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Rare Bird Blog

Sneak Peek: Harvard Health

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

For the past few months, we've been working on a very cool project for Harvard Health, a joint venture between Harvard Medical School and StayWell Consumer Health Publishing. In a nutshell, we're completely overhauling their entire e-commerce system, including overall site design, merchandising, administration and functionality.

Additionally, we're working with their Texas-based fulfillment company, Strategic Fulfillment Group, to provide a direct connection between our custom e-commerce platform and their fulfillment functions. This will allow seamless integration for customer access, order history, order & payment processing and insertion. All things that weren't possible in the previous iteration (built by another company.)

The image here is a sneak peek at the new site design which should be coming online in about a month. More details to follow...

Labels: api, e-commerce, harvard, integration

Web Review: Hulu.com helps you love TV again

Monday, October 13, 2008

Seems like I'm hung up on one-word domains... This month we take a close look at Hulu.com, a joint venture of NBC Universal and News Corp provides ready access to a wide array of TV shows and full length movies. Think DVR in the cloud and you've got it.

[Read the review of Hulu]
[Visit Hulu]

How to communicate (even if it's bad news)

Monday, October 6, 2008

As a little sneak peek, I'm intending to write a web review article for the Indianapolis Business Journal on The Big Picture soon, but they came to my attention today in a way that can't be ignored.

A quick primer: The Big Picture is a photoblog hosted and maintained by The Boston Globe. Each day, Boston Globe web developer Alan Taylor compiles a set of photos related to something in the news and presents them with captions on the site. Big, amazing, high-resolution images that work hard to tell a compelling story. A very simple communication tool, beautifully realized.

Today I noticed, in addition to the recent photo additions, a message from Alan. "Just a brief note," he started, "three things to mention." Two of the three things were a new feature and a teaser for a very important upcoming entry. Sandwiched between them was this:

"A second ad position has been added (yes, I know, I know) but I wanted to be upfront about it, and not sneak an ad in. It's below the photos, above the comments - I'll never put ads in amongst the images - please feel free to give your feedback here in the comments. Just so you know the rationale: the bandwidth bills must be covered. In a single day, last month the entry on Hurricane Ike was served up over 1 million times. The 28 images on that page add up to a bit more than 5.2 megabytes. Multiply that a million times, and we (The Boston Globe) ended up serving nearly 5 terabytes of images for just one entry from one blog in less than 24 hours (not counting the HTML or the thousands of comments). And we topped one million daily pageviews at least five times last month."

Honest, transparent, succinct. Following a classic strategy too often ignored: "Here's what we did, here's why we did it, we hope you understand, tell us what you think."

Folks, it doesn't matter if you're running a Fortune 100 company, a newly minted startup, or a photoblog that just happens to be seen by millions. This is how you communicate.

Well done, Alan!

Labels: alan taylor, big picture, photos