Well Wednesday I attended the Minnesota Interactive Media Association‘s annual summit. Jason Fried of 37signals was one of the keynote speakers. In fact he was pretty much the reason I was there. Jason spoke on Unconventional Collaboration, more or less speaking about how 37signals has operated and how these techniques can work for you too. Many of these ideas challenge many corporate business norms of today. Like most meetings are pointless, do not have them. If you do keep them short and to the point. Make attendance optional, this makes presenters have to make their content valuable enough for people to stop what they are doing to come. Many professional find a lot of these truths that Jason presented as idealistic and not very realistic. Funny thing is 37signals may only be an eight person company (completely by choice), but I would not dare say that they are unsuccessful. These are the people who brought us Ruby on Rails, BaseCamp, Campfire, Highrise and many more great applications. Not to mention being an icon in the industry.

The topics Jason spoke on come out of the book written by 37signals called “Getting Real”. I am currently reading it myself and am loving it. People like Jason Fried & Jim Coudal have proven that many of the founding principles which I have been building Port Eighty upon are not just pipe dreams. While these ways of doing business may challenge many corporate norms and standards, they define a more pure way for those passionate about their work to make a living through their passion.

So two weeks ago I commented saying I would post about key things I took away from An Event Apart Chicago 2007. Here we are more than two weeks later and nothing.

Fortunately I love my clients. This is why I have had no time for writing about AEA. Currently working with a local clothing shop on a splendid little web presence. Pretty standard site, Xhtml/Css a dash of flash and done! Well sort of.

Apparently in this industry, manufactures do not understand what an API is. That is to say that the manufactures do not offer any API of any sort. Which in an industry like clothing were fashion is changing constantly, this can be an issue for retailers that do not have huge budgets to spend constantly updating their web sites. Retail outlets have little to no recourse for posting online what their manufactures offer but through linking to the manufactures’ website. This seems to unload the burden of smaller retail outlet of having to constantly update their websites with the new seasons fashions.

Great….right? Well not exactly. We (you and I) are in the business of Online marketing, and if there is one thing we know it is that we do not send visitors to some other site where they may loose interest in our clients products/offerings. Heck, they could go to one of these manufactures’ sites and find another retailer to purchase from!

Solution, frames. Yes, I know what I just said….I feel dirty just saying it. BUT it give me the ability to work with the lack of an API and still hopefully not completely sending people off my client’s site. Create a nice banner which includes contact information in plain text along with navigation to contact or break out of the frame. This banner will be a frame at the top of the page when a visitor clicks to view a manufacturer’s website from our clients site. Now we have hopefully retained a potential client. As they browse the manufacturer’s site, our client’s information & branding is still at the top of the page reminding the user who they want to call or visit for their purchase. We have helped the user find what they are looking for along with a retailer to buy it from plus we have helped our client retain a client that may have gotten lost on the manufacturer’s site.

I am sure many readers(yes I mean the two people that read this) are very curious to see exactly what I am talking about along with what I perceive to be a beautiful solution to a real problem. Once the project has been finalized and goes live I will post an update on how this solution worked along with a link to see for yourself.