Last night my wife, our 3 kids and I had a big night out at the grocery store -  more specifically, Festival Foods. We often shop at Festival Foods for a number of reasons (not the least being their sweet liquor department). They’re certainly not the cheapest store in town, but they understand our needs as parents with small children, and make it convenient for us to purchase their “goods and services.”

It’s that time of the year when we start to get phone calls from clients looking to create a unique Holiday card to send out in December. In years past clients have always wanted to do the traditional printed greeting card/envelope and send out via bulk mail. But this year, the first thing clients have brought up is that they want to do something digital. With the business world so connected online and with the huge spike in social media involvement over the past couple years I think online Holiday greetings are going to become the norm sooner rather than later. I could be wrong, but I think this year we are going to see more digital cards from your average B to B company and not just from the Ad Agencies like years past. With printing and postage costs always increasing it makes a lot of sense for businesses to make this change to save money, which is bad news for printers and the postal service.

We recently started a campaign project with a local school to promote their annual benefit gala. As we brainstormed ideas with their marketing committee months ago the team came up with some great concepts that wrapped around the students of the school and the idea that donors and volunteers involved with the gala (coming up this November) will have a crucial role in helping students “build their futures”.

We recently had the pleasure of listening to Jeremy Epstein of Never Stop Marketing speak at the latest Milwaukee AMA event. In his enthusiastic presentation he talked about the importance of finding and supporting your “raving fans.” Rather than trying to throw matches at potential fans/customers, hoping they catch fire and become an evangelist of your brand, why not find those who are already singing your praises and add some gasoline to the blaze they’ve already started. He gave some great examples but the one that stuck with me was a scenario that could leave a company scratching their head.

s a follow up to my last article about website usability, which admittedly got a little long-winded, here are two great resources on usability testing. There are many great resources out there, but what I like, and appreciate, with these are the author’s very casual presentation style (in the video) and the easy-to-read nature of his book- which matches his very simple philosophy about website usability.

As a web design company, we are always thinking about site usability and the overall user experience. Our job is to create a web presence that no only looks good, but is also easy to use. It does our clients (or their customers) no good if the site looks fabulous, but users can’t find what they’re looking for.

My wife and I stopped at Alterra on the Lake this morning for coffee and a bite to eat – which was a big deal to us since we were kid-free for a few hours (and because I love Alterra Coffee as much as I love my wife and kids).