Neal Advertising created this site for Lexus of Northborough to provide valuable information to Boston area Lexus owners. Visitors to the site will be able to quickly access specific vehicle recall information on all Lexus models as well as schedule an appointment for repair as well as research recall responses made by Lexus.

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Hatch Award

We’re proud to announce that Neal Advertising received a Bronze Bowl at The Ad Club’s 49th Annual Hatch Awards. What project won this award you ask? This blog! UnderTheBigTopics.com was the only blog to receive an award in the blog category.

The Hatch Awards celebrate excellence in our creative community recognizing the best and brightest advertising agencies in New England.

Congratulations to illustrators Alexis Pacelli and Bryan Woodbury, designer Danielle Pikus, developers Jason Narciso and Jesse Friedman, art director Chad Foster and the rest of the Neal Advertising team!

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I can reach in to a proverbial “hat” of web posts and pull out dozens about Twitter Best Practices. In an effort to prevent from having to repeat myself, I’ve linked to a few below written by trusted industry leaders (linkbait anyone). The idea behind using Twitter best practices is that you are a business or person who wants to create a community to share and improve your brand. Before you can do this you have to figure out who you are; The Leader, The Follower or The Zombie.

• The Art of Writing an Effective Twitter Profile by Zach Braiker
• Guy Kawasaki: Twitter As a Tool for Social Media by Lisa Barone
• How To Manage Twitter by Chris Brogan
• 20 Must Read Beginner Twitter Tips for Small Business Owners by Mark Hayward

A common question that always seems to come up among friends or colleagues is “You’re surrounded by zombies and you can choose only one weapon, what is it?” A lot of people go for the shotgun but you have to realize that you’re eventually going to run out of ammo. The next choice is usually a sword or machete. How does this apply to Twitter? Well…

In any chaotic post-apocalyptic world where citizens are threatened by brain eating zombies (social network), you have individuals who set themselves apart as authorities. These people lead us and motivate us to keep the community alive. Everyone else are followers or zombies. The follower should not carry a negative stereotype, however. Followers are good, with out followers we wouldn’t have leaders. Followers are the backbone of any community and should be considered extremely important. Zombies on the other hand are lifeless beings existing only to feed off everyone else. This is especially true on Twitter.

Let’s start by asking: “Why Are You On Twitter”. The answer is usually one of the following five answers.

1. Your friends, family or celebrity crush is on Twitter and you need to know what it’s all about
2. You’ve been on Twitter for a while, tweet about being bored in a doctor’s office or what crazy thing your kid is doing but haven’t really figured it all out yet
3. You’re a business owner or representative and are on Twitter to deliver important content, answer questions and increase reach to your customers or clients
4. You’re a professional and have something to offer to the world (or at least you think you do) and you want to be apart of a community of like minded tweeps
5. You’re a spammer and want to sell, drive traffic or eat brains

You’re probably not a 5 because I don’t think Zombies can read.

1’s and 2’s welcome to Twitter, I hope you enjoy your stay.

3’s and 4’s I want to tell you a secret. Being on Twitter or any social network isn’t about gaining as many followers, fans or friends as possible. It’s about creating a community where active users can be engaged and gain something of value you from you, share that information with their community and create advocates of your brand. I would choose to have a small number of active users with strength and authority in their community over 10’s of thousands of zombies following me.

This is a point I try to make to all my clients and students. Tweeps who are desperate to increase their followers by any means possible aren’t providing any value or substance to you or anyone else. They’re greedy and eager to reach a rather pointless goal, because they believe this is what makes you an authority. The truth is that anything worth doing is done over time with a lot of effort. These Zombies only act to create more zombies. By following them and countless others you lose sense of what’s real, start aimlessly wondering the universe and gain and give nothing.

There are of course exceptions to any rule. However I fear a Twitterverse where everyone is speaking and no one is listening.

So what’s your favorite Zombie weapon? I like http://topify.com they make it easy to kill zombie followers right from your email account. If @topify isn’t available for some reason I’m a big fan of a riding mower!

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This website will provide an easy and functional place for John Sheehan and his team to write, engage and help the local people.

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There are a number of services out there that provide analytics reports of your website. At Neal Advertising, we are partial to Google Analytics for its accurate reporting, ease of use and the amount of available data. Today we’ll take a look at 3 basic metrics. 

The total amount of web pages that were viewed on your site in a given time period is referred to as page views. If someone visits your site once, but views 15 different pages, your site just generated 15 page views. When using this to analyze your website, you also need to look carefully at the number of pages you have on your site and the content on each page. You can also delve deeper into this by looking at which individual pages garner the most traffic.

An individual or browser that views your site is measured by a unit called a unique visitor.  If an individual visits the site more than once, it is only counted as one unique visitor. This is a great way to measure your websites traffic, giving you an accurate reading on your audience size. 

When Google calculates your time on site, they take the total amount of time that each visitor spends on the site before exiting the website. If you view 2 pages for a total of 10 minutes or 20 pages for a total of 10 minutes, your time on site will be the same. Every website is unique and thus, the amount time a visitor spends on your site gets will vary. When analyzing this metric, it is important to look at the number of pages, content of those pages and your ultimate goal or purpose for the website.

As with any web metric, Google Analytics is not 100% accurate, but it is a great tool to measure the effectiveness and stickiness of your website.

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I hear a lot of people saying that print is dead, and the digital age is taking over. This is something that I disagree with. I am aware that technology is very abundant in advertising, but just because technology has become the new way to advertise doesn’t mean that the art of print design is dying out.

Print design in mainly used in advertising to create products such as posters, billboard, direct mail, magazine ads and much more. What people don’t see is the other side of print design that is needed to make a business run. Business cards are a good example. The design of them is extremely important to a business. That little card that you leave behind is the first impression people get of your company. It gives your company personality and helps support its brand and image.

Let’s take a step back from business cards and think about what is the most important thing for a company to have. A logo. Your company’s logo is what identifies your company. Without it a business is not branded and advertising will not be as beneficial. A logo makes you associate with the brand. That logo will go on anything and everything your company creates throughout print or web.

I am not saying that technology is bad; it is a wonderful tool and I think it has a lot of great benefits. The best way I think of web design and print design, is to see them as two different things. Web design is a new tool to advertise your brand, but the root behind getting web advertisements recognized by consumers goes back to good print design. So while print advertising may be dying, print design itself is not dead.

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Almost 2 years ago I was brought on to Neal Advertising with a specific mission in mind.  What everyone didn’t know was that I’m apart of a “group” that has a very specific goal.  To create a better internet where a set of standards are used to better a users experience and clients product.

The beginning was chaotic and slow.  I had one employee under me who was very good at what he did but it was still just the two of us.  I quickly began to impart my want and need for everything to be compliant, but it wasn’t easy to get everyone on board.

I was fighting an uphill battle. My team members and colleagues didn’t use standards in the past so convincing them the extra work and limitations we’d be putting in place was worth wasn’t easy. However, I knew if I could just teach everyone about standards they would understand and be happy to adopt the policies I was trying to put into place.

The graphics team at Neal Advertising is comprised of some the most talented individuals I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with.  Their designs are amazing and their ability to grasp the crude ideas in my head and bring them to life are exemplary.  However, they never had to design for standards or general accessability before. Most of the designers started in print and were later asked to simply design websites.  Before I arrived almost everything was developed out in flash and just embedded on a page.  There was no thought put into usability, standards, seo, or anything other than creating stunning and impressive graphics.  Then here I come pulling the rug out from everyone and asking it all to be different.

I set up a meeting to have the interactive department and the graphics department meet, learn and converse about standards.  I presented the idea of standards compliancy, how code should be written a certain way.  How standards benefits the user and client on many levels including usability, functionality and over all web happiness.  My speech went on for about 30 mins until my first question.

“So we have to do all this extra work, so…. Why are we doing this again?”

FAIL.  I didn’t engage them.  I wasn’t passionate about standards.  I didn’t teach anyone anything important.  This was my fault not theirs.  I can’t expect anyone to suddenly adopt new principles if I haven’t given them a good reason to do so.

If we fast forward a few months I would be sitting in the front row of An Event Apart, Boston 2008 (which is open for registration).  I was listening intently to Kimberly Blessing.  She was speaking about the challenges of adopting web principles.

“Point them to any number of resources on the Web which cite Web standards as common modern development practice, and explain how their leadership in this area will demonstrate to developers the commitment the company is making in their long-term careers.  Introduce them to the community that practices Web standards and show them that there is plenty of support out there, as well as pride, and those things will make them happier. And, slowly, you will change your company’s attitude towards standards. Remember what Gandhi said: ‘Be the change you wish to see in the world.’ And make the Nike slogan your mantra: ‘Just Do It’.” – Kimberly Blessing

I was impressed, Kimberly had done what I wanted to do and at a much larger scale.  She was passionate about standards and the 500+ people in the room could feel it.  At the end of her lecture she gave out copies of her book to those who had questions.  I quickly racked my brain for a good question to ask, that would also benefit the many people in the audience.

I asked, “How do you get people passionate about web standards when they’ve never had to apply them in the past?”

Her answer was simple, “Show them your passionate about it”.

When I returned to the office I got everyone together again.  I made it clear that I wanted everyone to adopt the ideas of web standards because they wanted to adopt them not because it was going to be mandatory.

“We have an opportunity to take hold of the way the internet is being transformed.  We can empower ourselves and other people in our industry to produce better and more efficiently created web pages.  Yes, standards has that much POWER”

I left that meeting with a better feeling in my gut that things would be changing for the better.  I knew it wasn’t going to be easy and that sacrifices would have to be made by everyone.  We would have to put more time and planning into each design.  This however would create much better results including:

• Ensuring that every single user has a quality experience
• Content will be accessible to more users on multiple browsers, machines, operating systems and devices (handhelds and phones)
• Better Search Engine Optimization, better ranking and more efficient crawling
• Less challenges with Cross Browser Compatibility
• Faster loading
• Management of the site and code would be far easier
• and many more…

The challenge was to help them understand that we aren’t adopting these policies just to make things better now but to make things better for the future.  While we are still working to improve our efforts to adopt web standards we are definetly getting there.

Here are some Extra Resources

• Designing with Web Standards (2nd Edition)
• Adapting to Web Standards: CSS and Ajax for Big Sites (Voices That Matter)
• W3C QA – How to achieve Web standards and quality on your Web site?
• The Web Standards Project
• FAQ: The Web Standards Project
• Wikipedia: Web Standards

Please take some time to comment on how you have improved web standards policies in your business and websites.

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We all know the power of social media networking and it’s ability to go viral. We also know it’s not easy to get people talking and working for you. This is where contests come in. We can offer something of value in exchange for a little bit of work and interaction.

Mashable is having a contest right now giving away a free pass to Demo 09 worth $2,995. All they ask for you to participate is to post a comment, which finishes this sentence: “I’d like to attend the DEMO 09 emerging technology conference because…”

This is not particularly difficult. It requires you to spend a few moments being creative. Writing something intelligent with a mix of goofy and a bit of sucking up and poof you have a comment.

Melanie Nathan just opened the doors to her new blog, Canadian SEO. After introducing herself, the blog and talking a bit about what she does she offered up a small contest.

“And now, in the interest of keeping things er, interesting…. I’ll be picking one commenter below by end of day Friday, to receive a fun-filled Canadian themed prize package. Hmmm. What *ever* could it be???”

Again all you have to do is post a comment. This prize package is probably not valued at $3,000 like the Mashable contest but it still invokes a challenge in us. It’s fun and interesting and I want to be apart of it. Even if all I get is a mini Canadian flag and some maple syrup.

The third contest was by SuccessFool to name his company. You get to create the company name and suggest the domain name to be purchased. The rules ask you to submit by commenting on the site like the other two. The prize is free consulting and free access to a $997 Coaching Program.

We have a competition ingrained in every fiber of our being. We want to compete, we want a challenge and we want to WIN! These contests are a simple way to motivate people to travel to your site, learn something and commit to an otherwise daunting task of getting them to interact.

Commenting is by far the most important form of interaction a user can perform on your site. The comments area of your post is the outlet for discussion and the spreading of your “word”. This is especially important when you have a new business, site or project.

SuccessFool is creating interest in his SEO business before it’s even started. Melanie has immediate new visitors to her site. Mashable, while well established will be gaining new visitors and new discussions about their site.

The benefits are clear, new readership, discussions, spreading the word, increasing brand recognition, motivating and sparking interest in your users, it goes on and on. Lets talk about taking it to a new level.

As we’ve seen contests have the power to spark new interest in your site. What about link building and community building?

Motivating users to join your site and social networks can be difficult. If you are offering a great product, quality content or a premiere service you will gain a following, eventually. What if I want followers and I want them now?

An idea that has been implemented with success is a competition where you award the individual with the best social networking, link building and content sharing abilities.

For this example lets offer a free $1,000 gift certificate to whatever product you sell. Ask users to become a member of your site to join the contest. As a member you can participate by gaining points, each point is equal to 1 digital raffle ticket. Obviously the more points you get the more likely you are to win. Here’s the fun part, you gain points by joining a facebook group, talking about the site on twitter, writing a post on your blog, etc… Different items will have different point values. Joining a group might be worth 1 point but writing a post with a link could be worth 10 points.

This is just one type of contest. There are several others out there going on right now. The guys from IM Broadcast have a competition going on for a free seat to IM Spring Break. Where you write a post on your blog about why you want to attend IM Spring Break followed by a list of linkbacks to other sites. This is a meme and a great idea!

Do you have any fun contest ideas, if so lets hear them below.

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This is a list of some well-known issues found in Internet Explorer starting with version 5.  Based on browser popularity and saturation reports, many web designers have targeted which versions of Internet Explorer they will support and which they will drop.

Neal Advertising’s general policy is that we do NOT support IE6 any longer and provide simple redirection for IE6 users to gain access to more recent and advanced browsers.  We know this will limit some users and aggravate users on a network that doesn’t allow them to upgrade their version of IE.  However, with any new sites we create and develop, we always make a point to analyze the demographic of that site and decide whether it’s a good idea or not to drop IE6.

No matter how well you write HTML and CSS, it is inevitable that you will need to specify certain adjustments for Internet Explorer.  With this fact in mind, there are several different ways to target a specific version of Internet Explorer for optimal viewing results.

Using Conditional Comments

Using conditional comments can be valuable because they are easy to define in the head of your document and keep all of your specific CSS fixes in one separate, contained location. It is important to keep in mind that they will only work in Internet Explorer on Windows.  (Since Apple dropped IE at version 5.5 and added the more compliant-friendly Safari, this isn’t really a huge problem.)

Conditional comments are considered a CSS “hack” because they give special and specific style instruction to some browsers.  They are different from in-CSS hacks though because they don’t use one browser bug to solve another one.  Conditional comments are a deliberate feature implemented by Microsoft for developers to purposely target Internet Explorer only.

In-CSS hacks can be confusing and ugly and sometimes will make CSS files invalid to the W3C validator.  The are also not 100% future proof to browser updates.  (Peter-Paul Kotch of http://www.quirksmode.com has written a great article against using in-CSS hacks.)

How To Implement Conditional Comments

Below is a basic example of a conditional comment found within the <head> </head> tags at the beginning of an HTML document:

<!--[if IE]><link href="screenIE.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" media="screen" /><![endif]-->

The basic structure of a conditional comment is the same as an HTML comment <!-- -->.  Internet Explorer has been programmed to recognize the <!--[if IE]> syntax – it will resolve the if statement and parse the rest of the conditional comment as though it were normal page content.

Referring back to the above example – if the browser is any version of Internet Explorer and reads this line, then it will include the screenIE stylesheet.

You can also specify a specific version of Internet Explorer:

<!--[if IE 6]><link href="screenIE6.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" media="screen" /><![endif]-->

In this example, the screenIE6 stylesheet will only be included if the browser being used is Internet Explorer 6.

There are also very specific operators you can add to the if statement for greater control.  Suppose you want to specify any Internet Explorer greater than version 5:

<!--[if gt IE 5]><link href="screenIEall.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" media="screen" /><![endif]-->

So technically this would work in Internet Explorer versions 5.5, 6, 7 and even 8.  A fair warning that some versions of IE handle certain css declarations differently, so if you are using a solution like this be sure to double check all versions to ensure you are getting the proper results.

Here is a full list of all operators and their results.

More About Conditional Comments

A great way to use conditional comments is to simply overwrite a specific declaration from your main CSS that is causing display problems in IE.

For example, sometimes IE will display padding or margin values differently.  If I’m seeing a discrepancy in IE 7 and in my main CSS I have a declaration like:

#header{ background:red; padding:20px 0; }

To target and fix the issue in IE 7 you’re conditional comment in the <head> of your document would look like:

<!--[if IE 7]><link href="screenIE7.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" media="screen" /><![endif]-->

Then included in screenIE7.css would be a simple overwriting to the above padding value (keep in mind that when overwriting main CSS styles, it’s required to include your conditional comments BELOW your main CSS declaration).  It might look something like:

#header{ padding:10px 0; }

There are other uses for conditional comments besides targeting stylesheets based on browsers.  They can be used to implement a specific JavaScript file or function based on a user’s browser.  They can even be used directly in HTML markup to show specific content based on a user’s browser.

Microsoft has a great overview of conditional comments on their developer network.  Take a look and learn more!

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