New Sites
In late July, IMA launched sites for ThePetCottage.com and for IATSE International. In addition, at the beginning of August, IMA handed over the final template deliverables to NECA for their Intranet site. Now the project is in the hands of NECA's IT department for implementation using the RedDot content management system.
ThePetCottage.com is IMA's first Yahoo store implementation, and offers more than 1,700 items for lovers of pet collectables and antiques. The store's owner will be using the Yahoo interface to manage the store herself -- adding and removing products, changing prices, etc.
NECA and IMA first worked together back in 2000, when we consulted with them on their public Web site. As noted in earlier newsletters, we were retained in February to help them reorganize and redesign their Intranet site, making it more usable and an enhanced resource for employees. We handed off the final templates in early August.
The redesign of the IATSE International Web site has been a major project here at IMA, and we launched the site in the final days of July. IATSE staff presented the new design, complete with a comprehensive interactive timeline and a database directory of union locals, to great acclaim at the annual national convention, which took place in New York City.
Mini Projects
Sometimes the small tasks we undertake for our current clients fail to make this newsletter. It doesn't make them any less important. This month we thought we'd highlight a few of our most recent mini-projects:
- NECA asked IMA to design a 20th anniversary logo for use in both digital and print media. We came up with more variations than they expected in very short order.
- Sussman Lifestyle Group, whose redesigned Web site launched earlier this summer, wanted to post a PowerPoint demo on the site. They retained IMA to design and brand the PowerPoint presentation with the same imagery we developed for the Web site.
- BEM Systems held an internal employee photo contest and wanted an easy way to collect and tally votes. IMA created a page for them that allowed employees to submit a vote for their favorite photo electronically from among 15 employee shots.
In the Works
New projects at IMA include a redesign of the Aquis Communications Web site, which will launch in the coming weeks. We are also involved in creating a micro-site to celebrate the centennial of the birth of George Balanchine, the founder of the New York City Ballet. A new-look Morris Vistor's Center is nearing completion. And we have embarked upon the initial phase of creating an events bulletin board for Rutgers University's Mason Gross School of the Arts.
Len was quoted in the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review
Preparing an article entitled "Online News Sites Score More With Flash Than With Substance," Mark Glaser asked IMA President Len Muscarella to comment on a research report on the state of online journalism:
The EPpys, owned by Editor & Publisher, have a history of focusing on print-related online sites (they were formerly known as the Interactive Newspaper Awards). The EPpys recently broadened to cover broadcast-related sites, and look beyond journalism at advertising and even classifieds. Len Muscarella is president of Interactive Media Associates, which administers the awards for E&P. He had an interesting take on the research report.
"I tend to agree that Web journalism is still somewhat derivative -- meaning that the stories are often written for the newspaper first (and primarily) and then moved to the Internet," he told me via e-mail. "But how they are moved to the Internet is crucial. If the news story is just spooled over to the Web site via a software procedure, it makes for some pretty boring Web feature. The award winners usually aren't doing that. They are using the multimedia and interactive aspects of the Web to make them unique. So, just because the words are the same doesn't mean the reader's experience, or the impact of the story, is the same as the newspaper."
For the full article, see Bylines in the News section at www.imediainc.com.
