Lately I’ve been seen an increasing amount of Flash ads which escape from the confines of the traditional ad box. You’ve seen the ads, a car driving over your text, stops, flashes it’s lights and encourages you to click for more information.

Most of the ads I’ve seen can be worked around; however the latest ad from the weather channel takes the cake. (View it here)  This page is vertically oriented, forcing most users to scroll. Upon moving from the left to the right across the ad, the ad to expands until the mouse reaches the browser scroll bar. Upon return from right to left the ad then again blocks the content before fully contracting. This might be one of the worst ad placements I can think of. Perhaps this ad would be better served on the left side of the screen away from the users interaction with the browsers navigation system.
Has anyone else found ads which hinder website usability?

Today, while back visiting family in Philadelphia, I visited the new National Constitution Center in Old City. At first I was skeptical about how an entire building could be dedicated to the US Constitution. I thought it would be wordy, boring and un-interactive. I was dead wrong and pleasantly surprised.

In a testament to thoughtful design, the NCC was a journey through the origin, making and continued evolution of the US Constitution. Visitors enter through the Kimmel Theater where they are greeted with a hybrid visual, theatrical and audio presentation which immerses and excited the audience. Once the presentation has completed, visitors exit through the second floor where the interaction begins.

Following a circular path, visitors interact with various kiosks and displays which breakdown aspects, history and principles of the US Constitution. While browsing and learning I watched families debate legal decisions, children role play presidential inauguration, and review and decide on legal issues. As you exit the NCC there is Signer’s Hall where all the original signers of the US Constitution are replicated in full size bronze. Visitors are asked to mix with the signers and leave their signature on a mock Constitution.

I left the NCC with a full appreciation for the United States and our Constitution. I learned more in 1 hour then in 22 years of schooling and 9 additional years of self-education and life’s teachings. That 1 hour presented the Constitution in a way that evoked all my senses (but smell). I was engaged by the layout, design and presentation in such a way that it made learning enjoyable. Without being corny I had to fight from getting teary-eyed because the presentation was that powerful.

Go check it out for yourself. http://www.constitutioncenter.org/ 

As I was hanging Christmas tree ornaments last night I noticed that one of the ornaments was in a box with the new Budweiser logo, with the associated red color. Upon closer inspection it was a Hallmark box, which made me think. How close are the two logos?

Upon side by side comparison if you just drop a oval under the Bud crown you would have a pretty close resemblance to Hallmark. Am I stretching here, does anyone else think these are pretty similar?

Since leaving Refinery in 2002 to help start Imulus, I’ve been on a quest to find decent project management software for OSX. At Refinery all project management was handled in Microsoft Project; however when we started Imulus, I chose to go with OSX as my primary operating system which then severely limited my project management software options.

I first started with FastTrack Scheduler only to be very disappointed in it’s usability. We then decided to use 37Signal’s BaseCamp, which we still use today. There is however limitations with BaseCamp. It works very well as a client facing tool to manage deliverables and thread conversations yet it fails at managing large projects with various task / activities and resources.

I now believe I’ve found the perfect answer to my project management woes, Merlin2. I started using this software 2 weeks ago and it is immediately intuitive, easy to use and it produces excellent reports which clients and project teams clearly understand.

Merlin2 has all the primary features that Microsoft Project and then some. Other then the reports, two of my favorite features are the utilization view and the document versioning. Under utilization view I have a quick visual as to the resource allocation across projects. The document versioning let’s me save edits on my documents as various versions so I can have a documented history on the project.

I highly encourage any project manager or development lead to give Merlin2 a try. I’ve been extremely pleased by this well built, intuitive software.

The blind run towards Google Adwords, Overture and MSN AdCenter (the pay-per-click channels) has started to slow down, and rightfully so. For the last few years, we’ve seen companies start with ad budgets of $500 / month only to increase those budgets to well over $8,000 per month in just under a year. These companies know that PPC is increasing their traffic, lead generation and sales, yet they don’t know exactly which PPC is working and which campaigns are just burning funds.

Case in point.
We have a client which sells computer hardware, at their previous agency they spent between $500 - $1000 / month on PPC via Google AdWords. Our client had zero visibility as to which PPC was working and which wasn’t. Once we began working together, we used Google’s Conversion tools to measure which specific terms were converting over to actual sales. In just under 4 weeks we measured ZERO conversions from AdWords, yet there were several orders from other channels.

Does that mean the AdWords is worthless? No, not at all. In fact, Google AdWords did refer traffic to the site and perhaps overtime these visitors will convert to sales, but we have no way to accurately track that data. Google AdWords can be of value as a branding tool. Our client may have not measured direct sales conversions, yet they are appearing in the search results for key terms relating to the business services.

Overtime, the net effect of AdWords, newsletters, press releases and advertising campaigns will ultimately create a heightened brand awareness. When considering PPC be sure to measure your efforts so you can strategically determine if PPC will be a sales, lead generation tool or a branding tool.