A Blog.

So you like their portfolio?
Here are some questions you should ask when interviewing a design firm or freelancer to avoid contracting a skillset that isn’t exactly what it appears to be.

1. What part of the work did you do?
2. How many people worked on it and what were their roles?
3. Do you still work with them?
4. Tell me something about this portfolio piece that you are especially proud of.
5. When and where did you do this work? (i.e., at school, at a company, or in your home office?)

That’s about all the questioning it should take to rule out portfolio forgers.

Here are some fun portfolio interpretations based on TRUE STORIES.
These “comments” and/or “actions” come from people we’ve known or have interviewed in the past.

• “I fixed one typo in this 50 page website, but now I’m putting it into my portfolio as “my work” since I really did work on it, just not the concept, design, or development…”
• “I interned for a design firm 8 years ago, and still feature their self-promotion material as my work even though none of it was my work. Hey, I live two states away now!”
• “I like to feature my award in my online portfolio. Of course, I’m not going to mention that it was a shared award with 10 other talented people who worked on the same award-winning project, in varying roles at an ad agency.”
• “I did the whole thing. Yes, I created it, but I have no details about the concept, the strategy, the target audience or the branding to back it up.”
• “I quoted 14 hours to get the finishing flash work done, but only made it halfway through. That’s OK, while the client didn’t get what was promised, I sure got a cool (unfinished) piece for my online portfolio.”

If you happen across any similar comments like this, step away and run as fast as you can!

Next: Positives to look for when interviewing a graphic design / web development firm.

Bing, Bing, Bing. Gotta love you because you are my laptop’s default browser.

And I loved you even more when I saw that our company website recently arose to position #1 in the Bing local listings for a very competitive industry keyword phrase.

But delight turned to “horrors!” when I clicked on the listing’s website and discovered that it linked to an old domain – one that Ad Ventures had retired at least 8 years ago!

Coincidentally – and this is a HUGE coincidence: Our Bing pin number to confirm our Bing updates just happened to arrive in the mail that same day. It is a big coincidence, because we submitted our requests for a local listing update several months ago….

After entering the pin, the long-awaited updates took only 3 days to appear. And there’s our correct website URL, still in that premium #1 position.

I’m rallying for you Bing to keep doing good things, not just for searchers but for businesses too.

A big congratulations to Candice Chang for her promotion from marketing coordinator to project manager at Ad Ventures. Candice started as a design intern from University of Washington five years ago and was hired upon successful completion of her internship. She has diligently taken on more responsibilities over the years and is a key factor in managing website and print projects between agency and clients to assure seamless delivery. Ad Ventures’ clients that Candice has worked with over the years include Cascade Water Alliance of Bellevue, Kiel Mortgage of Renton, Applied Handling of Kent, Master Builders Association of Bellevue, and Seattle Yacht Brokers Association of Seattle.

A celebratory luncheon at Ray’s Boathouse, conveniently located across the street from Ad Ventures’ design studio, starts with a round of cell-phone inspired photos. And it follows with one round of drinks, and multiple rounds of jokes, stories, laughter and getting to know each other even more. Congratulations to Heather on her 8th anniversary as senior graphic designer at Ad Ventures. And, congratulations to Web Developer Nathan for arriving at his first-year anniversary, with all the bells and whistles that go along with a job well done. (Nathan likes cool gee-wiz web stuff and so do his co-workers.)

Pictured from left to right: Nathan Loheim (web developer), Candice Change (marketing coordinator and project manager,) Karen Skeens (creative director,) Heather (senior graphic designer), Alex Howard (strategic director and guy who foots the bill.)

click to enlarge >

Ad Ventures’ “welcome waggins,” Sammie and Taco, howl with goulash stare-downs. (We howled too trying to wrangle up doggies for photo shoots.)

Thanks to Bonnie, Executive Director of NW Yacht Association and self-described “more of a cat person,” for her tip to buy the “really cute” bat wings for Sammie from ‘All the Best Pet Care.’ “We howled even more when we saw that they sold taco dog costumes, perfect for our Taco,” laughed Alex Howard, owner of Ad Ventures and Sammie too.

Sammie, 7 months old and appropriately dressed up as a bat-out-of-hell.	Taco, 7 years old and appropriately dressed up as a taco

Welcome Samantha (aka Sammie), Ad Ventures’ new company “welcome waggin’” and self-appointed Top Dog! Sammie shares her co-welcome waggin’ position with the veteran Taco (aka “Underdog”).

Sammie holds a special place in Ad Ventures’ employee hearts and occasionally in laps of clients. “If you come visit Ad Ventures, expect a lot of tail wagging and puppy love,” says Alex Howard, Ad Ventures’ president and Sammie’s owner.

Social networking has been around forever. And today it’s bigger than ever. Social Networking has arrived at a new level from connecting in person to connecting online through a variety of key social media resources.

Simply put, every active business or organization should evaluate social media for social networking now. There are pro’s and con’s to it, but if it’s right for your business, now is the time to implement it.

Ad Ventures develops online social media plans at all levels – ones that involve minimal maintenance, as well as plans that need daily updating. We plan it, design it, and implement it. You monitor it and work it.

Expand your reach.
Reap the benefits from online Social Networking.

From conceptualization to planning media to delivering the call to action

With the gigantic movement of ears and eyes to the internet, its formidable presence commands reconsideration of planning traditional media campaign mixes in print, radio, TV and outdoor. A well-strategized website should play a key role in every advertising campaign regardless of selected advertising mediums. It’s because a quality website has a long shelf life, sells 24-7 and is always available to answer quick questions, provide information or even close the sale. More importantly, there’s so much more you can say and show in your “website-encompassing ad,” much more than a 30-second radio or TV spot or a billboard, for example.

Ideally, every page in a website is part of an ongoing advertising campaign, whether you’re selling a concept or selling a widget or simply your brand.

Who is the campaign designed to reach and how often? Direct Response, in one swoop of an airplane-pulled banner, to increase your Adults 12+ reach? Or is the objective to build frequency with multiple magazine ads that speak to very specific target audiences over a long period of time? Whatever the objective, the call to action in the ad shouldn’t necessarily be to simply visit the business or organization, or buy the product, or implement educational tips, or email or phone for more information. Your primary call to action could be simply to drive people to your website where people can learn more, get qualified, buy or give you permission to contact them by email or phone. At the very least, an incentive to visit your website and sign up for future promotional announcements from your company should be included in as much of your advertising as possible, including direct mail pieces, radio spots, newsletters, e-newsletters and print ads.

Ad Ventures’ team has several years of experience planning, buying and selling radio, television and print. Combine that with our 10 years experience writing advertising copy for the web and placing online ads, and we bring insight and objectivity into the strategy behind the ad, writing the ad, designing the ad, and placing the ad.

The Internet incorporates hundreds of combinations of website skill sets and technologies. Just because one’s skill set may be that of a “web developer or designer,” do not assume they have all the necessary web skills or know everything they need to know about websites.

In my role at Ad Ventures, I make it my business to know the key must-haves for every website. I’ve surprised more than one fellow new web developer, that a non-HTML type like me studies the left-brain geek stuff as much as I do. After all, my “creative director” title is a right-brain kind of title. But I love everything to do with website strategy and researching – it is my occupational hazard of a hobby.

Here are must-knows that I’ve come across over the years, that are so important that they are worth noting. It is staggering how many times I’ve encountered the three below must-knows during a web redesign, that weren’t known or implemented by a client’s previous web developer/company.

Must-Knows

1. When setting up your hosting: Resist the temptation to accept the hosting company’s suggestion that he set your business up with multiple ‘alias” websites (your website hosted for no extra charge at 5 or more different domain names.) It doesn’t matter what the host says in regards to SEO, what matters is what Google says. And Google penalizes for “alias” websites, AKA “duplicate content.” (Hosting companies are often confused as being SEO-knowledgeable. Remember, they typically specialize in hosting, not SEO.) If you find yourself with more than one domain serving up identical websites, a robots.txt file will block your alias sites from search engine view, and this issue will be resolved.

2. When beginning development: Don’t leave your site’s interior page URL naming to your web developer or web development company, unless they provide SEO as a specialized service and have included an SEO “foundation” in your scope of work. Not all web developers are skilled in SEO, and often they don’t know to include keywords in URLs. (Google weighs heavily on well-named URLs.) So be proactive and ask about the process naming URLs. Or ask to submit your own keywords and suggested URL names. Or hire a company (such as Ad Ventures) that does include SEO in the foundation of a website.

3. When launching your website: If you are one of the lucky few who got on board the internet in the early days and secured a ranking of #1 on Google or Yahoo just for being there, be careful not to lose it just because you launch an updated website. Far too often when a new site gets launched, the old URL gets left behind, only to lead the search engines down the path that you simply don’t exist anymore. So they report your missing site as “404” (page not found.) And within days, your site gets dropped from the search engine indexes.

How does something like this happen? The web developer didn’t know or didn’t take the proper steps to “connect” the old to the new. For example, let’s say you added a database to your new website, so your new URL has a .php file extension, instead of the old HTML file extension. Google doesn’t necessarily assume that they are one in the same. Unless a web developer takes steps by adding the proper redirects from the old URL to the new URL, as well as notifying the search engines of the URL change, your website will be treated as new and starting from the ground up in the search engine rankings.

At Ad Ventures, we take a team approach and have several “watchdog” check and balance systems in place for not just our web developers, but for all our team members. We regularly and thoroughly check each other’s work, keeping each other in-the-know. And we’re always on the look-out for what’s right for our clients.