Hi, my name’s Rob Larsen and I’m new here.
Well, not really "new." I actually built this site three years ago and I own the first account. So, in that sense, I’m kind of like AWiderNet’s Methuselah.
Still, I’m a new author, so there’s that.
In addition to the author role, I’m also serving as Social Media Editor here at Cramer. We’re still sorting through exactly what that means, but in general I’m responsible for the content and tone of this blog, our Flickr photostream, our YouTube channel and our Twitter account.
Fun.
Here, I’ll be posting about…. whatever I feel like. Really. It’ll all be on-topic, but since "on-topic" for Cramer means everything from producing sales meetings to website design and development I’ve got a lot of leeway. That pleases me to no end.
One thing I will occasionally write about is what we’re doing here, at Cramer, in the social media space. This is one such post.
On with the show.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Internal Projects
It’s been redesign summer (and now fall) here at Cramer. We redid CramerOnline.com over the summer and are now in the middle of redesigning this very site.
Some of you are probably cringing at the idea of 6 months of internal projects, but I’m glad to report we’ve learned to love Cramer work. The key, as we’ve identified at least, is to keep the number of decision makers to a bare minimum. Easier said than done, I know, but in both cases we’ve been lucky enough to have one client for each and that simplicity has made it a lot easier to push quality work through the building. People step up and own projects. Which means these sites are the kind of fun, rewarding endeavors that internal jobs should be, but rarely are.
I’m not sure how well that model will translate from company to company, since it relies on folks that want to step up and take on that role (and have the web savvy to do so) but it’s certainly a model that’s worked for us.
We Just Want to Get Rid of the Fish…
So why go right from CramerOnline.com to the redesign of AWiderNet?
We’re mad with power.
I’m only half kidding. We’d come off such a successful, fun time on the CramerOnline.com redesign it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to take the plunge and redesign the company blog.
Which isn’t to say it was a random undertaking. Like any good project we came up with a healthy list of improvements and features we wanted in this redesign. In the spirit of having something to write about, I thought it might be interesting to share some of them here. A few will have to wait until after the site is live, but some are fit to share here at the early stages.
For starters, as you may have noticed we’ve expanded the blog roster around here to better represent Cramer as a whole. With that in mind we’re looking to expose the new editorial reality with a bigger nod in the new design towards the individual authors. Right now the only way to know who wrote what is to scan the box full of tiny text appears at the end of every post. We’ll be making it a lot easier in the new design to figure out who’s who. I really feel like that’s a big change because one of the best things about working here are the talented, creative people we’ve got running around this place making all kinds of cool stuff.
Hopefully we can share a little bit of that vibe with you guys through the blog..
Speaking of Which, “We Make Stuff” and We’re Going to Write All About It
From the CramerOnline.com Redesign Trivia Department:
“We Make Stuff” was the working tag line for the redesign of CramerOnline.com for about six weeks. We came up with the hands concept pretty quickly and then folks broke out to work on the the specifics. Thing is, while the creative types were off doing hand model casting calls and doing storyboards I needed something to anchor the home page during development. A design featuring a prominent "We Make Stuff," filled that need nicely.
It was perfect as placeholder because it captured the feel of what we were looking for and it’s true.
While we eventually retired the placeholder in favor of the final animation, I’ve carried that sentiment over to drive the new editorial direction at AWiderNet. We’ve got experts from a wide range of fields here at Cramer and the blog needs to represent that with a strong range of topics and authors. We’ve started to express that with posts on topics like virtual events, augmented reality, fonts for the web, agile development, and movie trailers all intermingling over the weeks and months. It’s a promising start. I’m excited to see where it all ends up.
Hopefully you’ll check up on our progress from time to time.
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