Articles in Business
by Jonathan Longnecker in Design,
Business,
Personal
Well, in case you hadn’t noticed there’s an election coming up pretty soon. A pretty big one, actually. So in the spirit of all that is “true” in these crazy times, we want to share a small project with everyone.
It’s called USATaxDollars.com. Just put in your annual salary and you see every last dollar that the government takes out of your paycheck; and what they spend it on. Guess what? I’m giving the government more money each month than my house payment! Now that’s depressing.
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by Jonathan Longnecker in Business,
ExpressionEngine
Wait, what’s a Content Management System (CMS)? Well, according to Wikipedia, it’s a computer application used to create, edit, manage, and publish content in a consistently organized fashion. We, for example, use ExpressionEngine as our CMS of choice. And no, I’m not going to get into why it’s so awesome right now. Go check it out for yourself.
So back to the point; when is it time to use a CMS? We’ve worked on several small websites lately and our customers decided they didn’t want the upfront cost of integrating the site into a CMS. But the more we make changes to these static sites we’ve built, the more of a pain it becomes. They decide to change “Services we offer” to “What we do” throughout the site and all of a sudden you’ve got a bunch of manual editing to do! Sometimes a search and replace function in your HTML editor will help, but not always.
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by Jonathan Longnecker in Design,
Business,
Personal
Yeah we know. It’s been way too quiet around here. Not many new portfolio entries; not many blog posts. We’re slackers, I tell you! Well, maybe not 
First, we have been doing a TON of work. Web app design, social network design, interface design. Except none of it’s live to the public yet. The backend guys are still doing their thing. And in the past two weeks we just pushed through about 3 or 4 major front-end design projects that should be live shortly. Plus, we’ve done several for other agencies that you can only guess that we did by their awesomeness cause they won’t let us put it in our portfolio. But such is the way of the wayward web designer.
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by Jonathan Longnecker in Design,
Business
So I had a short conversation with a client of ours today and it went something like this: “Hey you guys make some great looking sites; why don’t you design some templates and sell them. You’d make a ton of money!” Naturally I had to agree that we make pretty decent looking sites, but that was beside the point (insert deadpan look here).
From a business perspective this makes perfect sense, and it’s been done quite a few times before. But here’s the problem. That’s not who we are. Money’s all fine and good, but at the end of the day we all have to remember who we are and what we believe in.
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by Jonathan Longnecker in Design,
Business,
Personal
I will readily admit that I am a total nerd. I was totally psyched about the new Indiana Jones movie that came out a few weeks ago. I went out and bought the first three and watched them in like two days. Watched all the extra stuff on the DVD’s. I can’t even tell you how many childhood memories those movies brought back. It was great!
But when I finally went to see the new one, I found myself a bit disappointed. Some of the scenes were so ridiculous that I just couldn’t get past the impossibility of them. The atomic refrigerator? The monkey vine-swinging thing? Three ginormous waterfalls? I mean, seriously! Yeah I knew the first three had implausible moments, too but not like this! Or were they?
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by Jonathan Longnecker in Design,
Business,
Tutorials,
ExpressionEngine
Non-profit organizations have a special place in our hearts here at FortySeven Media. We love it when people decide to change their world for the better, and do our best to help them however we can. Several months ago we completed the Knoxville Leadership Foundation's new website. Shortly there after Dan Myers, the Director of Communications and Operations at KLF, asked us to be part of a seminar for non-profit organizations to better equip them to use their websites. The following is a condensed version of that session. We had a grand time chatting with everyone there and hope you enjoy the information! The slides of the presentation and the handout companion are available in PDF format at the end of the article.
1. Evaluate Your Current Website
Before we jump too far into this, let's take a moment to think about your current website. Are you excited about it? Do you tell people about it or do you try to not bring it up? When was it last updated? These are great indicators of the current condition of your site. Most organizations can answer these questions instantly. The short version for most, is “No, we aren't excited about our site, it's awful!” The good news is that it doesn't have to stay that way. Let's look at a few ways to get your website tuned up and working for you.
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by Jonathan Longnecker in Design,
Business,
Personal
Ever wanted your logo hand carved from a massive piece of wood by natives of Papua New Guinea? Ok, so maybe it wasn’t the first thing on your list, but dang it’s cool. My wife’s sister and her husband are missionaries in New Guinea and are back in the states to make the rounds to all their supporters and show them what they’ve been up to. Too many “and’s” in that last sentence? Probably. Regardless, we just got this in yesterday and had to share.
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by Jonathan Longnecker in Business
Recently I had an encounter with a company that had a website, but didn’t understand the web. I promised them in an oh so nice email that I would write a blog post on the whole thing, so enjoy .
So my wife has a site that talks about the benefits of cloth diapers over disposable. She became a member of the Real Diaper Association (no I’m not going to dignify them with a link) who provides members with some very nice researched information to back up the above claims. Things like the chemicals used cause cancer, they take 200-500 years to decompose, scary stuff like that.
To make a long story short, we used their reasons, clearly citing them as the authors and giving them a prominent link back to their site. And then we got this email:
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by Nate Croft in Business
There is a company very close to my house. I drive by it on an almost daily basis. I don’t know the name of this company. I don’t know what they do. All that I know is that they do not want me to ask for pallets.
As you can see in the picture above, this sign (and the two or three more just like it) are posted on the chain link fence surrounding their property. It’s the only signage you can see from the road and it isn’t a necessarily friendly welcome, you know?
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by Jonathan Longnecker in Business,
Apple,
Personal
So the other night the wife and I were at the Apple store looking for Time Capsules for 47m. Happened to see the new AppleTV setup while we were there, and the HD movies looked incredible. I mean, jaw droppingly good. Yeah, I know BlueRay is better, but seeing Transformers in “almost” HD compared to the standard def movies I was used to; I was hooked. No more trips to Blockbuster, I nudged the wife (Gently nudged, of course)!
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by Jonathan Longnecker in Business,
Personal
Hey everybody, sorry we’ve been kind of quiet around here lately! Since we launched the new site in January we’ve had a flood of job requests come in and thus our free time has diminished a bit.
In addition, Nate and I are both helping to start new churches. Nate is running sound over at Turkey Creek Church (no, we didn’t do the website…don’t know why) and I’m leading worship and handling web duties at EdgePoint Church.
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by Jonathan Longnecker in Design,
Business
So I got these in the mail the other day (see picture). They were both roughly the same size, had big weird pictures on the front and were supposed to be cool, I guess. I glanced at them and noticed they both had the exact same offer. 25% off! That’s kind of strange. Oh wait, apparently Getty Images and Punchstock are located in the same building! Same return address! What do you know? I think someone is trying to pull a fast one on me!
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by Jonathan Longnecker in Design,
Business
We’ve all probably used Google Docs or Zoho Writer. The new crop of AJAX based online word processing applications surely have Microsoft scrambling over in Redmond. Not to say any of those options is bad; in fact most of them are quite nice. But I found something completely different. BuzzWord.
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by Jonathan Longnecker in Design,
Business
We are honored to have been listed on Stylegala’s gallery this month. In addition to seeking out the raddest designs, Sylegala also has a nice newsfeed with relevant and useful info for web designers. Kick awesome for sure. Ty Gossman wrote a very nice review on the new 47m site, and people are giving us pretty darn good ratings. We are super excited to be so well received by the web design community. Check it out if you get a chance via the link below.
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by Jonathan Longnecker in Business,
Personal
I’m a frequent reader of Seth Godin’s blog, and his recent entry “Music Lessons” is mostly right on the money.
I think everyone is in agreement that the music industry has been ripping us off for years; their business model from 1950 is dead, and they’re floundering around trying to figure out what to do. Copy protection; while a decent first tackle at the problem; should have been dropped years ago. Suing your own customers. Stupid. Yeah, yeah we’ve heard all this before.
What makes Godin’s entry so interesting is that he reminds us that it can happen to any business.
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by Jonathan Longnecker in Business
So technically I’m writing this in the latter portions of 2007, but no matter. As you can see, the ol’ 47m site is looking a bit different as of 2008. That’s right, we’ve finally given ourselves a proper website. It was becoming apparent that we needed our own site to “live up to” the standards we were setting for out clients. Of course we always wanted it to be that way, but finding time is another matter.
See that big “Subscribe” button top right? Use it.
The more we thought about it we realized that we just needed to make time. It’s funny how easy it is to loose track of what’s important. Granted, there are some days that getting money in to pay the mortgage is priority, but as a business we have to look beyond day-to-day tasks. Setting up a true portfolio and blog to share our thoughts with the world will likely have a much farther reaching impact long term than finishing up that magazine ad today. But anyway…
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