TreeWorks Blog

I told to myself we should launch a blog about the online (together with the colleagues, but after testing a little the market, together with other bloggers seems a good initiative too; let’s see if it will sustain itself by interesting content).

It will be more than a collaborative blog: an open-source! Meaning everybody who knows online (from .ro or .com/.net) may write their opinions, announce things and so on. Of course, not exactly like “the well-known company X, with a galactic knowhow has just launched the product that will conquer google/yahoo/microsoft and will change the paradigm in web 999.0″ unless it is really like this :))

But enough already with the introduction! The blog is here:

GANDESTE.NET

For the moment it only contains daily sum-ups of the most important pieces of news, plus a few opinions of Livia (who is the mother of blog ), but we are hoping to fill it with tones of stuff on the long road.

So who’s in?

By the way, who feels like answering the questionnaire but is not on the initially list, is free to do so. And sorry for the omission.

* “gandeste” means “think” in Romanian and the blog will be also written in Romanian.

The first 15 Romanian banks, having 89.5% of the market, got an average of 64.73 points for online presence (the maximum being 100).

Who is offering a lot of information, who has RSS Feed, who proposes a fidelity package for the young generation, who has a newsletter, who’s the one with most pages, who has mobile banking, who gives dictionary or tutorials? We arrived at the conclusion that BRD has the best online presence.

The things that propelled some banks up to the first places can be read not only here, but also in the press: Banii Nostri, Bank News and Cotidianul.

Ionut spun his charmed twig and with two whiffles transformed the TreeWorks headquarters into a Fairyland. Bridi blew magical dust over us and transported everyone in the land where only friendly dragons exist. There where little frogs allow only attentive children to listen to their songs, where the dragon lights the stars and the bandmaster organizes concerts in the glade.

Almost synchronizing with Santa, the riped minds from Tree returned back to the childhood years, trying to remember the first school years and the confused letters, the meaningless numbers and the long studious afternoons. And because majority’s vote was against the wooden / plastic counting frame, we replaced it with garden full of magical beans. We have also decided that the ABC is a too cold, impersonal character, so we introduced the Inventor obsessed with noting everything he sees.

For Anna we have prepared a princess who is waiting to try on her complete and coquette wardrobe and an entire collection of colorful butterflies. For Daniel we have a quiver full of arrows waiting to be pointed to playful balloons.

But what we wanted to announce is the discovery of the fact that our minds stayed close to the first school years. For me, for instance, school was associated with the bang of chestnuts on the asphalt and technology with the great HC 91. But no matter the common generation gaps, we realized that the most important attributes of childhood are those that also existed 10 or 20 years ago. Curiosity and innocence.

We may grow wise. But we stay young at the same time. And that is what we wish for you too.

PS: We mention that we are responsible for having drew some other young minds into this: Ana, Olga, Simona, Alin and Alin. To whom we thank for having played a role in the Fairyland.

While reading these sentences I can choose to perform from one of these actions: read the e-mail, delete it or mark it as a spam.

I usually do not open the emails that come from unknown addresses or ones that have vague headlines. I do open emails from sites I have logged on, but not always follow their links and most of the times I take a glance at the content and that’s all. From time to time I get an email telling me I haven’t visited a specific website for some time and probably someone who manages the answers evaluation is wondering if I want to keep my account. Other times I order products online and after that I keep receiving offers or just events invitations.

Thus, day after day, I open and delete newsletters, latest products offers, news of order forms. It does not really mean so much for me, but it sure does for people who generate them.

B2C Internet Direct Mail Communication - direct, personalized, targeted - is more and more used. Because an email is less expensive than a letter, a print or a tv ad, the results of a campaign can be measured, the resources are limited and the messages can be customized for a specific target.

The questions you need to answer before implementing an internet direct mail campaign are:

• Who do you send the emails to?
• Where do you get the addresses from?
• What will be the format of the message?
• What about the content?
• How will you measure the results?

For instance, HTML email strengthens the message, but are preffered by the unexperienced users. That is why it is advisable to let the users choose their desired format. ROI (Return Of Investment) is an efficient method of measuring the results of a campaign. The rate may vary depending on the product, industry and target.

You can find the answers to all these questions, as well as how you can avoid being labeled as a spam generative here.

The T-shirts that carry a message say something about the persons wearing them. Quotations, funny ideas or ironical phrases (I see dumb people / I smile because I have no idea what’s going on / Your lips keep moving and all I hear is Blah Blah Blah). This can label a person as being either ironic, funny, the fan of a band, with a fantastic imagination or not, but, above all, they can label him/her a person who wants to stand apart.

How should the text on a t-shirt look, in order to be read? Short, concise and big. Because the street is a dynamic place. People move, run, are in a hurry. The texts should adapt the environment.

The online is similar to this to a certain amount. Scanning, rapidity and concision. If we analyze a concrete example, we will notice why not only the design and the usability count, but also what and how you write online.

Above we have a compact block of text. Maybe I’m just being subjective, but the design of the first text is not similar to this one:

How are they different? Lists, bullet points, one idea per paragraph, white spaces, clear structure, URLs. Just a few elements that convince the user to read the webpage or to return on it. Because he liked it and it was not difficult to get the information he needed.

But how do you write something for the online? You put yourself in the user’s position, you choose the key words (that will be underlined, made URLs etc.), you try to structure text so that it appears airy and not just a block of text. Think if some of the information can be better explained with the use of a photo, a graphic or a table. Do not insert a big quantity of information on one page. Instead, insert a URL to a downloadable file or to another webpage for the users that are really interested on the subject. More about writing online you can find here.

This percent was our output at Internetics. We have signed in a piece of work (protv.ro) and we got two awards (Webspace - Media Portal and Platinum Icon Best Practices for Webspace). I remember a story in the Munchausen Baron in which two deer (or boars) were shut through their ears with the use of just one bullet.

We did not know there was also a big award for the entire webspace category, so that turned out to be a cool surprise. Especially that our strategy was not to sign in with works for online presence because we are trying to differentiate as specialists in the content organisation (programming and also design), and not as a web agency.

In other words, our competences are towards content-delivery and not image-delivery.

We believe there are others better than us at this (advertising agencies and branging companies). We know how to apply identities in the internet, we do not want to create them from zero. So we are trying to be closer to the industrial design than to the artistic design - we structure information in a clever way, so that people consume it right.

But to return to the purpose of this post: we wanted to show we are good web-developers (web-developers meaning subject’s strategic planning + super-skills in programming + design focused on usability). We also took the Best Practices Award - which would be the equivalent of the agency of the year for the webspace zone.

We are not interested in awards, although they are a good opportunity for celebrating.

Next year we want to win at least an award with a cool concept we are working on at this moment. I will give you a hint - especially for those who are familiar with the SF: Diamond Age