I rely on technology everyday for work. If you look at the arsenal of hardware on my desk at home, you will see four computers (both Mac and PC), a smartphone, an IP phone, an iPod, a webcam, a wireless router as well as my most recent toy, the iPad. All of these gadgets keep me connected and let me do my job, and I’ve totally convinced my husband that they are a necessity. (ahem)

About three years ago, I realized that my children will grow up in a very different world then I did, both for work and play. This is the age of information, where amazing amounts of knowledge are at your fingertips. Today, words like “apps”, “tweeting” and “friending” are commonly used and part of my daily vocabulary. And when I need to learn something new, I go directly to the internet.

As I type this, I have a three-year-old clone sitting next to me learning her shapes, tracing, matching and coloring, not on paper mind you, but rather on my iPad. She is absorbing and learning at an alarming rate and our iPad, in my opinion, is helping. This is the same girl that mastered the Nintendo DS stylus at age 2 and would beg her older cousin to play with the iPod Touch on a long family trip to Canada, so a touch screen is nothing new. It is only natural that she would steal the iPad from me.

When we bought the iPad, it was supposed to be MY toy. I’m in that “mom demographic” Apple was gunning for! I had visions of using the iPad to surf, check Facebook, read books and watch movies. But that’s not quite what it’s being used for now that my daughter has got a hold of it.

Since I didn’t want her surfing around my Tweetdeck app and replying to my followers with nonsense, I found myself searching for “age appropriate” apps that SHE could enjoy. First, I searched for “Toy Story”, since she is in love with that movie, and low and behold, I find a free Read-A-Long book to download. Boom, installed! She loves to draw, so I find a Doodle app. Boom, installed again! After that, it all went downhill. Now before bed, I find myself searching apps for HER to play with and less for ME! (I also suggest keeping a password prompt on your iTunes account so your child isn’t “auto” buying apps! I might elaborate on that story in another blog post…)

8 Apps My Three-Year-Old Loves:

1. Tangrams

I myself liked tangrams as a kid with the “real” blocks, making shapes and simple pictures. It took her one trip in the car to master this app. Dragging and dropping blocks onto shadowed outlines allowed her to make fun designs with the apps’ easy user interface.

2. Fruit Memory

This recent purchase is a well-designed matching game. If I had a dollar for every time she asks “Mom? Where’s the lemon?? I can’t find it!!” I’d have… well maybe only 40 bucks, but still. This is the game that we can play together since it supports up to four players.

3. Doodle Buddy 

Since I myself am an artist, I found it necessary to have an app where she could draw. I use Sketchbook Pro but I needed something a little less robust for her. And although my daughter likes the drawing part with all the colors, she like the stamps that make funny sounds better. (Especially the smiley face that makes the “sick” sound. Thanks for that.)

4. Disney Movies

Disney Movies lets you preview movie trailers and then takes you to the iTunes store to purchase. (clever and sneaky) But the reason that I put this in my post was because Disney Movies was the app where my daughter REALLY learned the “pinch and grow” sizing technique and the “moving and sliding” of information. It blew me away how quickly she picked this up.

5. Alphabet Tracing

Again, learning disguised as fun. She doesn’t get very far into the letters but understands that she needs to follow the dotted lines. This is my attempt at being a “responsible” mom and telling myself: She WILL learn something playing with this thing!

6. Virtuoso – Piano 

I actually first saw this app being used by the 3-month-old son of Miles, an interactive programmer at L&S. My daughter plays it much like she plays a regular piano, sliding her hands across the keys or poking them one by one. She isn’t a Mozart yet but enjoys the sounds and I find myself looking for more instrument type apps.

7. Toy Story Read-Along

This was one of the first apps I downloaded and installed because of her love of the movie (and my love as well). Basically it’s an e-book with puzzles and coloring pages in between story pages that can be read out loud as the words are highlighted. I’m hoping this one will help her with words and reading. It even has quick video clips that play as you are reading.

8. Default iPod App 

(preinstalled with the iPad/iTunes)

Listening to music is a given and she has her own playlist with “girl” songs. Usually I will find her jamming out to some hippity hop song in the living room with the iPad cranked up to 11. Yesterday I walked in to check on her as she is getting her groove on and she turns around, points at the door and says, “Mom, you go back to work, I’m dancing.” Le sigh.

Don’t worry, she still likes drawing with REAL crayons, running around outside, NOT cleaning her room and playing with toys. But on a side note, I’ve had to limit her time on the iPad since she is so addicted and we’ve even had to take it away during timeout.

Rather than “No TV young lady!”, it’s “No iPad young lady!!!”

If you have any favorite iPad/iPod apps you’d like to share, post them in our comments. 

April Johnston is the Senior Interactive Art Director at Lawrence and Schiller and an awesome mom according to her daughter. And yes, there is an insurance plan on her iPad.

As many as half a million people are expected in the Black Hills of South Dakota this week for the 70th annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. Most will make the trip without accident or injury. But for some, the ride will be their last. And it doesn’t have to be that way.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, one in three motorcycle accident fatalities could have been avoided if the rider had worn a helmet. It’s a warning the South Dakota Office of Highway Safety is literally laying at the feet of riders in the Black Hills. One hundred decals, each measuring three feet square, dot the sidewalks of Deadwood during the Rally. As bikers take a break and walk around the historic Black Hills town, they can read three different reminders to wear a helmet.
Knowing the issue of helmet use can be an emotional one for riders, Lawrence & Schiller decided to take a statisical approach. For example, 96% of motorcycle crashes result in an injury to the rider. The message clings immediately sparked a reaction, even while members of our Deadwood office were working to apply them. Here are some of the comments heard by the L&S crew:

• A local woman who works at the hospital in Spearfish told us that we should have included real photos of people involved in motorcycle wrecks because that might be a stronger message as she has seen some graphic images in her experience at the hospital.
• We had a few people who stated they would like to open this issue up for vote to make helmets mandatory in the state of South Dakota.
• We heard a lot of, “Keep up the good work!” and “What a great message!”  
• People were offering money for the clings because they wanted to put them on their garage floors and campers.
• One woman even wanted to take one and put it in the hospital where she works as an ER nurse.
• Many people stopped for photo ops of the clings. 
• We did have one angry man who told us to check our facts. He believed there was no way our stats were true. He then proceeded to drive by later on, tapping the top of his head which was of course, helmet-less.
• One woman stopped and told us how she and her husband were involved in a motorcycle accident. He died and she is now disabled. They were wearing helmets, but that didn’t change the outcome of the accident. She appreciated our message and told us that she supported what we were doing.

The clings will be removed when the Sturgis Rally ends. Hopefully the lifesaving messages will stay with riders for much longer.

Black Hills Vacations has launched its new updated online presence. Black Hills Vacations is the official booking agency for South Dakota and the Black Hills and Badlands. They do everything from booking your tee time to booking your hotel room. You can view pictures, post and read reviews, print maps, and even watch some video tours. BlackHillsVacations.com is the full package (no pun intended). The features are endless.

I have to admit this site was no small feat. Programmer Minh Lee – yes that is his full name – used some nice jQuery on this site to make any transitions you see move with ease. I love when our programmers surprise me with neat tricks! We are also pulling in a lot of dynamic content into several niches that our client can control from our custom maintenance area.

I can honestly say this is one of my favorite sites I have had the opportunity to work on because of the challenge of making it clean and simple but still keeping all the information there for the user.  The site went live after a lot of hard work and dedication by not only the L&S team but Susan, Keri and Kenny at Black Hills Cen Res too. Thanks everyone!

Enough said. Take a moment to check out all the great features that blackhillsvacations.com has to offer! You can also check out our new LS site and all the related information we have in our Travel and Tourism section.

Is advertising art? Is art ever advertising?

These questions are much more than rhetorical.  They stretch all the way from the design studio to the board room. In this episode of The Extra Minute, Dan Edmonds, Vice President of Design Services at Lawrence & Schiller, weighs in with his thoughts on the subject.

For the Social Media Boot Camp season finale, we brought in the ratings boosters –a.k.a. VP Dan Edmonds (@monkeyboy5280) and VP John Pohlman (@johnpohlman) to discuss the impact of social media on our design world.

For those not familiar with the history of social media design, let me give you a brief overview.  In the mid-1990’s we entered the era of Early Static Websites. These websites allowed users to view the website’s message but only accounted for one-way communication, similar to traditional advertising. The era of Early Web Applications was soon created and those applications allowed online users to interact solely with the propriety content on the website, but two way communications started to take hold; Oh No! What’s an advertiser to do! (j/k J)

Today, we have entered into the golden era of Social Web Applications, which allows for multiple-way communication, promotes interactions and connects people together. This is why design is so important, people are using these websites to interact with other users and the brand, and users don’t need a poorly designed website getting in their way.

To succeed in the current era of Social Web Applications there are two important rules to follow:

1. Don’t Do Anything without a Plan

2. No Need to Invent the Wheel Twice.

These may seem like very basic rules to follow, but it’s good to remember that though the medium of interacting is new and different, the design concept behind the interaction is at the core, the same.

The Best Practices of Social Media Design (summed up in webinar 10): Make Interacting Easy. When a user comes to a website they need to be able to engage quickly and without a long search for the content they want, or thought they would find. Think of how many times you have gone to a website and quickly wanted to make a purchase, upload a file, or find a link, but the icon seems to have disappeared from the site!  I know I get irritated when I spend too long on the website; for some reason my frustration “rope” is much shorter when working with technology than in the off-line world. Technology is here to make life easier, not more complicated; a website should be designed with the users’ intentions in mind.

In the era of Social Web Applications, users want to become a part of the website, so it is important to design and support the development of online communities. Everyone always wants to feel connected and a part of something, so design your website as a place for members to share interests, join groups or post blogs. As we have entered the web applications era, we want users to become part of the site and have it be a place to communicate and connect with others of similar interests.

At the end of the webinar, @johnpohlman and @monkeyboy5280 didn’t leave any cliff hangers but they did leave some words of wisdom: Make sure the experience belongs to the user!

Thank you for participating in our webinars, and see you next season!

Hot off several satisfying wins at the South Dakota Addy® Awards in February, L&S went on to win five silver district awards. Congratulations to our winning clients:

• CHCS Services (Silver Addy Award for CHCS Lenticular Trade Show Booth)
• Augustana College (Two Silver Awards for the Augustana Viking Logo and Logo Reveal Campaign)
• DAKOTACARE (Silver Addy Award for the “Body Cast Guy” Non-Traditional Campaign)
• Black Hills Digital Strategy (Silver Award for Digital Strategy Banner Ad Campaign)

These works were judged in competition with creative from Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin.

Despite a droop in the nation’s economy, there was no shortage of creativity at this year’s 43rd annual Addy® Awards. Lawrence & Schiller took home two Best of Class awards at the February 21 event, with 11 gold and silver awards total.

L&S swept the Non-Traditional Advertising category, taking home the group’s only two awards, including a gold Addy for DAKOTACARE’s “Body Cast Guy,” campaign. Showing up at sporting events and community festivals, street team participants wheeled around a man in a body cast to let consumers know how not having health insurance can cost you. “Body Cast Guy” went on to win Best of Class in the Non-Traditional category.

The agency also took home Best of Class in the Out of Home category with Augustana College’s “Viking Logo Reveal” billboard campaign. For four weeks, the college’s new Viking logo was slowly revealed in a teaser billboard campaign. These efforts culminated in a logo reveal celebration on the Augustana campus and exclusive announcements to alumni and the Sioux Falls media.

Several other L&S clients took home hardware including CHCS Services, Shock Land Company, Great Bear Recreation Park, Black Hills Digital Strategy, Midcontinent Communications, SDSU and the South Dakota Symphony.

Lawrence & Schiller received two Sioux Falls Business Journal Readers Choice Awards this week:

Best advertising agency
Best web site developer

http://www.argusleader.com/article/20081119/BJNEWS07/81118064

Thanks to our Clients for allowing us to work on the many great projects that attributed to these awards!

Before planning and deploying your e-mail campaign, think about the message goals:

1. Open the e-mail: Message open rates depend heavily on the inherent trust that lies with the sender of the e-mail and the subject line. Think carefully about the “from” field in the e-mail. If the relationship lies with an individual employee, list that person’s name rather than a generic customer service e-mail address, or the like. Subject lines should summarize the content of the e-mail and sell the value of the content found within. Ask the question the recipient will be asking – WIIFM – “what’s in it for me”? Also, pay attention to the time of day you’re sending to your audience – consider when the message will be best received.
2. Read the e-mail: What is the goal of the content? To educate the consumer on industry best practices? To present a client success story? To sell the features of a product? To discuss a new service? Whatever the goal, make it clear and always make sure you’re providing value to the reader.
3. Click from the e-mail: What’s the desired next step? Don’t provide all of the available information within the e-mail… give the reader a reason to click for more information or to complete the associated task. Make the call-to-action very clear and provide adequate instructions so the reader knows what to expect when they arrive on the web site landing page.
4. Click through web site: You’ve gained the web visitor – you’re done, right? Wrong… gaining the click is only half the work. Now, you need to provide a clear navigation path for the visitor to click through and convert on your web site. Conversions may be a sale, a request for information, an e-mail newsletter sign-up, a content/promotion, etc.
5. Convert on site: You’ve led the visitor to the final step – now make task completion easy and thank the visitor on the confirmation page.

Effectively e-mailing,

Robin

Search engine spiders, defined: Spiders are used to feed pages to search engines. It’s called a spider because it crawls over the Web. Another term for these programs is webcrawler. Source: www.webopedia.com

Can search engine spiders ‘see’ your web images? With the emergence of Google images and other image search engines, the importance of indexing the images on your web site has become all the more important. While you should be adding ALT tags (defined: The ALT tag is meant to serve as an ALTernate if the image source does not exist, or if browsers have images disabled) and descriptions to your images for organic search engine ranking purposes, the only way for the image search engines to find your images (and furthermore, link to your web site) is by adding information that allows the spiders to see you.

For example:

Non-Optimized Image:	Optimized Image:
What you see:	What you see: Mount Rushmore, Black Hills of South Dakota
What the spider sees:	What the spider sees: ALT=Mount Rushmore TITLE=Mount Rushmore, located in the Black Hills of South Dakota Caption= Mount Rushmore, Black Hills of South Dakota

The saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words” doesn’t hold true for search engines unless you tell the spider what it’s supposed to see. A fully optimized image includes the following elements: ALT tag, TITLE tag, thumbnail (version shown on the web) with a link to a larger version or additional content, and a descriptive caption beneath the image. Additionally, the file directories should be named similar to the topic.

Example of optimized image code (applies to the example above):

<a href=http://www.travelsd.com/_images/placestogo/rushmore/rushmore.jpg><img src=”/images/placestogo/mount-rushmore/mount-rushmore.jpg” alt=”Mount Rushmore” title=”Mount Rushmore, located in the Black Hills of South Dakota” /></a><br />

Resources: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_IMG.asp or http://www.htmlquick.com/reference/tags/img.html

Organically optimizing,

Robin