HTML emails are an invaluable and sustainable tool for keeping up with current clients and for getting your name out to prospects. Especially when an HTML email can be a prospect’s first impression of your company, it’s essential to make sure that first impression is a great one; here are some tips to help...

At Silverscape, we keep a close eye on the results of our website (and our client sites) and we love to teach others how to read the Ouija Board of Google Analytics. It’s certainly not breaking news that a website is a key part of any successful business today. What does tend to be overlooked is how much information is available to monitoring the success or weaknesses of your company’s website.

There are many ways you, my reader, could’ve found your way to this article – our website, web search, RSS reader, Technorati, or perhaps a caring friend. One of my favorites…Twitter.

Here's what I find sexy: The perfect red lip and a complex e-commerce system with an extensive product catalog and zillions of SKUs! Lately, I've found myself really applauding the brand Sephora for the fantastic and cohesive user experience offered to their customers through multiple mediums on the web.

We’ve all heard the line ‘If you build it they will come.’ In a Hollywood flick about baseball, maybe, but don’t be fooled: in marketing this isn't the case. It takes more than a well-designed website to drive brand recognition and ongoing increases in sales for your firm.

We make some pretty nice looking websites – our designers are pretty awesome at what they do. They create a plethora of custom art for every site that we the developers have to use to produce the site. Even though high bandwidth connection availability and internet connection speeds have rapidly increased in the last few years, no one wants to wait around for pages to load.

My 2009 at Silverscape was chock-full of e-commerce, thanks in huge part to being a designer on the DRIFIRE website. Now I’m here to pay-it-forward, and impart some of that knowledge onto you. So here’s my rundown of the five most interesting and innovative ecomm site features of '09, from inside the studio and out.

This is a continuation of my last post, Your Corporate Blog: Why to have it and How to maintain it (Part 1 of 2)! In the first part of this post, I discussed the advantages of integrating a corporate, or business blog into your company’s web presence. Now that we’ve thought about why we need one, it’s time to think about how to manage it.

At Silverscape, we love blogs. One of the areas where we’ve been innovating and seeing success is in the world of corporate blogs, or business blogs – blogs that represent the views of an organization or key individual within that organization.
 

You may have noticed the New Year is upon us in full swing. This year’s troubled economy brings understandably scaled-back holiday marketing efforts; the thought of sounding too cheery or boastful has led clients to seek out a more tempered tone in comparison to that of holidays past.

Any need you might have, chances are that ‘there is an app a plug-in for that”.

As promised in an earlier blog entry, we have completed the sixth version of Common Goal WebManager! While I hold a certain fondness for the earlier versions, I know I speak for the whole team at Silverscape when I say that I am very excited about the new features, the new interface, and some of the technology we have brought into it to make the maintenance of site content even easier than it was in earlier versions (and our clients can speak to how easy it has always been)!

Actually, its amazing Technicolor radio paper. And after more than a decade in production, we’re finally starting to see some of the results of this ground-breaking technology.

While perusing the day’s status updates on Facebook, I came across a video parody of not only one of my favorite singers, but of one of my favorite typefaces. You can imagine my excitement in finding that someone somehow had managed to creatively combine the two.

Last night I was watching an episode of my favorite TV show and when you start the disc it begins with a commercial. What happened next is what struck me.

 Except for instances where my internet is down, I pretty much never watch tv shows on my actual television anymore; I am part of what I suppose we can call the Hulu generation. The other weekend, I went home to visit my folks and prepared to settle comfortably back into the family room routine of TV-watching from the couch. And before long, the ever-growing rift between the different two mediums became painfully obvious.

So I have my Google Wave Beta invite and have been using it a bit with about 15 friends. Unfortunately, I haven’t had any invites myself to give out, so for now I’m the only one at the office riding. So what is Wave? Google says...

In my humble opinion, Silverscape has one of the most uniquely designed offices the city of Boston. Our building is located amidst the hustle and bustle of the financial district, right above a local pub called Mr. Dooley’s.

Award season is fast approaching in the marketing, technology and design world. While pop-culture aficionados have their Emmys Grammys and Oscars, we at Silverscape have the MITX, NEDMAs and Horizons (just to name a few).

SMPS Pacific Regional Conference, The Wave, Navigating Change. Since it is a grey November day here in Boston, I've included the perfect soundtrack.

Once again it’s my time to blog and, mentally encumbered by a big personal decision, I’ve decided to write about it and hopefully bring my dilemma to an end.

Social Networking Unplugged: Part of the Professional Development Lunch Series

Handwritten type is one of those awesome design elements that I find myself always wanting to find a way to implement into a project. It’s really a powerful tool, because it can eliminate the need for photography and illustration all together.

Silverscpape is thrilled to announce DRIFIRE.COM is a MITX 14th Annual Interactive Award Finalist Finalist, Consumer Goods 2009. DRIFIRE is the leading producer of Comfortable Flame Resistant FR Apparel.

You’d think that, being a creative, I would have been planning, sketching and designing out my Halloween costume both in exquisite detail and months in advance. Alas, my weekends have been filled with afternoon naps and end-of-summer bike rides and I am totally behind the Halloween eight ball. So, for all you fellow Halloween-stumped designers, here are some costume ideas.

The topic for this blog came up from a meeting I had last week with a prospective client. Very often when our firm is sought out to create a new website or provide brand strategy for a company, we have to raise the all-to-familiar and never comfortable question: what about your logo?

One of my pet peeves about blogs from creative interactive agencies is that they are often farmed out to prolific professional writers that produce lofty witty commentary on the industry’s latest superstars. Many go to the utmost lengths to attempt to convince you that they are innovative just because they say they are.

Every morning at 9am (okay…9:20) I turn on my comp, check my email, hug every single one of my co-workers, finish all of my timesheets, and look at the day’s posts on NOTCOT.org.