Wayde Christie — Thursday 4th June, 10:46pm

Building Campaign Monitor update and work in-progress

We definitely haven’t forgotten about the blog series, but to say we’ve been busy would be an understatement.

Getting the Building Campaign Monitor blog series out the door is a priority for us, but we’ve been rather busy of late. Here’s how we’ve been spending our days (and nights):

We’ve built a few sites

By far the largest chunk of our time lately has been taken up working on several large sites. The first one is a complete redesign and Wordpress theme build for the Australian Apple blog MacTalk. One of their founders infamously obliterated their site recently, at which point they decided a refresh was overdue anyway. We managed to get some sweet parallax background action in there a-la Silverback (resize the window for the effect), and so far the feedback from the 20,000 strong community has been overwhelmingly positive. Next on the list - a MacTalk iPhone theme!

Another great Australian company we’ve started working with is people management software company Acelero. Their site is currently in progress and is due to launch in the next couple of weeks.

Last but not least, another Australian company TakeItOff.com.au has us working on an SMS coupon site for savvy shoppers. We took on the task of working with an SMS API and integrating it into an ExpressionEngine module, and so far it’s been challenging but also great fun. We hope to be able to share what we’ve learned along the way when the site launches in the coming weeks. Did we mention this business was solely conceived and financed by a young Newcastle entrepreneur in his early twenties? Go Damo!

We’ve mixed with some Silicon Valley start-ups

After spotting our interview on the Harvest blog, Alain Chuard from Wildfire Interactive contacted us about making a custom theme for his Wildfire application. We’d never heard of him or it, but after discovering his company had recently been a winner of the inaugural Facebook fbFund prize our ears pricked up!

Since working with Alain and his fantastic team over the last couple of months, we’ve really managed to get our heads around the whole Wildfire application, particularly the theming aspects of it. We won’t go into any detail about how the system works right now as we plan to dedicate a full post to it in the near future, but for those of you who are interested in running promotions on Facebook you should definitely read up on it. We think it’s a winner and we’re really happy the team at Wildfire trusted us to help them with their application. Here’s the latest Wildfire promotion we’ve designed and built for none other than P!NK! Facebook users can check out the live P!NK promo here.

We’ve done some advertising

After repeatedly bragging about our gobsmackingly awesome online advertising skills, Dave Greiner from Freshview finally caved and agreed to let us at his upcoming Campaign Monitor marketing campaign.

So after a solid ten minutes of brain-storming and the first official use of our chalk-board wall, we came up with three gobsmackingly awesome banner ideas. Dave’s written up a brilliant article on the outcomes of the campaign, including loads of businessy insights that the web community is rarely privy to, so I highly recommend you check it out, particularly if online advertising interests you.

Something else we’ve done recently is run the first advertising campaign of our own. Most of our readers will know that Leevi is one of the most prolific developers of ExpressionEngine extensions in the industry, having written, documented and released more than 20 add-ons in the past few years (most of them for free). Lately however, he’s launched a number of commercial add-ons; most notably LG Better Meta, LG Polls, and NSM Publish Plus.

We thought it would be a good experiment to dip our toes in the water and advertise some of these extensions across a few key sites. So we came up with some concepts, built the ads, then plastered them all over EE-Insider and the newly launched Devot:EE. They’re doing really well so far, and we’re one step closer to buying ourselves mansions of solid gold.

We’ve volunteered some of our time

A couple of great opportunities to give back to the community have come our way recently. Firstly we’ve offered to design and build an email campaign as part of the fantastic ‘Design Hope for Startups’ initiative. Jonathan and Nate from FortySeven Media have rallied together some great sponsors to help a start-up business develop a web presence and market their product, and Newism is really excited to be involved. The first Design Hope recipient is Scott Schuster from Underdog Solutions, a new indie iPhone developer. Keep an eye out for Scott’s new site and email marketing campaign soon.

Secondly, thanks to a tweet we overheard, we’ve been able to volunteer our services to the ANTaR (Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation) organisation. So over the next couple of months we’ll be working with them to develop their new email marketing campaign also. It’s great to be working with such an important organisation, particularly because they’re from Oz. C’mon!

We’ve squashed some bugs

Leevi and Anthony have secretly been working on a bug-tracker module for ExpressionEngine over the last couple of months. It’s looking great so far (and is actually completely ready for prime-time), but sadly like everything we’ve got on the go, more important (read: revenue generating) work keeps pushing in front. Leevi keeps telling me “as soon as we get x, y and z projects complete, it’ll launch”. Sigh. In the meantime check out the screenshot below, and visit Leevi’s bug-tracker gallery for more sneak peeks.

Our staff numbers doubled, then halved

In May we finally got our hands on a full-time developer, Amos. Leevi was excited beyond belief, and even came up with a suitably geeky nick-name for him (in lieu of being able to remember his *actual* name). Amos left on the basis that Leevi should’ve been able to remember his name after 4 weeks. Fair enough. Know any good PHP developers in Newcastle? Let us know. Please.

A few people liked our site

Our humble little site did the rounds of a few design and CSS galleries last month, which came as quite a surprise. No really. Smashing Magazine and Six Revisions sent us loads of traffic after a couple of mentions, as did about half, a dozen, other, sites. This of course, has done bad things to our already over-inflated egos.

So yeah…

Bizzay! We’ve got even more work on top of all of this stuff, so we may never surface again, but in the unlikely situation that we do you can guarantee that the blog series will be our first priority. Huge thanks to everyone who has entered the competition and left a comment - your chance at the prizes is still well intact. We’re super keen to get the next post in the series out the door, so please hang in there, it won’t be much longer!

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