I’ve been involved in interactive media and marketing since 1996 and I’ve not shared as much as I could have as far as what I’ve learned along the way. All of that is about to change. I’ll soon be revealing all of the tips, tricks, and advice I’ve picked up along the way that cover design, development, search engine optimization, internet marketing, offline marketing, and so much more. I’ll cover a wide gamut of topics that all involve interactive media in some way, so if you get geeky about any of these things then I suggest you stay tuned. Keep track of me using the icons to the right, underneath my mugshot. You can subscribe to the rss feed, follow me on Twitter, add me to LinkedIn, or view my facebook profile. Whatever you do…follow my tidbits and you’ll be sure to pick up all sorts of ideas to improve your interactive projects!

Kathy Turner, the Creative Director of the company, had organized this massive get-together to celebrate my recent graduation, upcoming wedding, and impending departure from the company to start my new life in GA. I have never seen this many people in the company together in one place at the same time…ever…not even the Christmas Party! I was completely floored. People from at least two theaters, three shows, and three businesses showed up…over 30 people in all! The president and vice-president were there along with general managers, marketing and sales directors, etc etc. A lot of great things were said and it’s something I’ll never forget. The people that came and that I work with every day are simply amazing. I love them like family and hope that the career I take in GA will have people that are just as great. Kathy has been an incredible person to work with and the company is extremely fortunate to have her as their Creative Director. I just can’t say enough about her and the rest of the staff!

As for the giftbox…well…I went to open it up and it was FILLED with dollar bills! I thought for a minute that it was tissue paper, but I then realized it was real! Everyone had pitched in to create this huge box of money. I just don’t know how I’m going to get this thing through the teller window at the bank…

Whew…WHAT a day! The money was a great gift, but the amount of people that showed up and signed the card meant so much to me. I know everyone had a ton of things going on at each business in the company and knowing they took time out of their day to be a part of this is simply amazing. I’m still floored. So yeah, this was one of those moments when you realize just how much an employer likes you! It’s a day I’ll never forget.

Project Description:

Having lived all of my life in Pigeon Forge, TN I often get asked by visitors where the best places to eat, see, shop, stay, etc are. Having answered these types of questions more times than I can count I decided to create a website with reviews of some of the most popular places in Pigeon Forge. What I came up with was Inside Pigeon Forge and it’s already bringing in quite a chunk of traffic from people looking for reviews of certain places. Now you’re probably wondering why I’ve given 5 star reviews to some of the places that I am associated with as I might look biased. Well, the truth is, if I didn’t think they were 5 star places then I wouldn’t be working with them! The reviews are 100% honest (I’m not paid or influenced at all for any of them) and I will be adding tons of other reviews in the future. The site also allows visitors to add their own comments to any of the reviews, which will be a nice addition once the site is fully rolling along.

Project Details:

Inside Pigeon Forge was created with the following:

• Wordpress 2
• K2 Theme
• Adobe Photoshop
• Flash 8
• EditPlus
• CSS, PHP, mySQL

Project Description:

My fiance is a second grade teacher and has an amazing gift of coming up with ideas for her classroom that make teaching more effective and fun. I convinced her to share these ideas with the rest of the world by starting her own blog. I then put together a layout and design that fit her target audience (female teachers of primary and elementary grades). The main image of the female teacher at the top of the page is a stock illustration from iStock. I used it to somewhat keep a theme throughout the site with the colors and graphics. As for the logo…who says Comic Sans doesn’t work well any more?!

To make sure she got something in return for her hard work, I monetized the site with Google AdSense and a handful of relevant affiliate links.

The site is optimized for search engine traffic with dynamic page titles, descriptions, keyword, header tags, and more. Each article is written with keyword research to find the best words and phrases to use for optimum search engine traffic. The extra 10 minutes spent doing keyword research for each article has helped tremendously. I’m starting to think I’ve created a monster…not the site…HER!

Project Details:

My Teaching Ideas was created with the following:

• Wordpress 2
• Adobe Photoshop
• iStock Royalty Free Illustrations
• Google AdSense
• Commission Junction
• EditPlus
• CSS, ASP, Access

Project Description:

My fourth project for the Fee / Hedrick Family Entertainment Group was to redesign the website for The Blackwoods who host the Blackwood Breakfast Variety Show at The Black Bear Jamboree Theater. Their original site (seen in the before and after link below) was fairly modest and in need of an update to go with their current image. They had new photos, marketing material, press releases, etc that they wanted to get online and needed a dynamic website that could provide that.

I turned to Wordpress to base the content management system on so they could post current news and press releases with ease. I then started with the excellent K2 theme for Wordpress and designed a scheme for it that matched the Blackwood’s current marketing material.

The new site features:

• More color
• Flash slideshow on the first page (static images on the rest)
• Five latest news storied on front page
• Dynamic list of their upcoming shows (driven by a simple text file…big thanks to Christopher Bourque of XK3 Media for hooking me up with the script that does this)
• 30 second commercial embedded as a Flash file on their Breakfast Show page
• Tons more search engine optimization, which is already bringing so much more traffic to the site

Click here to see the before and after screenshots.

Project Details:

The Blackwoods was created with the following:

• Wordpress 2
• K2 Theme
• Adobe Photoshop
• Flash 8
• EditPlus
• CSS, ASP, Access

Project Description:

I was planning to propose to my (then) girlfriend on December 24, 2005 and found myself going through quite a bit of steps to make it all come together. To somewhat journal it all, I created a website where I kept track of everything that I was going through such as buying the ring, making a photo book, asking for her parents’ blessing, etc. It quickly became “part of” the proposal.

Some people may wonder why I have a “personal site” in my portfolio. Well, let me count the ways:

• This was my first site based on Wordpress, so it contained tons of “experiments”
• The site is smoothly coded in XHTML & CSS
• It validates
• It’s driven by PHP & mySQL
• It’s search engine friendly
• It’s cross-platform and cross-browser compatible
• It contains AJAX
• It contains a Flickr API to show the latest 4 photos of Crystal and me
• It’s ranked in the top 1% of websites on the web according to Alexa
• I created customized CSS to give Crystal’s posts a different colored text than my own
• More CSS is combined with Flash to give the titles of our posts unique fonts
• Even more customized CSS and PHP shows our pictures beside our posts for easy reference

Project Details:

Crystal and Shane was created with the following:

• Wordpress
• K2 Theme for Wordpress
• EditPlus 2
• Adobe Photoshop
• Flash MP3 Player
• Canon Digital Rebel
• XHTML, CSS, PHP, mySQL

Project Description:

My third project for the Fee / Hedrick Family Entertainment Group was to redesign the website for The Comedy Barn Theater. The old site was fairly simply, full of unnecessary spacer gifs, lacked alt & image tags, used images for plain text, and was just all-around an SEO turtle. It needed a bit more character, cleaned up, and tweaked for search engines.

I have to admit that this is the last site with tables that I have created. I have since moved to using solid XHTML and CSS based layouts. Even with tables, I managed to do away with the spacer gifs and cleaned the code up substantially. The first thing that I dis was add color to the design. The background is now blue and the top is a bright red barn roof with a Flash animation of the logo and the characters that pop up beside it. It creates an immediate “fun” emotion when opening the site.

Other changes are:

• The menu was cleaned up with sharper rollover images and text
• The paragraphs of text are no long images. This allows search engines to see the keywords
• Links to other shows & theaters were added to provide cross-linking strength
• 30 second commercial added in Flash format
• Online ticketing integrated (Online ticketing was not created by me. I had practically no control over the functionality and a lot of the user interface. I just linked to it and tried to make its pages look the same as the rest of the site.)

Click here to see the before and after screenshots.

Project Details:

The Comedy Barn was created with the following:

• Macromedia Dreamweaver
• Adobe Photoshop
• Flash 8
• EditPlus
• CSS, ASP, Access

Project Description:

When I was hired by the Fee/Hedrick Family Entertainment Group, one of my first projects was to create a website for a new theater that was to house a musical based on the miracles of Christ. About the only thing that I had to work with was a logo that was created by the Creative Director and some photos of some other production that we had rights to use. Needless to say, I was somewhat lost at first as to how to present it online as they didn’t even have a theater or show at the time. Fortunately, everything seemed to fall into place as I created the header, dove, menu, main content template, footer, and background. It now has a video commercial embedded into the site that streams on broadband connections. The end result was a simple, yet attractive site that quickly snagged a Google Page Rank of 4 and is on the first page of Google results for “The Miracle.”

Some things on the site that I did not have a hand in is the cabin rental button on every page and the ticket ordering system.

Project Details:

The Miracle Theater was created with the following:

• Macromedia Dreamweaver
• Adobe Photoshop
• Flash 8
• EditPlus
• CSS, ASP, Access

Project Description:

The Fee Hedrick Family Entertainment Group owns three large theaters that are homes to five shows in Pigeon Forge, TN. The shows are:

• The Comedy Barn Theater
• The Black Bear Jamboree Dinner Show
• The Miracle Theater
• The Blackwoods Breakfast Variety Show
• Triumphant Southern Gospel Show

A single, corporate website was needed in order to send out media releases, marketing material, and corporate information. The majority of the information needed to be publicly available so that various media outlets could access the editorial content as well as any photos or videos associated with stories.

There was also a need for a password-protected area where authorized users could download logos, photos, posters, etc for marketing purposes.

Project Details:

Elements I created

• Practically everything you see other than the actual articles and photos within the articles
• Logo and header image
• CSS menu
• Password-protected area with photos, logos, and editorials of each show
• Template design
• Based on Wordpress content management system and K2 Theme

Fee Hedrick Family Entertainment Group was created with the following:

• Wordpress
• K2 Theme for Wordpress
• EditPlus 2
• Adobe Photoshop
• XHTML, CSS, PHP, mySQL