Thursday April 5, 2007

Balancing Design, Technology, and Business

by Garrett Dimon in Design

3 comments

Creating a blog is simple. Creating a single blog to represent a company with a very diverse set of individuals and competencies is anything but. Our real challenge when creating this blog was finding a way to organize the site in a way that was indicative of our balance as a company.

Much, if not all, of our marketing message is built around the idea of helping companies create “agile real-time enterprises”, which, admittedly, says very little by itself. In fact, few people outside of the company know what we really do, and few inside can really pinpoint what we do. We cover a lot of ground. This makes for a difficult environment with regards to designing a blog.

The Audience

The audience is going to be diverse. Well, hopefully, it will be diverse. Engineers, designers, information architects, project managers, sales people, .Net people, Java people, SQL people. We do a lot, and we’ll be blogging about a lot. How on earth can one blog meet the needs of such a diverse audience?

The Solution(s)

What if a designer subscribes to the feed and gets a post about .Net or Java? What if a .Net engineer subscribes to our feed and gets a touchy-feely post about design? While we were initially concerned about making the content easily filterable for our audience, our solution ended up being pretty simple. We decided not to worry about it. Kind of.

We all skip over information everyday, and a post here or there that doesn’t relate to your interests will, at worst, be one more bit to ignore, or, at best, could expose you to some wonderful new ideas you might not have otherwise encountered.

Of course, for anyone who really doesn’t want it, we’ve organized the blog loosely around three content-centric areas, each with its own feed.

The Wireframes

With the home page, we wanted to be able to feature particular posts of interest. The posts at the top half of the page are selected based on the amount of interest we think they might generate. As a result, the featured posts will be a little longer, and possible more intense than the average post.

The second point of note is the footer with its three sections of content and three recent posts for each section. This element is generally present throughout the site

With the article pages, we didn’t see a need to do anything fancy. We focused on the article, the author, and of course we had to have comments.

Also of note, although not incredibly astounding was our decision to keep a short blurb about Geniant in a prominent location on the article pages. This is in anticipation of deep-linking. An unstated goal of the blog is to help the outside world understand what Geniant does. So, helping people orient themselves if they arrive at the site throug a deep link only makes sense.

Summary

We’re excited about the blog and having a sort of playground for sharing what we do and why we do it. We’re hoping it serves as a forum to increase transparency, provide a little insight into the company, and most importantly, just a place to have fun and interact with the community at large.

Geniant has evolved into a much different company than it was a year ago, and this blog is one of the first outwardly visible steps towards a much larger vision.

Comments on “Balancing Design, Technology, and Business”

1. Wolf said:

   I really like it – good text resizing is important to me, and that’s very well done :)

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2. Spencer said:

   I learn so much from you guys. Thanks for the inspiration.

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3. Scott Parish said:

   Ditto —- very inspiring for this designer who is about to embark on a similar venture. Kudos!

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