Early Internet adopters took advantage of the vast, unexplored network for communications, collaboration and massive amounts of innovation. With unabashed determination and curiosity, they latched on to the Internet frontier and their creativity exploded into a technological frenzy. Today we all...
After a bit of a hiatus over the busy holiday months, Sites of Note has returned! As always, we've handpicked a handful of sites worth persusing for some much deserved web-inspiration. This time around we've found a site that might even improve your web workflow. First up:...
Remember the good old days? When simple ranking software could be used to see an accurate representation of a site’s positioning for any given keyword? We relied on these reports to tell us with certainty whether a site ranked or not (or not as well as it could) for high-priority...
Last week millions of Americans participated in or witnessed the biggest digital protest the world has ever seen. Big and little names alike bound together to fight against the PIPA and SOPA acts – two proposed bills that could have unleashed a level of censorship on the Internet that many...
Yesterday hundreds of websites, including Interactive Strategies (we blacked out our website for the day), joined the protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 (PROTECT IP/PIPA)....
We recently sent a holiday greeting to our clients, associates and friends, wishing them the best in the coming year. Then it occurred to us? Why not extend this important message far and wide? We have a feeling that 2012 will bring many exciting projects, partnerships and opportunities to...
It's the number one question of our client who are considering a PPC program with Google Adwords, "If I'm already ranking well in the organic listings, why should I pay for ads on Google?"
I usually offer up a few reasons including:
Like any marketing, you want... It's often been said that Texas is not to be messed with. If the website for Austin-based brewery Austin Beerworks is any indication, Texans sure know how to wrangle up a quality brewski, and a great website to match.
As a self-professed lover of all things typographical...
The team at IS would like to congratulate our very own Cory Jurentkuff for getting her first Gluten-Free Living article featured on the front page the Examiner.com Health section.
Way to go, Cory! We'll be on the look out for more Gluten-Free tips and tricks.
Following the culmination of Octobërgerfest day 5, we tallied the numbers and counted every vote.
After a very close, very heated contest, one burger joint has emerged victorious. Despite our subjective experiences and personal preferences, the numbers don't lie. ...
In the first of this two part essay on CMS platforms and our agency, I explored our history, which encapsulates the experiences many web agencies have had in the past decade. In this installment, I will lay out the present landscape of open source CMS platforms and a very...
For the 5th and final installment of Octobërgerfest, we decided we'd go big or go home. Bobby's Burger Palace at K and 21st NW, eponymous burger emporium of one Bobby Flay-- yes, he of FoodNetwork fame, the Iron chef himself-- sits just outside the range of easy...
Rounding out Day 4, our team ventured over to a tried and true standby, BGR: The Burger Joint. While past experiences definitely place BGR in a favorable light, it's been a while since we sampled their namesake product. What better opportunity than Octobërgerfest week to put...
Day 3 started off with quite the surprise. Having read our impressions from day 2 of Octobërgerfest, Jenny Conrad, general manager at the Dupont Circle Shake Shack, was kind enough to have half a dozen shakes personally couriered over to our office! Not only that, each of...
A few weeks ago, I posted a new module to drupal.org -- the iMIS ISGweb module. The module is used to integrate a Drupal 6 site with the "ISGweb for iMIS" product developed and hosted by ISG Solutions.
While the ISGweb product can be visually integrated with any CMS via HTML...
Day 2 of our burger adventure hit a little closer to home. For this round we looked no further than across the street to the hotly contested, oft-glorified, NY import, Shake Shack. While this burger mecca frequently invites a lunchtime horde of eager enthusiasts, I'd hazard...
User experience, visual design, content management systems, information architecture. All key elements of any successful web experience. But these experiences are built so that users can consume the content within them. And that’s where content strategy – one of today’s...
For Day 1 of our inaugural Octobërgerfest, we decided to go with a previously tried and true favorite, Black & Orange (formerly The Rogue States).
Setting favorable bias aside for the task at hand, Cory, Corey, and myself ordered a respectable selection of their menu...
Today, we kick off the very first (hopefully) Annual Octobërgerfest.
The premise is simple. In a city with seemingly as many burger joints as politicians these days, we have selected FIVE (5!) noteworthy (and nearby) candidates to participate in a self-administered burger...
As any web agency knows, a CMS development platform is integral to delivering solid, flexible and cost-effective data-driven solutions to its customers. It doesn’t matter if the project is the simplest of brochure sites designed to be seen by thousands, a corporate brand presence...
We are happy to announce that our lead application developer, Nate Mow, has given something back to the Drupal world! He created a module for integrating a Drupal site with the "ISGweb for iMIS" product developed and hosted by ISG Solutions. The module can be found on...
Today I am proud to announce that Kye Tiernan, our Director of Client Service, and Dean Burney, our Director of User Experience and Design, have been extended ownership in Interactive Strategies and are now Managing Partners.
For me, the decision was an easy one. Kye and Dean have been...
Modern developments in CSS and Javascript have made gorgeous web typography increasingly de rigeur. While home-brewed @font-face declarations in addition to services such as TypeKit and WebType have gained plenty of traction, there is certainly something to be said for the more austere,...
Last night Vanessa, Corey, Victor and I were all geared up to attend a networking event around designing for the mobile web. After all, we have recently engaged Microstrategy to design a series of ads to promote their products on the iPad and iPhone .
And recently we...
In our most recent project with Team Hole in the Wall we were tasked with designing their blog. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Team Hole in the Wall, they raise money for Paul Newman’s Hole in the Wall Camps for kids with serious illnesses by asking runners, bikers and...
Chris Coyer from CSS-Tricks.com got together with a few people from Paravel and created a fantastic new jQuery plugin called FitVids.js. FitVids is a lightweight, easy-to-use jQuery plugin for fluid width video embeds. This is a great plugin with the new wave of Responsive Design taking effect...
Since the economic down-turn of 2008, CapitalSource Bank has become a shining star in the banking industry. Backed by CapitalSource, a niche middle-market lender, CapitalSource Bank has expanded its reaches in the California area to include 24 branches and amassed more than $6 billion in...
In part one of this three-part post about site search usability and best practices, I covered the homepage search box. Today I will cover search results display.
When it comes to displaying your search results there are a number of decisions to make including, sorting,...
Drupalcamp Atlanta is an attendee-driven, completely volunteer initiative modeled after the open, participatory nature of barcamps. The event is catered towards those who have a like-minded interest in Drupal or simply want to find out more about Drupal.
...
Its Amazing what we see out the window of our conference room sometimes. On Thursday, August 25th, 2011, we witnessed what seemed like the invasion of the Pod Cars.
Thirty or forty of these little guys came racing down Connecticut at about 11AM with absolutely no...
Today we were rattled out of our seats, quite literally. Not by an exciting project launch, or a heart-pounding deadline, but by an earthquake with a 5.9 magnitude, to be precise. We, along with the rest of the Nation’s Capitol (and DC Metro Area), were shaken to the core....
Even though establishing your business' presence on social media channels is more about engaging your customers and building trust in your brand, there’s no harm in reaping the SEO benefits that come along with it. Below we have listed some best practices on how to leverage...
Ducks Board helps you monitor mulitple platforms, below are a few listed:
Facebook Foursquare Twitter Google Analytics FeedburnerPhilip Andrews - http://philipandrews.org/#
Philip Andrews is a freelance...
We like our work. But we love our work when we can combine creativity with a great cause.
So we were really excited when the United Way asked for our help on this year’s Back to Football Friday campaign, an annual partnership with the National Football League to tackle childhood...
The Google+ Song, in case you're an auditory learner...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGugj1ym594
Mario Kart - Rediscover
Diesel - Denim
Reverenddanger - Digital Agency
By now you know that at I.S. content is king. And as we’ve talked about, Content Strategy is pretty hot right now and increasingly sought after as a service.
So I thought I’d take a moment to explain what Content Strategy means to us, and why it should matter to...
Sometimes we talk with clients about a "phased approach." This often means prioritizing features for launch and post-launch, or establishing priority search terms for immediate and long-term returns on investment. Sometimes these discussions are difficult: Clients want to realize a...
The dawn of "social media" is something that my generation has had the dubious honor of participating in, and indeed pioneering, since before the term "social media" even meant anything (..still not entirely sure what it means). Over the years, my personal level of...
Like much of the country, Washington, D.C. is broiling this week - with triple-digit temperatures and a heat index of 115+. The local weatherman even interrupted last night's "Office" to inform us the city was 111 degrees at 9 p.m. No storm warnings, no power outages, just really...
The easiest way to share localhost over the web.
Fore Fathers - forefathersgroup.com
ONE JUGGLES. ANOTHER COMPLETES A FIERCE DOUBLE SOMERSAULT. OH THE PASSION! You won't find any patsies at Forefathers - just good-...
Part 1 in a 3-Part Series: The Homepage Search Box Over the years I've had the opportunity to lead the UX and design for a number of content-heavy site redesign projects, including several online newspapers, magazines and scientific journals where search functionality was of...
With the middle of summer being here, some of our team members take a walk around the neighborhood. Cory had taken this fantasitc photo of the George Washington Monument, and from that photo I got the inspiration to illustrate and post on dribbble. I invite you to rebound this image and share...
The future of home energy management starts with better information. Welcome to oPower. oPower Crosses the Pond!
University of Wake Forest Stores - stores.wfu.edu/
In the last couple of years universitieshave really stepped up...
For a Drupal 6 theme, here's a handy trick for moving the $messages variable from page.tpl.php to node.tpl.php. In your theme's template.php file, add the following:
function yourthemename_preprocess_page(&$variables) { unset($variables['messages']); } function... Bruce, Dean and I just had a great meeting with one of our favorite clients, ACS Publications. We walked out of it energized by the prospect of working on a project where we can lend creativity and ingenuity to some pretty significant challenges. But that’s not the only reason we...
As seen on a lunch walk. The Washington Monument is the subject of millions of photos. I don't think many compare to this one taken on my humble iPhone.
We just read on NPR that when he's not veeping, Joe Biden is tweeting - @VP. Now we can track him every minute; not just when he's motorcading by our office.
Google has recently released its newest attempt (third time’s the charm?) at tapping into the social networking space – the Google+ Project - and competing head-to-head with Facebook. While the product has yet to be released, a demo version is being tested among a small number of...
As a high-schooler of the late 90's, I was fortunate enough to take several rather practical "computer" courses. The courses offered ranged from the utilitarian-- "Word Processing" to the vaguely occupational-- "Data Processing", to the cryptic "Computer...
At Interactive Strategies, we’ve been encouraging our clients to kick-start their marketing efforts via social media (when appropriate) for quite some time. Thanks to today’s NYTimes article we are pleased to see our approach is vindicated, as it points out many small businesses...
...With the web, that is.
A new podcast, On the Network, is asking you (and every other web user) to submit a story about the moment you realized the internet was a big deal.
The point is to show how the internet is ingrained in our daily lives, and that it is a legitimate...
It was just too nice to be inside... so Kye and I took a little stroll to the fountain.
One of the greatest things about consulting is that you never know what challenge is around the corner. Recently a client approached us to refresh the look of their site and make some general structural changes. All in a day’s work, right? But this project has a big twist.
The...
Ever since the creation of jQuery in 2006, web developers around the world have been using the library to help build their sites. Personally, I can’t imagine going back to writing javascript without the framework. But that doesn’t mean we can’t raise the bar a little higher...
Content Strategy is not a new concept. In fact, back in 2000 when I was transitioning my print journalism background to the unchartered world of the world wide web, I participated in a workshop at the National Press Club (lots of journalists needed to beef up, hence the location)...
How do you measure the success of a web design? I’m not talking about conversion rates, visits or bounces, or any number of analytical figures you can ultimately use to evaluate the effectiveness of site – I’m talking purely about the design. How do you...
How do you know when it is time to retire your brand identity? This is a hard question for most organizations – even ones like us who pride ourselves on helping clients through this process.
In January 2011, IS began redesigning its website. We...
In the web industry it’s a widely accepted fact that redesigning your own website is a difficult task, so difficult that many agencies simply outsource. We faced that reality after many failed attempts to get our own redesign off the ground. That’s when a simple thought...
Yes, we work above a bar. There are obvious albeit clichéd reasons why this could be considered a sweet work perk. And it is when you’re an office newbie. But to most of us, the Lucky Bar is like that pesky neighbor you don't want to talk to but still borrow his lawn...
“We have Google Analytics installed but have never logged in” or better yet “We use Google Analytics but we don’t know where to begin analyzing all the data.” Statements like these are common when we ask our clients or prospective clients what web analytics...
InfinityQS makes the world’s leading real-time SPC software. What’s that mean? Don’t worry, we had no idea either when we took on the company’s website redesign. But we soon learned that their software is used in factories around the globe to make products...
One of the great things about working in the heart of Washington D.C. is that its a veritable who's who of political figures. Because we're perched right above Connecticut Avenue, Interactive Strategies has a brush with fame every day in the form of Joe Biden. We have the good...
For over four decades the Washington Blade was an institution in the world of gay news. But when the Blade approached us, their lean-but-dedicated team had just rescued the publication from bankruptcy. It seemed like a mission impossible, but with sacrifices, all-nighters and...
Nobody really knows why or where our craze for cupcakes started around here and we don’t really care. We just appreciate that we’re a bit nuts for those sweet little morsels and run with it. No judgment, just pure satisfaction. I have to say, sometimes...
Hey, we're i.s. and this is our blog. We invite you to read and share.
