I stumbled upon the Lime microsite for Trek’s newest bicycles, and have to say, I am in awe. The site is a perfect example of branding your site for fun. The bicycles, which are some nifty automatic gear shifting cruiser bikes (not the hard core bikes our buddy Lance rides), are targeted squarely at the average weekend bike riders.
The beauty of the site and the presentation is that they took on this project thinking: how can we make bikes less intimidating? Despite my not loving flash for entire sites, I have to say this is done excellently. I am a huge fan of flash being transparent to the edges of the page, and incorporating video into the marketing factor.
So what does this really show us? You can have fun and market stuff too. I think the site will go a long way to converting the non-typical bicylists into buyers. I mean who doesn’t like a sunday ride through the park on their bikes? Kinda reminds me of the scene in wedding crashers when they are riding a bike…
So folks, I was recently
interviewed by Darrin of
TycoonsRow.com at the Web2.0 in south florida event held by the MIT Forum of South Florida and thought you might want to check it out. So here is episode 2 of
Digital age entrepreneurs
This baffles me as to why they aren't doing this already (and if they are, then kudos to you web team at big booze company). They could also use this technique to pitch new products aimed at that demographic. Now imagine they take it one step further, and figure someone from a zipcode in Alabama in the 30-40 age range is likely to drink Jim Beam instead of Blue Label Johnnie (fair assumption, no offense), now you've got an entirely new level of targetting. Anyway, I'm not going to rant much more on what is essentially A/B testing and optimizing their ROI, ... Continue reading
Most of this is just rambling, but I think there is a great deal of success to be had from taking these risks, and throwing caution to the wind. Man, many of the freelance web designers whose portfolio's I've had the opportunity to see in the last year seem to be resting on their laurels. Now this is not a shot at any of them, this is more of a call to action than anything. I'd like to see the immense design talent that is in the region rise up and show the world what you can do. There are hundreds of fantastic we ... Continue reading
The real reason I'm bringing up open source in this venue is that it plays a critical part in the development of many companies and people I deal with on a regular day to day basis, including my own. Over at my web development shop, we use open source software all the time, from ActiveCollab to PHP/MySQL for some of our development, to an open source phone system to handle our calls. Being in Miami we also deal a lot with companies in South America where open source ... Continue reading
A while back I wrote about the death of the signup, and how all the major players were making it as easy as possible for the everyday web developer to leverage their existing username systems to authenticate users. Well after looking back at the situation, it seems to me that the players are all moving their pieces around in ways to best capture asmany pieces of the pie as they can. Continue reading
So today's "tip of the day" is really just an idea that I had been thinking about a while back. It is part SEO, part PPC, part programming, and basically requires a lot of work, but my theory is that it would be worth it in the long run if you sell products online.Here is the gist of the idea: people coming from different places (yahoo, direct links, google, msn, etc.) are likely to be looking for different things, or behave slightly different. So if you're selling products online, and plan on making lots of money/investing lots of money into this, it would ... Continue reading
