If Phil Collins and Neil Young were to have a shoot-out, After Runnymede would be the kill-shot that ends the bout in a happy compromise. Equipped with a drum machine, acoustic guitar and sultry voice, come listen to Christien Paul perform the love letters he wrote to make the album “Standing Still”.

This website has a gig calendar, a ticket store, a blog and a very sexy video player. Last but not least, it’s hosted by EPKhosting.com

The Fight Network is one of the world’s largest Combat Sports TV Network and the biggest in Canada. Their website includes a community in addition to the standard rich media features such as a podcast, streaming video and thousands of fight photo galleries. I had the pleasure of rebuilding their website for them and created what I feel are some of the sexiest widgets you’ve ever seen on a wordpress site. It goes beyond with the use of buddypress which is figuratively a plugin that gives you the framework of Facebook profiles, chat, private messaging & a buddy system.

This summer I had the pleasure of shooting the world electronic music festival (WEMF) in South Algonquin. They were just shy of 6,000 people in the middle of nowhere with some of the hottest DBS on the planet today; skrillex, Andy c, noisia, and pendulum to name a few.

My assignment was to optimize their website so that fans of said djs would find their profiles on the official WEMF website. Part of this optimization was to produce video clips for each DJ performing at the festival.

The outcome was a new record of 12,000 + views over the course of the event (2 days). The grand majority of the views were coming from mobile users present at the event.

We used Facebook and Twitter to distribute the videos which were hosted on YouTube. These videos were shot with a single camera and posted online within the first 20 minutes of the DJ’s set time.

This experiment had proven well with YouTube having upgraded be WEMF YouTube channel’s video limit

Here is my favourite video from the project;

I was invited to attend a webinar with Russell Brunson which was a presentation he had at an e-commerce convention. His presentation was about an hour long most of which outlined his approach to upselling but I found the most valuable insight to be this; there are only 2 kinds of buyers, i.e. people who buy for pleasure and people who buy for pain.

Sounds dramatic but it makes a lot of sense.

On one side you have people who are in a jam, they are sick, they are tired, stressed, annoyed, angry, depressed what have you… they are in pain and they want relief now! These people are not going to take the time to shop around and get the best price… in fact these are likely the kind of people who will not only buy now but pay through the nose depending on how bad the pain is.

Conversely, at the opposite extreme we have people who are very comfortable in life and are looking for thrills and pleasure. These are the people who have all the time in the world and will certainly shop around before buying anything. So in Heinz site, if you’re selling a product that is pleasurable you are force to be even more competitive than if you were selling a remedy to someone’s pain.

Take that into consideration when you are marketing your services/products. Try to identify the type of buyer you are dealing with and conduct yourself accordingly.

Truth is, I am going to tell you how to design C.R.A.P. instead of crap. I learned this while in design school at Humber College and it goes like this;

Colour: I learned colour instead of contrast because there are a few “laws” when it comes to colours such as contrasting colours versus complimentary colours. You also have the psychology of colours, i.e. red means stop, green means go, orange means cheap, blue means trust-worthy, etc.

Repetition: nothing brings a sales point home like repetition, although in the context of design this really refers to consistency is your colours, your fonts, your shapes, sizes, etc.

Alignment: I recommend you all text with the same alignment (all left, all centre or all right). The human eye is conditioned to read in blocks of text or paragraphs. A successful ad/poster is quick and easy to read.

Proximity: negative space (empty space) is another term that can be used to describe “proximity”… be sure not to cram too much on the page and clutter things up, you want to have a safe distance between all elements in your design. Contrasting colours may help you cheat proximity in your design.

It is with great pride that I present TASSONI BRASIL, a Canadian owned company that designs jewelery handcrafted in Brasil. The designers are based in Montreal, quite young and quite handsome. To date they have been marketing themselves “gorilla style” hosting private showings for VIPs only.

Today marks the start of their online business with a fully loaded wordpress e-commerce website. This site’s design is the definition of simple and sexy. From their home page to their check out page the visitor is presented with slick slideshows and eye popping products.

Payments are processed with PayPal standard and shipping is quoted on the fly using FedEx based on product weight and dimensions. If there was any site of mine that could win an award this would be it. Check out their website and let me know what you think by posting your comments on the official blog post.

I am now beginning to see myself as a “general contractor” for web development much like the construction business for property developments.

You have a foundation or framework and then you build in the layout such as all the pages/rooms functions/utilities. Beyond that you have to design the front-end/front-yard. After all, your website is also known as your home page

So without further adieu I would like to present The Hilton Group: General Contractors Toronto specialized in building custom homes. With the launch of their new WordPress website, we have conducted an online marketing campaign focusing on landscaping services such as outdoor lighting, sprinkler systems, sodding, grading, etc.

The home page is split into 6 funnels covering an array of sub-services; waterproofing, snow removal, custom homes, landscaping, concrete, and paving. This site is one of the largest sites I have built to date and still one of the easiest to navigate.

For Live Entertainment
Hosting a private party? Perhaps for work or your friend’s birthday? Better yet, your wedding day! You want musicians no problem, you want a DJ no problem, you want karaoke no problem… I got it. Send me an email describing what you’d like to get quoted and be sure to include the date/location.

For Motion Picture
Music arrangements for film can be rather complex and very time consuming. Finding the right composer or assortment of songs can be challenging to someone who is not connected to the music industry. Negotiating licensing can also be cumbersome without a lawyer. Let me take this burden off your hands and act as your music supervisor.

For artist development
Producing a song for radio takes special ears and an understanding of the recording sciences. Producing a song for a live show takes a sharp set of eyes and an understanding of theatrical high points. Spend an hour or two with me and not only will I share some insider secrets of the industry but I will show you things you had all along that you never recognized before.

I think most of us would say that Google is king and that optimizing your website for Google will likely do well in other search engines such as Yahoo or Bing.

That being said, there are 3 things I will do right off the bat which are all verified by Google. That’s right, Google will literally list what they want from you… all you need to do is sign up for a Google Webmasters account and do 3 simple things;

1. Create a sitemap.xml file listing all the pages/posts you want to have listed
2. Create a robots.txt file listing all the directories/pages/posts you do not want to have listed
3. Create a unique meta description and title tag for every page/post in the site

Once you do that, you will at least have a two way dialogue with Google where you can make requests of them such as listing/removing your pages from their database. The rest is really content optimization (text formatting, choice of words, link building, etc.) based on market research and competitor analysis.

Have more questions? Post a comment or email me, I’d love to hear from you

While surfing around the net I came across an old adage that has helped me negotiate value with my clients.

There are three major sales points to every deal; good, fast and cheap. The rule is that you can only 2 of the three.

If you want good and fast it won’t be cheap. If you want fast and cheap it won’t be good. If you want good and cheap it won’t be fast.

I use this one on clients all the time and when presented with that equation, people tend to understand what they can expect. Managing your client’s expectations is crucial to retaining their loyalty so be sure to make this little anecdote clear up front so there are no disappointments.

My personal motto is this “Under promise and over deliver, never over promise and under deliver”.