Web

I have been deeply involved with publishing and advertising on the Web since 1994, when I was working in London with a number of the pioneers of the digital realm.

Since then I have helped pioneer several aspects of the Web, and especially Web 2.0, that we take for granted today – e-Commerce, tagging, online photography portfolios, online film director’s showreels, online picture libraries, webzines and interactive Flash advertisements.

I Was There

As someone wise once reminded me, I was there when the Revolution – the Digital Interactive Revolution – happened. And, I took full and active part in it.

You will find samples of some of my purely Web-only projects in other portfolio pages in this site – in Brand Advertising and Magazines. I have also written about some of my projects in an e-book located in my e-Books page – in Achievements & Innovation in Advertising, Publishing & The Web.

To download these PDFs, simply click on the blue underlined text links.

SemperMac Webzine 3

SemperMac web magazine was a new online publication created in order to try out my ideas about interactive web advertising and publishing – ideas considered way too radical by web publishers of the time.

One reader even accused me of “breaking with tradition!” Tradition, in a communications medium little more than a decade old and that continues to evolve at a whopping pace!

The magazine was enormously successful – some 210,00 subscribers from all over the world at its height – when web magazines were still walking on uncertain feet, still working out what they were and how they needed to work. In the end though SemperMac fell victim to the digital bubble and expired through underfunding.

SemperMac Webzine 1

Innovative full-page Flash advertising format that appeared in between articles in the online magazine. Flash ActionScript was still very new at the time and few designers were then thinking beyond simple linear animations with buttons. I wanted to push the medium further.

I came up with some ideas for more sophisticated interactive ad formats, circulated them amongst the global web advertising community, and invited people to create ads in these formats for themselves. This one was created to one of my conceptual outlines by the folks at Macromedia, Inc – now merged into Adobe, Inc.

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SemperMac Webzine 2

My Website-in-a-Website innovative full-page on-demand interactive Flash advertising format, originally showcased in SemperMac webzine. I have shown it here in schematic form.

Readers of the magazine liked the format so much that many readers wrote in asking for more – unprecedented in any form of publishing until then! Readers usually want less advertising and not the reverse.

This format has recently been taken up by Google, in a slightly smaller size, but essentially following my original guidelines.

ThePortfolio

Radically innovative proof-of-concept for British Telecom’s Creative Services Network and the London advertising industry.

At the time nobody had solved the problem of how best to display photography portfolios and directors’ showreels, so this was an excellent opportunity for me to try out my ideas about how to do it well. Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft chipped in as project co-sponsors, while BT supplied us with the spanking new fibre optic cable network they had just finished installing throughout the City of London and the West End.

In order to classify and find the images and films that our users wanted to see, I came up with the idea of tags – “a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information,” according to Wikipedia. We also tried extending the CSN’s portfolio search-and-display format with built-in business systems allowing transactions live online.

The Web Ain’t Dead Press Campaign

When the WA business community declared that the Web was dead, we called out the Luddites by simply telling the truth about the Web as a superb sales and marketing medium, and I wrote the long copy for a series of full-page print advertisements published in the local business press.

Mark Braddock of Block Branding – a Perth-based advertising and design firm with a global clientele – did the art direction and typography for the press component.

The campaign was very well received, and completely turned around the fortunes of the Web design firm I also worked with in creating it, so much so that they were made an offer they could not refuse and were subsequently merged into an IT corporation, then sunk with trace!

Vmoto Flash interactive website

A web design and programming firm I was consulting for was approached by the manufacturer/importer of motorcycles, motorbikes and ATVs to come up with a state-of-the-art website to promote their brand as hip and edgy, in touch with the very latest trends in personal transportation, the web and the inner urban lifestyle.

Our brief was to create a website embodying all those qualities, to enhance the perception of this new, rapidly-growing brand.

I designed the project to make as much use of Flash as appropriate, and commissioned local Flash experts to create 3D product displays inserted into realistic urban settings. Interactivity came in the form of a colour picker and background choices. The front page included an endless loop cartoon-style Flash animation.

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Knowledge Management for the FOD

Knowledge Management (KM) hand-built proof-of-concept for the WA Department for Planning & Infrastructure’s Financial Operations & Development division.

Ever since my days as a university lecturer in art and design, just after graduation, I’d been fascinated by the process of knowledge retention and sharing. I developed a few theories of my own, and they proved quite successful in practical application. When the Web came, new possibilities in education and knowledge recording, retention and communication opened up, and I followed their progress with a keen eye.

This project appeared, and I began to apply my own thoughts on KM to a proof-of-concept I presented to the department’s board of management to quite some acclaim. The problem with government-funded projects, though, is that they can take an eternity to gain funding and then begin in earnest.

Meanwhile, I was contacted by a project leader for another government-funded body – the state’s foremost university – and asked to consider secondment to their own institution-wide KM project. The role involved a good balance of research, writing, editing and training, so I said yes.

Like the FOD project, though, the start date was put back again and again – this time due to the fact that the university’s legacy Content Management System (CMS) was proving unequal to the task. There is a lesson in there for anyone hoping to adapt legacy systems to state-of-the-art requirements – it’s often less frustrating and far less expensive to start from scratch than to make an old system do what it was never intended to.

WAAC website

Copyediting and coding for the WAAC website, now much changed since I worked on it.

I first got into copyediting other writers’ text for Black+White magazine, when suitable writers were few and we had to talent scout and help new ones rise to a suitable standard. I often had to rewrite their articles completely, as well as copyfit articles into their allocated spaces in the magazine. I came to enjoy it, despite the fact that it was usually done with deadlines looming.

There is a special art to writing good web copy well, as proven by some great books on the subject by Maria Veloso and others. It is odd, then, that so many clients insist on creating the copy for their websites themselves when they would do much better by appointing a professional to do the job. Readers read, even on the Web, and good writing is crucial to a successful website.

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