Chicago Comedian Mike Stanley selected Bobbr to refresh his web presence in order to improve his personal brand with fans. Mike’s requirements focused on the ability to easy manage the content within the site including upcoming gigs, merchandise, performance videos and images, and a blog he wanted to write while on tour. Additionally, Mike wanted fans to be able to easily take the conversation about his content to Facebook and Twitter, expanding his reach into the popular social channels where his fans WANT to interact.

Innovations

The site met all of Mike’s requirements and pushed the envelope around site design. We implemented a cool, fresh approach to browsing videos on the site with a side-scrolling gallery where videos could be watched inline OR within their own pages to allow for Facebook likes and commenting.

We implemented an open-source event management system to allow Mike to easily manage his upcoming shows and venues. A custom API was also written allowing for these events (and any other content on the site) to be retrieved in JSON format over HTTP. We used this technology to stream his events on to a custom splash page at MikeStanleyComedy.com.

CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) are efficient, typically distributed host environments that are in business to host the files that make your site go. These files include your images, videos, javascript libraries, stylesheets – really anything you want that isn’t used on the server side when compiling your pages.

CDNs can reduce your load times for a couple of reasons. First, referencing files from a SINGLE endpoint (ie the CDN) reduces the number of external connections that have to be made during load. Again, the more outside servers you load dependencies in from, the longer your site will take to load. Sites performing at the highest standards will typically load from as few storage locations as possible. Second, CDN hosts are optimized for really one thing: delivering content.

Bandwidth costs associated with delivering files are usually much cheaper through a CDN vs the cloud on which you host your site itself. For example, MaxCDN.com offers 1Tb of traffic for $40. That’s cheap.

We’ve implemented a CDN with both TweepMe and Spider.Cat and the results are dramatic – especially, with Spider.Cat which is mostly ajax driven. It’s important to get the Spider.Cat search interface loaded up as quickly as possible.

So if you are truly trying to build a world-class web app or site, be sure to choose the right hosting environment (Rackspace Cloud, Amazon EC2, etc) as well as a good CDN partner (MaxCDN, Akamai, etc).

The St. Joseph County Department of Health started an initiative to engage citizens inside and outside the local area and challenge them to take action against obesity. ReducingObesity.org is the catalyst behind the movement. The site offers users nutrition plans, physical activity guides, and hundreds of other toolkits that enable health professionals, parents, teachers, kids, and teens to make smart decisions regarding the future of their health.

Framework

Bobbr™ developed and designed ReducingObesity.org on top of the open-source platform, Joomla. This platform allows for a more modularized approach to content creation versus other CMS platforms like WordPress. WordPress is great for content, Joomla excels at data management. This approach worked well for managing the toolkits and their associated files in an easy-to-understand interface.

Hands-on Collaboration

We met multiple times on-site with our client to walk them through the progress of the build as well as dive into incremental training around the platform. We sat side by side during the final push and collaborated live on the final edits – literally pushing the go live button together.

Visit ReducingObesity.org

When weighing the options for online ad campaigns for the promotion we elected to pause our Google Adwords initiative and go with an ad on a couple of small blogs via BuySellAds.com.

We chose this route because our measurable ROI during this campaign is essentially zero since we are giving the accounts away. So rather than pay per click, we thought running a few monthly ads on well optimized blogs would generate the push we need while keeping the ad spend fixed.

So which blogs? We looked to our analytics for the answer. We took a look at the top 4 blogs that referred traffic to us organically – meaning they linked to us as part of a story they had written. We figure since they are already sending TweepMe.com a good amount of traffic, we should grab the traffic that they’re NOT sending to us as well. With the ads placed through BuySellAds.com, we were able to do just that. From Pelfusion.com alone we recieved a couple thousand extra visitors for less than $100… Just pennies per click.

Advertising on sites that already send you traffic works because they are usually well optimized for the same search results you are targeting – otherwise the user wouldn’t have found the page where they wrote about you in the first place.

By placing a fixed cost ad on their site you are hooking into their SEM/SEO traffic at substantially lower CPCs that bidding on those keywords directly.

In fact, external in-bound linking is one of the most important factors of a high rank on the search engines.

So how can you get a large number of sites to link back to yours in a short amount of time? Do something outrageous!

The TweepMe.com web app that we developed has thousands of incoming links from sites we’ve never read. Not because the site is outrageous by any means, but because the idea of what the site does is controversial and caused an outrageous amount of feedback – both good and bad.

The people that love the site posted about how much they love it and the people that hate it won’t stop hating on it…. That’s a great thing!

It’s great because as people blogged and tweeted their opinions, they left links back to the site along the way – usually keyword laden links like ‘check out this site that gets you thousands of Twitter followers’.

Search engine algorithms can’t yet decide the nature of a link (if it’s positive or negative), only that a link exists. So whether good or bad, it’s ALL good.

Whether you have to skydive for charity, or swim the English Channel – doing something that sticks out in peoples’ minds will prompt them to spread the word.

Spider.cat is the newest internal project from Bobbr™. It’s currently top secret between us and our partners so we can’t tell you exactly what it is. But, you can visit www.spider.cat to join the Spider.cat email list and be notified when we’re ready to accept beta testers.

TweepMe users are members of an exclusive online group that all practice what we’ve dubbed Mutual Following. As official TweepMe members, we all agree to follow each other on Twitter™. Usually, this would be a very time consuming and tedious process, but TweepMe makes it automatic! Just register for an account and we’ll take care of the rest.

The TweepMe system performs the necessary follow API calls to Twitter on our members’ behalves, so there’s no need to manually follow each member. The process is gradual and could take weeks or months to accumlate a 100% following of all TweepMe members. This is by design, however, so that your followship grows at a steady pace and so we don’t overload the Twitter API.

As TweepMe membership continues to grow, so will your followers. As new followers join the system they will follow you, and the system will have you follow them back. Many members see results in as little as a few hours!

Technology

The TweepMe application is built on Microsoft ASP.net 3.0 with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 powering the data. The solution is hosted in the cloud and has successfully scaled to handle over 20,000,000 follow transactions to-date.

Visit TweepMe.com – The Mutual Following Engine

A web site is typically informational content about products and services while a web app is usually an online application that does something on behalf of the user. Both web sites and a web applications can (and probably should) be dynamic and data driven, although a web site could be static, hard-coded HTML.

Bobbr™ builds both.

If you need a simple online presence with a contact form, CRM lead capture or just a few pictures – we can do that. If you need  a self-service content management system to allow you to update your site’s content – we can do that too. If you need a partner to build your new idea for the next cool thing online – we can be that partner.

Past/Current Clients:

• The University of Notre Dame
• St. Joseph County Department of Health
• Mecca Companies, Inc
• QCTSites.com
• GramTel
• InSource
• The South Bend Clinic
• Hammershmidt, Amaral & Jonas
]]> http://bobbr.com/website_and_web_application_development/feed/ 0 http://bobbr.com/university_of_notre_dame_office_of_research/ http://bobbr.com/university_of_notre_dame_office_of_research/#comments Tue, 26 Jan 2010 12:10:43 +0000 admin http://roxigo.com/demos/grubforce/discovery/wp/?p=133 The Project

In partnership with ThinkMarketing™ and Element-31 Design Inc., Bobbr™ implemented a custom, cloud-based instance of WordPress to manage the ever expanding content library, and provide for high traffic scalability.

Security

The Office of Research is subject to strict compliance regulations and was required to not only adhere to those rules, but also rigorously test them. After a multi-stage process of tens of thousands different attack simulations, our environment passed the test.

Training

After development and when site-launch was within reach, we went on-site to the Notre Dame campus to personally train the Office of Research super users that now handle the site on a daily basis.

Visit or.nd.edu

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