Submitted by webdesign on Wed, 2007-08-01 10:21
By PJ Matulka
My first week at PlattForm, I was subjected to moving a ginormous (just added to Webster’s, yet Word still puts the squiggly red line) filing cabinet, sitting at a desk with no phone and a computer that recognized me as Sherri, and compiling a spreadsheet of the 240 military bases I called around the country.
Submitted by webdesign on Fri, 2007-08-03 10:22
It's not every day that you get to throw a pie at your old boss – let alone two pies.
Not many people can pull off the Princess Leia look, Adam, but you do it beautifully.
Submitted by webdesign on Mon, 2007-08-06 14:51
Five mornings a week, my father left his still-sleeping family for his job at the meat packing plant. Accompanied by a hot cup of coffee, he steered his pickup to the Bottoms, a section of Kansas City, Mo., nicknamed for its place on the river basin beneath downtown.
Submitted by webdesign on Fri, 2007-08-10 10:03
Around this joint, nearly every department has a catchy little moniker. The Print dudes are known as Printopia. The Web Designers are called Web Zeppelin. Michael Platt is referred to as God. And so it goes.
My department … the Video Production department … was known as the Video Production department.
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Several ideas were bandied about in our ultimate quest to come up with something catchy. The Vidiots was quickly dismissed. Freaks & Geeks was already taken. And VProd sounded dirty.
Submitted by webdesign on Fri, 2007-08-17 15:13
The Creative Services team had a retreat at Lake Doniphan last week. It was exhilarating to see 33 of us sitting in a big circle in a lodge basement; it gave me a heightened sense of community.
Submitted by webdesign on Mon, 2007-08-20 15:24
User-generated content (UGC) has been getting a lot of buzz lately, and for good reason; when used correctly, it is an incredibly effective marketing tool (and it's generally a lot of fun, too). UGC is so effective because consumers are sick of sales pitches – they trust other consumers, not salesmen. UGC is real. Using it can give you the kind of credibility you won't achieve through advertising alone.
Submitted by webdesign on Wed, 2007-08-22 15:13
Search engine optimization does not just include the on-site and off-site optimization strategies that may be implemented on a given web site. The structure of the code and how it is organized is also a very important piece of the SEO puzzle.
Jonathon Hochman, of SearchEngineWatch, recently spoke with Dan Crow, the product manager for Google’s Crawl Infrastucture group about clean code and how it affects the indexing of web pages.
Submitted by webdesign on Fri, 2007-08-24 11:18
PlattForm-produced commercials blanket more than 60% of the country. That’s not too shabby for a company that started a mere decade ago in the basement of owners Michael and Tamie Platt.
Submitted by webdesign on Mon, 2007-08-27 10:50
When I’m working with new PlattFormers from other departments and cross training them on exactly what it is we do in Media, I find it’s often hard to cram all that we do into a brief 45-minute session. Going over the intricacies of our reporting procedures alone could realistically cover an hour.
Submitted by webdesign on Fri, 2007-08-31 08:42
The good ol’ folks in the direct mail world have been living and breathing PURLs over the past few months. They’re supposed to be the “next best thing” when it comes to direct mail. Not sure what PURL stands for? You’re not alone, but we’re trying to change that.
A PURL is simply a personalized URL (www.briansumner.com, for example). The belief is that prospective students who receive a direct mail piece will be more inclined to check out a web site that has their name included, therefore turning into leads.