionary way to recruit qualified candidates.

This meant creating an intuitive way to speak to multiple audiences (associations, members and prospective employers) within the same site structure. We conducted interviews with key stakeholders from each constituency to ensure that we were meeting each of their needs and "speaking their language."

The result was a simple architecture with clear call-outs for each audience right from the home page. Additionally, we designed and built a flash piece that speaks to the connections and networks that are the core of the Affinity Circles brand.

On top of this new infrastructure we laid a great new design - one that works with their existing branding but extends it and adds fresher colors and new network-inspired design elements. Developed by the Creative Director for this project, Jakub Skyba, these new colors and elements were first featured in print pieces designed prior to the new site roll-out and then extended for the web.

The site was built out using Adobe Contribute-based templates so the Affinity Circles team will be able to maintain the site and keep the content fresh. As a result the new site will remain the effective, productive platform for the Affinity Circles marketing message that it was at launch.

The last piece of the puzzle was Search Engine Optimization (SEO). We took the opportunity in this ground up redesign to ensure that everything about the site maximized the site's SEO potential. From the folder structure and file naming conventions to the keywords used in the H1 & H2 tags, the Unbridled Brain team made sure that this site was state of the art for SEO. As we move forward, we will be working with the Affinity Circles team to monitor and maximize this critical traffic driving tool.

The entire process was completed on-time and on-budget and as we talked about above, with a very satisfied client:

“I am extremely pleased with the project.  The turnaround was unbelievably fast, the quality was outstanding, and the creativity of the design and content was very impressive.  Unbridled Brain did a fantastic job, and if this is a sign of things to come on our website, then we are clearly going to kick some butt!!!   

I can see why you got such consistently positive reviews from your references. I really appreciate your attention to detail, your can-do attitude, your ability to quickly grasp the business objectives and priorities, and your overall enthusiasm and passion.

I really appreciate the effort.”
Chuck Taylor, VP Marketing and Development, Affinity Circles

Can't promise we'll get back to regular blogging, but there are some things we'd like to share and we hope to get the time to write them up sometime real soon.

On blogging gaps and excuses and the future

Well, we've been busy. Not an excuse, or even a good reason to stop blogging regularly, but there it is. In the last couple of weeks we have launched sites for two clients:

www.softagon

www.genbook.com

We're working on a new Client's section for the website so look there soon for more details on the great work we did in both those engagements.

On top of that we have brought on several new clients - Affinity Circles and a certain large retailer that shall remain nameless. We've been to Ad-Tech and Web 2.0 and on a number of very interesting client calls. Unbridled Brain is quickly becoming a go-to agency for Web 2.0 (and soon Web 3.0) companies that need their site to reflect their model in an interactive, dynamic, engaging way.

Now, with the weather starting to resemble the paradise that accounts for our unbelievable housing prices (even in this down market), I see blogging getting even less priorty :)

That said, there are a couple topics that I have been writing on in other spaces that I will be aggregating here, plus I want to follow-up on a couple of the earlier posts. All this means that we will be back in the blogging game soon and often.

Welcome back!

Networking the Key to Social Networks

I was curious about how Facebook is doing, especially compared to LinkedIn. I use both but find Facebook cludgy and slow where LinkedIn is faster and more targeted. Honestly, if I'm on Facebook between 8am-6pm I feel like I'm just killing time, but with LinkedIn, I feel like I'm using a tool for work.

In the long term, online Social Networking will be profitable in the same way that the offline version is - the more a network postively affects our work and productivity, the more essential it will be to us and the more profitable it will be for everyone involved.

So, I have a hypothesis, with Web 2.0 tools turning the web into a place for work as much as a place for recreation (Web 2.0 companies proliferate while AOL dies a slow death), the more focused the purpose of the social network the more likely it is to grow and succeed. So, in this hypothesis, Facebook withers to a plateau of faithful, addicted users, while LinkedIn continues its growth path on the back of professionals that need/want a solid, Scrabuolus-free environment to keep track of their network and create opportunities for their careers.

To get a baseline for my hypothesis I pulled up my new favorite site - www.quantcast.com and created the following report:

Quantcast Traffic Comparison for facebook.com + linkedin.com

I'll check back pretty frequently, but this trend seems to support the hypothesis. I hope Mark Zuckerberg takes note of another high-flyer from an earlier bubble and doesn't get too comfortable with his current $15b valuation.

Unanswered Prayers or How we sometimes get saved from ourselves

One of my favorite quotes in a long time came from Craig Newmark's talk at Web 2.0 this week. When asked how Craig was able to keep the site so clean and simple, he credited his preferences and also the utility of the simple design.

But the best reason he gave for the current state of the site was limited resources when they were first starting out - "Scarce resources kept us from some serious blunders."

All to often our greatest advances come from not being able to make the mistakes we would like to make. Its nice to see that holds true for a site with 10 billion page views a month the same way that it does for all the rest of us. Like the country song says -  "Some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers."

Meeting THE Craig of craigslist

At the WebGuild's Web 2.0 Conference one the two keynote speakers was Craig Newmark - the founder of Craigslist. Now, I imagine by now everyone in the Valley has probably seen Craig at some conference or another, but this was the first time I had seen him speak.

He was "interviewed" by the Guild President Daya Baran. It was really more of a conversation and Craig can do conversation. If you like the iconoclast engineer personality - glib, quick-witted, sharp-tongued, smarter than you - then Craig is your guy. He's like a slightly cranky Wozniak - limited patience for the mundane or illogical, quick with the smackdown, quicker with the excitement on topics that engage him - these days those seem to be centered around positive social change.

Craig talked about starting Craigslist - as an events listing for friends, the reason they don't take ads - he thought they were ugly and slowed down the page, and his current role as Customer Service Rep -not heading up Customer Service or even managing a Customer Service team, but an individual contributor with a boss to report to.

He noted that he has been 'geek rich' for sometime now, i.e. he can buy all the gadgets, games and tools he wants. This allows him to focus on some of his other passions - the Craigslist Foundation and FactCheck.org to name a couple.

At the end of the talk, he popped up, spoke to some of the attendees (including me) in the hallway, then jumped into his car and began taking customer service calls on the way back to the office.

When the history of this time is finally written, Craig will have his space because he took a simple, effective idea and kept it simple despite all the opportunities to complicate it, sell it out or just generally screw it up. Like the site, like the guy!

Required, Requireder, Requiredest

One of my first great professional revelations, was that to manage a project successfully I needed to manage the requirements and do so closely.  This is not always listed as a task or function of traditional project management. Often there are strategists, interactivety designers, information architects and others that are tasked with defining the requirements while the Project Manager takes care of other aspects of the project.

Relatively early in my Project Management career, however, it became clear that the rest of the tasks attributted to project management - budget, scheduling, resources, etc... all came out of the requirements for the project, and to accomplish my job I needed to be an integral part of the requirements gathering and defining phase.

The math was simple once I saw it:
Requirements feed into scope - scope helps determine budget and schedule (or vice versa). However you look at it, the requirements are the base. You could concievably go back one more step, to the question of the business problem to be solved or question to be answered or need to be filled, obviously, these challenges are what drive requirements. But generally as project managers the challenge has been defined and we are tasked with leading the team that will determine how to create a site, application or product to fill that need.

As a project and account manager, then, it has always been a priority for me to understand and drive the requirements gathering and defining processes. Sitting on the sidelines during this phase leaves too much of the budget and schedule at risk. Once a requirement has been defined and accepted it is very difficult to get it removed, even when there are schedule and budget implications. It is far easier to make the tradeoffs in the requirements phase with any schedule and budgets consequences taken into account right then.

As I find time over the next week I'd like to spend some time talking about how our work in Visual Requirements is enabling amazling efficient and productive interactions with our virtual teams and clients.

New Tools - Remote Source Control

As the projects we take on get more complex and involve more parties we have decided to move some of our heavier source and document control to a great new open source tool that allows us to integrate a number of important pieces of the puzzle, including VCS, bug tracking and an opportunity to develop other tools as necessary.

Using Subversion, the fire-tested, open source, version control system, as a backbone, Assembla Spaces offers us a more robust, developer friendly environment for developing, controlling, tracking and versioning our code and documents.

For right now, we will continue to use Base Camp for communications among the entire team and with clients, and Assembla in the backend for our development teams. If we find that the interface and feature set advance to the point where it is ready for everybody to use, we will move everything to Assembla.

Build it and they will drive around it

Traffic, like water, will find its own level...

The image in this blog proves once again that arbitrary (read unnecessary) roadblocks and gates will be ignored, subverted or blown up by the intended audience as they complete their tasks.

Its a good reminder for all of us to check our traffic logs to see if we have put up a road block or two that are causing our users to work around or, even worse, to leave.

Training Alive

Just a quick note - the training class for Remote Project Management came together faster than any of us realized was possible. We are ready to lauch this great new service and it is on the website right now.

Check it out and see if your team couldn't benefit from training on best practices in remote team management.

Unbridled Seminars

With every new success, the Unbridled Brain team is growing more and more confident in the tools and processes we have developed to manage projects and project teams remotely. We believe we have a  well-documented, reusable, reliable toolset that would help any team get more out of their remote (and even local) resources.

We are so confident this toolset works, that we are going to offer it as a seminar. We will be bringing the course to interested companies, agencies and PMO's as an in-house 1 or 2 day seminar.

Additionally, the core of our tool set - Visual Requirements - is so solid we think it deserves it's own seminar. The ability to communicate requirements clearly and quickly is critical to all projects and that goes double for remote projects, where effective communication is the end all and be all for a successful project. Our Visual Requirements process virtually ensures effective communication of the project requirements.

As an aside, the mindmapping exercise (click on thumbnail) we had for both of these seminars was amazing. Topics flew onto the page for both the Remote Project Management and for the Visual Requirements seminars. We'll sort it all out and pull together and we expect to have the seminars ready to go before the first of the year.