Sometime last year I was approached by Vasakronan, Swedens largest property brand with a property portfolio valued at SEK 80.3 billion. Being a market leader the felt their digital presence had to reflect that position. Their question: What do we do? As always I teamed up with Caroline Karlström and accepted the challenge to answer that question. In this project I took on the role as both head of strategy and concept as well as actually delivering the top level designs of the new Vasakronan that Britny later implemented and refined.
This is what we did. Parts of the new Vasakronan digital brand presence
The new Vasakronan.se runs WordPress!
Me and Caroline started the project with an analysis phase and analysed their existing presence, the traffic to their site, the content, the design and the site structure. We interviewed representatives from Vasakronan as well as their clients and potential prospects. We also performed an extensive technical analysis [click to continue…]
psst. You haven't missed the new app for kids aged 1-9 years old? It's created by my other company JAJDO.
Check it out in the App store
The other day a friend of mine brought H&M’s global website to my attention again. Back in 2006 I was one of their consultants until I more or less lost the assignment due to the fact that I told them what the didn’t wanna hear – Your website sucks! Of course I was wrong and they were right. After all, they’ve been awarded time after time at major advertising shows (Thanks to among others to me and the team I worked with back then) so why wouldn’t they know what they are doing.
This is exactly where the problem start for most major brands – at ad awards like Cannes Lions, Eurobest, Clio and others where people with no understanding for how to build an online presence beyond Adobe Flash and cool animations take these monsters to new heights. Back in 2007 I was also a part of building these kind of platforms for major brands but behind closed doors I constantly tried to convince my clients that sticking to these worn out technologies was nothing but stupid.
Let’s take a look at couple of major players and have a quick look at their online presence.
The Online Nike Store
The online store belonging to the worlds leading sports brand. All built in Flash…in 2010
Nike has always been among the first brands to adapt to change. Back in 1999 when I took part in pitching them into Framfab they were even heading the pack.
At first glance it all looks great. The site design is inspired by blogging with that clear and present left hand menu hanging there. But once you start looking deeper it’s a mess. The entire store is built in flash which is just plain stupid. To Nike’s defense [click to continue…]
About two years ago I frantically started writing on this blog post. Then the sheer length of it got the best of me and since then it’s been stuck in my unpublished library. Now I thought it’s time to give birth to this baby even though most of it was written about two years ago, before Facebook got big, the iPad and more.
When you read it – remember I pushed publish to share the love, not the excellent writing.
This post covers how you start and run a company practically for free.
The post will guide you all the way from day one until you’re up and running and need to consider things like sales, advertising, process support, crm, intranets, extranets etc etc.
I spend about 1-2 hours a day [click to continue…]
I have gotten the question over and over again from people, organizations and brands: “How do we start a blog the right way” – I’ve decided to put my advice into writing.
Some of you might think this post is unnecessary. Other people have written about this already. I thought so too until I started searching for good posts on how to set up a kick ass blog and learned most things written on the subject either covered the tool or the actual writing but not actually leading you to do it the right way I think there’s room for another post on the subject.
The purpose of this post is sort of a combination of two things that I hope will lead to the following:
- Make sure agencies cannot charge big money for setting up your blog. Setting up your personal or branded blog is to me a democratic right and should be free and accessible for anyone who has something to share.
- I think more people should start a blog. It’s good for you. It’s good for the democracy. It’s good for the world.
Here is the essential guide on how to start and configure a blog that will rock the world:
1. Buy a unique domain name for your blog and preferably do it at the same place where you intend to host the blog
Personally I’ve followed WordPress own recommendations and used Bluehost.com to buy my domain name and then installed a WordPress blog with their simple script functionality. It’s a 3 minute process from registering that domain [click to continue…]
It makes me warm to see that companies out there are starting to utilize the possibilities that comes with social media. IKEA has definitely understood how to make good use of web-TV as they started their own IKEA.SE/TV where you are invited to upload your own interior decoration tips.
What’s even better is the fact that they’ve stuck to blogging standards when they have designed the whole thing and not fallen into the trap of trying to do something new and different. According to BuiltWith they’ve used Ruby on Rails to create it. However, I do recognize a lot of plugins, so it wouldn’t surprise me if WordPress or something similar was stuck in the bottom of the whole thing.
Jacob Nielsen, famouse user interaction dude from Denmark once said: “People spend most of their time visiting other sites”
Thanks Reklamfeber for pointing this one out.
In pursuit of easier readability, visibility of links I’ve tweaked a theme called Prisa 2. Hope it makes it easier to read my blog.
Good night.
