D4 Advanced Media provide you and your company a wide variety of effective media solutions, including social marketing, graphic design, search engine optimization, and of course, web design. Our media solutions will develop your brand, your image, and reach your audience. Simply put, we create the advanced media solutions that you are looking for: solutions that work.

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E-mail is a powerful marketing tool because it is intimate. You are among friend’s party e-vites, family messages and funny forwards that everyone can’t get enough of. You need to develop a relationship with the consumer as well. Otherwise you are just an intruder in a house you don’t belong in.

Treat your email marketing like a friendship and follow the proper etiquette that all good friends stick to:

Get to the point
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to read an e-mail that just won’t end. People are pressed for time, so keep it as short as possible to get across what you are trying to say. Write the email first and then cut it down by half. It will take longer to make the email shorter but it will be worth it in the end.

Write good emails!
I can’t stress this enough. There is a good way to write emails that is effective and increases your business, and there is a bad way to write emails that can potentially harm your business. Have someone revise your email and get feedback. Remember that you aren’t writing the email for yourself, you are marketing to a wide range of people. There is an art to writing effective emails. Make sure you are utilizing the following in all of your mass emails:

• Use a hook
• Support the hook
• Be succinct
• State the most important things first
• Write for scanability
• Use an active voice
• Use the right tone for your audience
• Avoid using long URLs
• Don’t ever use ALL CAPS
• Use line spacing to make your text easier to read
• Use hyphens or bullet points when presenting a list of items
• Use a simple and clear subject line
• Use supporting imagery to break up the text
• You email format should match your branding

Maintain consistency
You want your emails to maintain a consistent flow that is steady and reliable. Keep this in mind with elements like your company logo, overall email design, from address and name, as well as tone. This will make your email more recognized in a crowded inbox and recipients will appreciate the familiar look so they can better navigate the different elements.

Email with a purpose
Make sure you are giving your subscribers what they want whether it is information or special deals, which should be hinted at in the header of your email. Don’t send pointless emails; all of them should have a purpose. Give the people what they want.

Consider a mobile website
Since the number of users checking e-mail on their mobile devices continues to increase, you should consider developing a mobile platform. This will involve upgrading your campaign to perform properly on the iPhone, iPad, Android phones, Windows mobile platforms and other devices as well as adjusting your content to the smaller screen size.

The unsubscribers
If a person wants to stop accepting your emails, they shouldn’t have to jump through leaps and bounds to be able to. Make the unsubscribe link clearly visible because it’s way better to receive an unsubscribe than a spam complaint! Let your audience provide you with the reason they are unsubscribing so you can prevent future losses.

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Danny Winokur, Vice President & General Manager, Interactive Development at Adobe says, “Over the past two years, we’ve delivered Flash Player for mobile browsers and brought the full expressiveness of the web to many mobile devices. However, HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively.  This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms. We are excited about this, and will continue our work with key players in the HTML community, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers.”

So what is HTML5? HTML5 is a language for structuring and presenting content for the internet. HTML5 adds many new features to it’s predecessors. These include the <video>, <audio>, <header> and <canvas> elements, as well as the integration of SVG content that replaces the uses of generic <object> tags. These features are designed to make it easy to include and handle multimedia and graphical content on the web without having to resort to proprietary plugins and APIs.

The downside to all this is that it will take some time for HTML5 to be widely implemented. Older browsers are not capable of supporting it, which can turn into a nightmare for developers. With such a big shift ahead of us in terms of mobile development and web-based applications, compatibility concerns are high. Also, learning a new language structure can act as a barrier for producing web applications in a timely manner. Once implemented though, we think that HTML5 will be a great tool to utilize, and we look forward to seeing it be refined and developed!

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Today, we proudly present the launch of our newest website design, Crucial Life Sciences Data Solutions (CLSDS) is a custom website created by D4. Targeting a clean, neat look, we focused on a minimal & simple interface dedicated to their flagship product, Crucial EzDC, a web-based EDC development system for Clincal professionals promises security & improved workflow.

A relatively young company, started in 2009, they have grown quickly with tremendous success, which comes from innovation and determination to cost of business low. A quality product at a low price for the clinical profession comes from right here in Northern Nevada. Please pay a visit to them at http://www.clsds.com .

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Gradient Resources Inc., parent company of Gradient Geo Data, is engaged in the exploration and development of geothermal resources as well as the construction, ownership and operation of geothermal power plants. The company is headquartered in Reno, Nevada with a regional office, drilling operations center, and well-cementing plant near its Patua and Fallon projects. They a powerful, proprietary software package to provide for the storage, analysis, and presentation of the tremendous amount of geothermal data produced during the exploration and evaluation of its geothermal projects. This proprietary technology includes GeoData Manager, WELLSIM, and Steamfield Manager.

GeoData Manager: A comprehensive data management system that facilitates the storage, presentation and analysis of most data from a geothermal exploration and development program.

WellSim: An integrated geothermal wellbore simulator and analysis package designed to allow ‘what-if’ scenarios.

Steamfield Manager: Specifically designed to handle both short-term and long-term data from an operating geothermal steamfield.

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Rocket Drillco is a geothermal, gas and oil well drilling company based out of Fallon, Nevada.  With over 150 combined years of experience in the drilling industry, Rocket Drillco stands today as the industry leader for drilling operations.  Safety is always the primary goal with the Rocket Drillco crew.  Through their superior HSQE (Health, Safety, Quality & Environment) Program, a safe working environment has become the cornerstone of their business practice, as well as one of their core corporate values.  Rocket Drillco is a subsidiary of Gradient Resources Inc., a premier geothermal developer, also based out of northern Nevada.

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In addition to having both an e-commerce website and brick and mortar store, they needed a way to bridge real-time store inventory with online orders. D4 was able to synchronize their current retail inventory system with their newly updated e-commerce content management system. How cool is that?

They can now enjoy a seamless point of sale in store and online without the hassle of doing manual data entry every time an order is placed.

D4 is committed to providing online solutions for the unique needs of every business. Contact us if you have questions about how we provide efficient online solutions for you!

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We would like to announce the following new sites to our ever growing list of accomplishments:

Just Launched: North Valley Heating and Air
www.northvalleyheatair.com

North Valley Heating and Air is owned by two of Reno’s best HVAC specialists, Dan Callaway and Gary Murphy. Together they have over 30 years of experience in the HVAC industry. They specialize in a wide range of services, some of which include: HVAC repair & maintenance, central  air systems, commercial A/C, zoning, duct repair & installation, furnace repair & replacement as well gas pellet and wood stoves. If you need your air conditioner or heater fixed or upgraded, they are the guys to do it! The North Valley Heating and Air website was designed for easy navigation and prominent display of testimonials, services offered and contact information. We utilized a custom design and high-contrast color scheme to make sure North Valley Heating and Air stands out.

Just Launched: Lime Spa Reno
www.limespareno.com

Lime Spa is a new day spa in Reno that is proud to have their grand opening this month! It’s always exciting when we can be a part of marketing for a new and upcoming business. Lime Spa is no exception. The owner, Emily, wanted to create a feeling of luxury and relaxation and have a soothing ambiance in a fun, unique way. We did a lot of custom design including the creation of a beautiful white picture frame that acts as an image rotator on the home page and a tufted teal background. We even created a matching Constant Contact email template to match the website and integrated a customized Constant Contact sign-up form on the website. How cool is that?! If you love to spa, then you should definitely check out Lime Spa.

And wait, there’s more!

Launching Soon: Rakatier UTV/Truck Storage Rack Systems

Coming soon is a website for a fantastic new invention for all of you that love UTVs and off-roading! Rakatier is a customized rack system that enables you to carry all sorts of gear on the back of your UTV or truck. We have a put a lot of work into making this site the epitome of the outdoorsy type; sporty, rugged and fun! Stay tuned for the official launch, you won’t want to miss it!

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Never forget what your true purpose is when dreaming up your website. You want your customers to be able to call you, find you, know your hours and be able to peek at your menu (prices included). The more difficult you make this for your customer, the more likely they will choose to eat somewhere else.

I ran across this useful and very funny article on restaurant website design. It definitely highlights what NOT to do when designing a restaurant website. Make sure you check out some of their examples linked in the text.

Enjoy!

-D4

Why are restaurant websites so horrifically bad?

By Farhad Manjoo
www.slate.com

Great chefs don’t mean great websites. The first thing that pops up when you visit the website of the San Francisco restaurant Fleur de Lys is a nearly full-screen animation of celebrity chef Hubert Keller’s autograph. That makes sense—when I’m choosing a restaurant, the first thing I want to know is, Can the chef sign his name?

Wait a second, though. What does Chef Keller look like? You’re not going to bother with this place if the chef doesn’t have a good headshot. Good news! After the signature, the site fades into a snappy photo of Keller. Fortunately, he’s a looker—think Peter Fonda with Fabio’s hair.

After the autograph and headshot, the site transitions to a “main menu,” which presents you with links to Keller’s other restaurants and his PBS TV show. Tempted though you are, you stay focused and click for the San Francisco restaurant. One bit of advice: If you’ve got a subwoofer attached to your computer, now’s the time to crank it up, because you’re in for some auto-playing, royalty-free, ambient techno smooth jazz! As you stifle your urge to get up and dance, you click around in search of information about the restaurant. (The page emits a friendly beep every time you click.) If you spend the better part of your lunch hour scouring the site, you’ll eventually find the menu. What you won’t find is the price—it takes a Web search to determine that the tasting menu at Fleur de Lys costs $72 a person.

By this point, you’ve likely been so beaten down by the music, the nested menus, and the interminable “Loading …” prompts that you’re considering Taco Bell for dinner (though it too has a terrible site). Still, I’m not arguing that Hubert Keller is responsible for the worst restaurant website ever created. That’s a bit like trying to decide on the most awful serial killer in history. The head-poundingly awful Fleur de Lys site is just one of many in an industry whose collective crimes against Web design are as routine as they are horrific. If you think Fleur de Lys is ugly, check out the site for New York’s Buddakan, which launches a full-screen window, auto-plays sitar-heavy technopop, and subjects you to a series of flying panels every time you click. (Eater NY described the site as “like the Inception trailer, but with summer rolls.”) Next, check out Cavatore, an Italian restaurant in Houston that hired Web designers who were either a) on a Monty Python-besotted acid trip, or b) looking to induce epileptic seizures. Seriously, this site is so bad it’s evil.

Bad Restaurant Website Design

While lots of people have noted the general terribleness of restaurant sites, I haven’t ever seen an explanation for why this industry’s online presence is so singularly bruising. The rest of the Web long ago did away with auto-playing music, Flash buttons and menus, and elaborate intro pages, but restaurant sites seem stuck in 1999. The problem is getting worse in the age of the mobile Web—Flash doesn’t work on Apple’s devices, and while some of these sites do load on non-Apple smartphones, they take forever to do so, and their finicky navigation makes them impossible to use.

Over the last few weeks I’ve spent countless hours, now lost forever, plumbing the depths of restaurant Web hell. I also spoke to several industry experts about the reasons behind all these maliciously poorly designed pages. I heard several theories for why restaurant sites are so bad—that they can’t afford to pay for good designers, that they don’t understand what people want from a site, and that they don’t really care what’s on their site. But the best answer I found was this: Restaurant sites are the product of restaurant culture. These nightmarish websites were spawned by restaurateurs who mistakenly believe they can control the online world the same way they lord over a restaurant. “In restaurants, the expertise is in the kitchen and in hospitality in general,” says Eng San Kho, a partner at the New York design firm Love and War, which has created several unusually great restaurant sites (more on those in a bit). “People in restaurants have a sense that they want to create an entertainment experience online—that’s why disco music starts, that’s why Flash slideshows open. They think they can still play the host even here online.”

When you visit many terrible restaurant websites in succession, it becomes obvious that they’re not bad because of neglect or lack of funds—these food purveyors appear to have spent a great deal of money and time to uglify their pages. Indeed, there seems to be an inverse relationship between a restaurant’s food and its site. The swankier the place, the worse the page. Chez Panisse, Alice Waters’ Berkeley temple of simple, carefully sourced local cuisine, starts with a pointless, grainy five-second clip of what looks like a scene from a Fellini movie. Alinea, the Chicago molecular gastronomy joint, presents you with a series of menu buttons that aren’t labeled; you’ve got to mouse over each one to find out what you’re about to click on. Masa, the exclusive New York sushi bar, presents you with a pages-long, scroll-bar-free biography of its chef, but (as far as I can tell) no warning that you’ll spend $400 or more per person for dinner.

But it’d be a mistake to blame the chefs for these sites. They were all aided by Web designers who were either too unscrupulous or unsophisticated to disabuse them of their ideas. In fact, when you dig into some of the worst restaurant sites, you notice that they share the same designers. The Inception-like Buddakan site was built by a firm called 160over90, whose portfolio also includes New York’s Morimoto—a site that has a 10-second load time, obnoxious bass-heavy music, and a cut-out snapshot of the chef that constantly hovers on the screen. Those two places are owned by Starr Restaurants, whose other Web properties are also a piece of work. The site for Philadelphia’s Butcher and Singer, created by a firm called BAJ Design*, flashes an old-movie-reel countdown while it loads, then plays old-timey music that will drive you mad. I tried to contact 160over90 and the designers behind other sites mentioned in this article to ask them, essentially, why they sucked. Not surprisingly, I got no response.

I did get a plausible-sounding explanation of the design process from Tom Bohan, who heads up Menupages, the fantastic site that lists menus of restaurants in several large cities. “Say you’re a designer and you’ve got to demo a site you’ve spent two months creating,” Bohan explains. “Your client is someone in their 50s who runs a restaurant but is not very in tune with technology. What’s going to impress them more: Something with music and moving images, something that looks very fancy to someone who doesn’t know about optimizing the Web for consumer use, or if you show them a bare-bones site that just lists all the information? I bet it would be the former—they would think it’s great and money well spent.”

Not coincidentally, designers make more money to create a complicated, multipage Flash site than one that tells you everything you want to know on one page. Bohan, for one, isn’t complaining about the terrible state of restaurant websites. Menupages, which lists each restaurant in its database by menu, operating hours, price, and address, is one of several sites that benefits from bad restaurant pages. (Yelp and Urbanspoon are also good resources.) Menupages’ menus are formatted as Web pages, whereas many restaurants require you to spend time downloading a PDF file. This is because restaurants often don’t have tools to update the text on their sites—saving and replacing a PDF file of a menu is easier than messing with the code on the site. But, again, this reduces usability, and pushes people to use third-party sites.

This can’t be good for restaurants. Scott Jampol, the head of consumer marketing at the reservations site OpenTable, points out that the Web is one of the primary ways that people determine where to get dinner. One-third of restaurant’s reservations occur online during hours in which the restaurant is closed, Jampol says, and more than 10 percent of diners are coming from mobile devices. But many in the restaurant industry don’t understand how important the Web is to their businesses. “The fact that it’s a front door for many customers is still a new idea,” he says.

Not all is lost. I spoke to a few restaurateurs who’ve created great, easy to use, elegant sites, and they all said they were motivated by one thing: They were missing out on traffic from mobile devices. The steakhouse chain Morton’s, for instance, has a mobile site that uses your GPS location to get you information on the restaurant closest to you. The site loads up quickly, and lets you make a reservation in a matter of seconds. “We wanted to keep the bells and whistles at a minimum,” Roger Drake, the company’s head of marketing, told me.

Also, look at the the National, a New York bar and restaurant whose site uses nice photos and a simple layout to give you a quick impression of the place. The National’s site was designed by Eng San Kho, of Love and War, who also created what I consider the platonic ideal of a restaurant site—the page for Jimmy, a rooftop bar at the James Hotel in Soho. The site is aggressively minimalist. At the top is a slideshow (not in Flash) of large photographs. Underneath, in easy-to-read text, you’ll find everything you’re looking for: address, email, phone number, hours. The site works on any device, and it loads up in half a second. “It’s a beautiful business card, nothing more,” Kho says. “It’s not an ‘experience,’ it’s not a dive into the magical world of flavor, it’s not entertainment. What else do you need to communicate? It’s just, what is this place about, how do I get a reservation, where are you located—that’s it, and you’re done.”

Article Citation: www.slate.com

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We loved working with this campaign of politically passionate people and wish Mr. Miyamoto the best of luck.

“As the Sheriff, my goal is to ensure the effective re-integration of individuals from custody into our community. Reducing the chances of re-offending means increasing public safety for us all.”
– Paul Miyamoto, www.miyamoto4sheriff.com

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