What a difference a month makes! Mark Weisman it appears is now an avid blogger, as his regularly updated blog bears out. In fact, it’s earned a coveted link in my blogroll at stephenw.us, and I’m even learning a lot about sustainable landscape design. I think it’s great when business interaction can enrich personal lives, a good thing in a world that tries so hard at times to keep personal and business separated.

As we discussed down at WDG, SEO in our opinion is a misunderstood field, and part of that is simply down to SEO vertical marketing firms pushing things that are less important than blogging, such as keyword research and keyword meta tags.

In a recent article over at Google Webmaster Central, Matt Cutts really brought to light how things like keywords are over emphasized. It’s created quite a buzz.

Blogging for your firm represents literally the best opportunity to increase the surface area of your brand, and if you are a good writer and people pay attention to what you have to contribute, the organic search benefits are huge. Many SEO analysts will tell you these days that pay-per-click is rendering organic search near useless, but we believe there is no substitute for valid cross linking, non-advertising based content, for essentially creating and maintaining sustainable “near marketing” results. There is little to no cost to you as a business owner for writing a great article and having it consumed by potential clients.

This concept and approach also sort of fits with WDG’s approach to sustainable Landscape Architecture design and indeed is merited in the way that Mark likes to blog. It’s a great strategy, he posts frequent updates, with great images and cleverly articulated copy. I would imagine that Mark will become widely followed in his industry and beyond as a result. Instant marketing savvy.

So the message today is simple; blog. One of my facebook friends has a new years resolution in 2010 to blog more, and I’ve vowed to help him make sure he has a great theme for his blog once he gets started. He is a small business owner and I know from watching Mark and WDG that regularly blogging will over time grow the presence of his brand. That’s the idea!

I would caution against the temptation to just start trying all kinds of ideas, you need formally trained designers well managed and well informed to make real progress. The challenge when rebranding is to keep the options and ideas fairly narrow in scope, you want to make a decision and a cluttered approach or sloppy design process can tend to bog down the entire project.

The biggest lesson I take away from branding, and from working with the best designers in the world around identity – is this: Your brand needs a refresh every few years. Consumers notice identities that never change, and ironically, they *really* notice brands that they don’t think are changing but behind the scenes are undergoing constant refreshes. They subconsciously gravitate towards brands that don’t seem to change – but these are the brands that in reality are actually being changed. That may seem counter intuitive, but it’s true.

For example, are you aware that Jack in the Box just went through a major rebranding? Check it out. See if you can see the smiling jack-in-box character in the new brand – he’s there. I love the jack-in-the-box rebrand, it’s such a perfect example of how modernizing a brand can both validate an existing mark yet bring it into relevance by generating a visual buzz. There is energy in the new brand that I would bet can be measured financially.

So when should you refresh your brand, and when should you go for a dramatic change? Generally speaking, established brands with significant previous investments in marketing initiatives should capitalize on the large surface area this has created. A clever refresh to modernize the look and feel of a brand that is already well recognized will generate a buzz in your industry. A refreshed brand with new marketing collateral and ideally a new web site will have your sales people dancing in the hallways, and closing more business. You can actually measure the success.

Opting for a complete identity change – which can even include new registration of trademarks or even a company name change – that’s a bigger decision. My advice here is that this kind of major change should be driven by a change in business plans or business approach. Entering a new market segment, expanding offices, etc. Sometimes these suggestions for a complete new identity come from the designers. When and if that happens, always keep in mind that a designer is looking purely at the aesthetic value of your brand, as they should – business acumen should always trump anything based purely on visual appeal. Still, if you have not invested in significant marketing, now might be the time to go for it.

You should always explore both options, looking at an identity change and deciding to do a refresh validates your decision – really for a nominal investment in the grand scheme of things. If you find yourself grappling with this issue, just remember: Jack is “in the box”.

I am not one to believe that good designers will ever be out of a job. I do however believe that the attitude of the designer needs an adjustment. I’ve met entrepreneurs that have built entire websites and built successful businesses without an ounce of design school and zero technical background. They’ve put together a website and self sustaining business by sheer will power, using Photoshop and a CMS. I am always impressed by this when I see it.

They have been able to do this, because the internet and its underlying technology continue to forge toward an ever ubiquitous environment. Certainly all of these solutions that I have come across need major improvements in design, and it is really remarkable to hear these business owners at times announce that they won’t ever need a designer.

But still, they do have somewhat of a point. Their solutions are not that far away from quality, I’ve even seen some of them that only need a little design help. Yes you can see the glaringly obvious lack of a grid system, bad typography, and broken color rules – but only because they are unaware of these things. In a few more years these things will be common knowledge, indeed they may already be.

This means that design is becoming ever more of a utility proposition each day, and I fear for the designer whom needs a sexy high end project to be motivated. As a technologist by background, I’ve had plenty of 14 hour stints troubleshooting a problem that is ever elusive, often in a chilly raised floor data center huddling around a much too small to be effective console. The designer will need to understand that there will be days of simply designing side bars and boxes with gradients. It’s par for the course in today’s CMS driven world.

I imagine the designer looks at something like Drupal 6 and self built sites with stock themes and winces in pain – but I promise you they are soon to be surprised.

If I could have two wishes granted, I’d ask that business owners and executives realize that the targeted use of formally trained designers is essential, and to trust companies like Zemelo to keep these costs contained – but secondly, and most importantly, I’d ask designers to join communities like Drupal and advocate for good design, embracing the future as opposed to trying to ignore it.

Kirkland, Washington – October 13, 2008

Zemelo Corporation announced today that it has been designated an Acquia Silver Partner.
“We are very proud to be among the first designated partners of Acquia.” said Stephen White, Zemelo spokesperson and cofounder. “I am sure the list of partners will grow over time, but when you consider that we are still in startup mode here at Zemelo, this is quite an achievement for us. It speaks volumes for our business model and contribution to the Drupal community to be recognized as a leader in Drupal solutions. The bottom line for us is simple. People want to manage content, and they want to do it on a platform with a future. That is what Acquia Drupal represents, the power of Open Collaboration backed by commercial support, from a company founded by the creator of Drupal. We are simply delighted.”

Zemelo Corporation is a full service creative agency with service offerings in both design and technology. For more information about Zemelo Corporation, contact Stephen White at stephen@zemelo.com.

Kirkland, Washington – August 28, 2008

Zemelo Corporationtoday announced that it has signed an exclusive partnership agreement with Wowrack , a leading provider of hosting services in Seattle, WA. to provide end-to-end Managed Drupal Services to new and existing clients.

“For agencies and freelancers for whom CMS has become a necessity, Drupal increasingly becomes the simple and obvious choice. We know from our own experience that web designers are struggling to deliver scalable CMS capability and social networking features on ever shrinking design budgets. We’ve heard of too many bad experiences around dynamic content and well researched use case suffering on delivery due to lack of investment in content management and hosting scalability. Today we’ve moved to ensure our clients will never experience this issue”, said Stephen White, VP and cofounder of Zemelo Corporation.

He added: “With this agreement, Zemelo has laid the foundation for a complete and comprehensive Drupal Hosting and Services solution for our clients and partners. Literally any internet community our customers and partners build will be able to scale, from small to large, and we are delighted to be in a position to provide this capability from the outset. We are equally delighted to be working closely with Wowrack on Drupal, whom bring an impressive hosting enterprise and a wonderfully streamlined business model to this venture. This is a big day for Zemelo Corporation and all of us here are very excited about the future.”

“Wowrack is proud to announce this partnership with Zemelo”, said Erward Osckar, VP and cofounder of Wowrack. “We believe that Wowrack will strengthen our position as a premier hosting provider in the Pacific Northwest by offering Drupal (CMS) solutions with Zemelo as our exclusive partner. Having operated as a small business since our inception, we understand the value of CMS driven web applications empowering users to deliver fast and rich content. We are excited to be playing a part in supporting the new and emerging open source CMS community and we believe that our partnership with Zemelo will fill in a much needed role in providing value added content management solutions.”

Zemelo Corporation is a full service creative agency with service offerings in both design and technology. For more information about Zemelo Corporation, contact Stephen White at stephen@zemelo.com.

“Social Networking” is simply a buzzword for the reality of today’s internet experience, and Drupal has emerged as the clear leader. The Drupal Community baked in social networking from day one, it will take other CMS years to bolt on functionality that is already in Drupal and already mature and optimized.

Internet community enabled sites need to be able to handle all kinds of traffic, they need to scale, they need to support new web technology easily and they need to be updated constantly, this means the CMS requires backend management, from qualified IT professionals. We all know that simply launching a site is not enought these days, the site needs content updates, and the client wants to do this without another design engagement. The client needs a partner, not just a designer.

“Web Hosting” is not a decision to be made lightly. Putting your website on a server that has hundreds of other sites and dozens of other applications running is really asking for trouble. Putting your website on a server that only gets attention when your site goes down, just does not cut it in 2008.

In the coming weeks, Zemelo will make a series of announcements around Drupal and around a strategy to provide best in class hosting to our clients as part of our engagement process. We’ve come from the IT space, and we know how to provide our customers with rock solid IT related services. When Carbon ships, we will be one of the first companies to support this in a hosted environment, almost immediately.

Web 2.0 is not just about design – it’s about what happens when your community grows. Is your designer talking to you about everything? Do you know everything you need to know about launching your Web 2.0 site? Is your CMS fully supported? Stay Tuned.