The world famous Ann Arbor Art Fair is here! With booths and displays setup throughout Ann Arbor, we’d like to get in on the action and showcase some of our artwork from the past few months. When the cruel weather of the midwestern winter and spring lured us back to bed each morning, these were the projects that kept us motivated.

More On the Way…

We’re well into Summer now with some great projects in the works. Make sure to follow our latest musings, launches and news on our Twitter account or Facebook page!

West Hall (“SI West”) on the U-M
Central Campus in Ann Arbor

“Dive in and stay local.”

That was the unanimous message from a panel of Ann Arbor’s digital marketers who gathered last Friday at the University of Michigan School of Information’s Career Development lecture. The lecture called, “A Day in the Life of an SEO and SEM Professional,” featured industry insights from Chad Wiebesick, Nate Lewalski and MetaSpring’s own marketing extraordinaire John Paul Narowski.

The lecture was part of a series of career development lectures put on by the U of M School of Information (UMSI), designed to help students stay up to date on trends and strategies being utilized in potential career paths. Search engine optimization (SEO) and Search engine marketing (SEM) are two of those trends that are rapidly expanding, with businesses of all sizes taking notice – especially the highly digital companies in Ann Arbor, MI.

Here are some of the concepts that each speaker covered:

Chad Wiebesick

Chad, President of the Ann Arbor Ad Club, nationally recognized author, and award-winning digital marketing strategist, had plenty to offer this group of future job applicants. Some of his key points included:

• SEO and SEM are growing, exciting fields to get into these days. About 60 billion dollars are spent in online advertising each year and that number is constantly increasing, so there is plenty of room to step into the market.
• Skills for those looking to get in this field or find success include analytical abilities, hard work and a desire to learn. Most SEO/SEMers learn on the job.
• Social media is now the 4th most popular internet activity, outranking email. This means that social media is the “go-to” way for communicating with peers. Email is becoming a very formal communications method.

Nate Lewalski

Nate is an Interactive Marketing Planner at Enlighten, an interactive marketing firm. Since graduating from Western Michigan University in 2006, he’s been immersed in the digital marketing field and so he wanted to discuss some of the trends happening (literally) right now. Here are some of his key points:

• Real-Time search is an up-and-coming space in marketing. Given the deals with Twitter, Bing and Google, advertisers, marketers and branding experts need to find ways to master this new concept and get results for clients.
• Digital media is extremely track-able and thus, an easy sell to clients.
• SEO/SEM is fun! Accounts are live and constantly being updated, so you can get results in real-time.

John Paul Narowski

JP began his discussion by recounting a few of his initial trials and tribulations as a young SEOer at Amish Tables in Ann Arbor. He followed this up with his thoughts on today’s trends and the lessons that he learns daily in his work at MetaSpring.

• The beauty of SEO is that you can learn from your results. By conducting optimization tests and beta trials, the internet can teach you how to gather clients and impact target audiences.
• SEO and SEM are only successful through “constant interaction”. SEO are SEM are processes that seemingly never ending…and that’s a good thing!
• Anyone looking to get into the emerging field of SEM/SEO should have a solid understanding of search engines and strategic thinking. As the industry grows though, these requirements will surely progress and mature.

An Informative Event

This career development lecture series was a great example of the proactive steps I begged the academic community to take in my Web 2.0 post a few weeks back. As an audience member at the lecture, I was impressed by the wealth of knowledge Nate, Chad and JP presented to the class and the size of the audience as well. About 25 students showed up ready to learn and discuss the growing field of SEO and SEM.

Special thanks to Joanna Kroll for assembling the panel. For more information on the University of Michigan School of Information and their Career Development series, visit their website at: www.si.umich.edu.

Additional Resources

• SearchMarketingNow
• OneUpWeb
• AdAge
• SEOMoz

Valentine’s Day was more than a week ago, but we’re still feeling the love. We’ve been fortunate enough to get a bit of press attention recently and were thrilled to share our thoughts and ideas with the community.

Business Innovations with Larry Eiler

Last week, MetaSpring’s own Casey and JP were invited to record a podcast with Larry Eiler, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Eiler Communications. The podcast is part of a weekly series entitled Innovative Business Results. Guests on the show discuss their organization, as well as other business-related issues in the news.

We were very excited to join Larry on the podcast and thank him for the invitation. Topics discussed include:

• MetaSpring Company News
• Our recent exploration of Web 2.0 in the Academic community
• Ann Arbor’s Tech & Innovation Community

You can listen to our segment here: February 23, 2010 Podcast

And, you can find the full archive of shows at the Business Innovation website.

Job Searching in a Tough Economy

As many of you know, the MetaTeam has a pretty extensive online presence. Whether you’re on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or other social networks, you can usually find someone at MetaSpring to connect with. That was the case when a student at the University of Oregon was recently looking for job-searching advice from recent college grads through Twitter. This sort of crowd-sourcing technique was one of the skills Casey discussed in his last post about Web 2.0 and its role in career preparation.

Casey was happy to answer the call and bestowed upon her the knowledge that he’d gained from his job search last summer. The student, Paige Landsem, was able to condense Casey’s thoughts into a very helpful blog post for her class entitled Gateway to Media. The post is intended to help students combat current economic conditions. Well done, Paige!

Upcoming MetaSpring Appearances

We’re continuing our publicity run next month with another local engagement:

Lucy Ann Lance Business Insider – March 16

Lucy Ann Lance is one of the most ardent supporters of the Ann Arbor business community, emceeing events and chairing several local advocacy groups around town. She also hosts a daily (Mon-Sat) radio show called The Lucy Ann Business Insider, 9am-12pm on 1290AM WLBY in Ann Arbor. The show can also be found streaming online on 1290AM’s site or archived on Lucy Ann’s website. We start our day listening to her show co-hosted with Dean Erskine.

After a few conversations with Lucy Ann on Twitter, we were fortunate enough to receive an invite to appear on her Tech Tuesday segment on March 16th . This pre-St. Patrick’s Day show will be a lot of fun and we invite you to listen along.

Contact MetaSpring

As you can see, MetaSpring loves to talk. Usually we let our web designs do most of the talking, but we love to chat in person too. Most of our staff is on Twitter and we maintain an active Facebook presence. If you’d like to get in touch with a member of our team for an interview, networking event, or speaking engagement, email us at info@metaspring.com or check out our staff pages for social networking info.

What good is a website if it isn’t user-friendly? At MetaSpring, we make website usability one of our biggest priorities, and as you can see by the contents of this post, many other designers are doing the same. It’s one of those elements of web design that can always be improved on. This MetaSpring Blog Carnival features six usability perspectives from some of the industry’s best.

Five Simple but Essential Web Usability Tips

This post from Brujo Owoh, one of the many great bloggers at Six Revisions, covers a few points that would be especially important to a web designer taking on big projects for the first time. Brujo covers some key usability points like search features, page organization, consistency, web forms, and help features. He also includes some great real world examples and detailed descriptions for how they might improve usability.

Life, Below 600 Pixels

We took a page from Paddy Donnelly‘s book (and blog) and placed this post below the sacred website page fold. You’re still reading this aren’t you? Paddy makes this poignantly sharp point right off the bat in this post about life below the fold. So if you’re worried about users not learning how to scroll, this post will give you something to think about.

How Browsable is Your Blog?

As Heidi Cool points out in this recent post, “sometimes navigating a blog can feel like wandering through a maze.” How often have you tried to find a related post, or get more information from a blog only to give up after a few frustratingly-failed clicks? The fact of the matter is many blogs suffer from extreme un-browsability, leaving users on a goose chase for content. Use the 6 tips discussed in this post to make sure your readers get what they’re looking for.

The Myth of Usability Testing

We’re thrilled to feature this post from Robert Hoekman Jr. of A List Apart. Robert helps us understand why development teams often run into problems when they run usability evaluations. These tests, while good for many things, are a tad unreliable when it comes to addressing the right problems on websites. Robert points out several reasons why this happens, as well as some areas that usability testing must be implemented.

Bringing User Centered Design to the Agile Environment

Ever wondered anything about Agile Software Development? Anthony Colfelt provides all the answers in this post on bringing Agile and User Centered Design (UCD) together. In the Agile development process, requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. I’ll let Anthony take it from there.

Is Your Website Accessible?

User-friendliness consists of many factors. Sometimes the usability buzz dominates designs to a point where you forget other important factors of a user-friendly site, like accessibility. Occasionally you’ll find a website design that uses too many flashy gadgets, which can marginalize parts of the population due to one obstacle or another.

Nathan Olmstead, a freelance web designer right here in Ann Arbor, urges fellow designers to fulfill their moral responsibility to make sites user-friendly to all. He illustrates a few specific details designs must adhere to if they are to appeal to all demographics. For example, color contrast ratio for text to background should be around 4.5:1. Check it out for other tips to keeping your site viewable by everyone.

Next Month’s Issue: Web Marketing

Thanks to everyone who submitted posts and feedback for this month’s carnival. We had a blast connecting with each of you and look forward to continuing the conversation in our upcoming carnivals. Next month’s theme is Web Marketing, something we encounter daily here at MetaSpring. Marketing your product or service on the web is becoming a crucial factor to business success no matter how big your business is.

With such an important topic, we can’t wait to see what you all have for us. The deadline for submissions on BlogCarnival.com or through our email is March 21st. If you have a Web Marketing post or a suggestion for a topic that you’d like to see discussed, make sure to let us know at media@metaspring.com.