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We have exciting announcements about new projects and happenings coming very soon!

Mitra Creative is pleased to announce the launch of a new website for New York and Los Angeles-based experiential event producer, Craig D’Amico, and his company named the CRAIG D’AMICO EXPERIENCE. Co produced with brand designer, Brian Flink, the new site describes — with images and text — Craig D’Amico’s unique approach to his craft, calling upon his fascinating multidisciplinary background in theater performance and directing, design/decorating, and in business.

I am proud to announce Mitra Creative’s win of two 2010 MARCOM CREATIVE AWARDS, including a MarCom Platinum Award. We received the awards for our work for Nurture Marketing (formerly the Nurture Institute). 

READ THE PRESS RELEASE HERE 

With this year’s wins, Mitra Creative now has two MarCom Platinum Awards (2010 and 2009), and three MarCom Gold Awards (2010, 2009, and 2007). Thank you to everyone on our team for your brilliance, and a huge note of thanks goes to Nurture Marketing and our clients for making these wins possible!

It is always a challenge to justify the price of web design and development when clients want special features. Today’s climate is one of an aggressive buyer’s mid-market, where prospective clients who ask for estimates for website builds will often negotiate project prices with interactive agencies down to the bare minimum of profitability with the threat of using low cost templated offerings or individual contractors with limited experience instead. When digital agencies possessing experience in producing high quality work are successful in winning deals with clients for fair prices, more often than not the clients expect the agencies — even when a very clear scope of work is produced — to design and build every customization, every toolset, every other feature “in their heads” because they have “given them so much money” to design their website, and provide post-support (often very complex post-support) for free.

We at Mitra Creative, like all agencies, have experienced similar circumstances. We are truly grateful to win the business, and support the needs, of our clients, but we often work very hard to educate them on how sometimes even their smallest perceived requests for custom features are not “so small.” In that light, related to something very different yet very much the same, check out this article from today’s edition of “The Wall Street Journal” (via “Yahoo! Real Estate”), entitled “A Dream House’s Difficult Birth,” by Nancy Keates, of WSJ.com. It tells of a couple’s pursuit to have their dream house built their way, and the impact of custom requirements on the budget of a project. Though people frequently perceive interactive projects differently, websites of true uniqueness, that differentiate brand and function not only properly but with tools, visuals and language that help to reduce the time of sales cycles, speed delivery of information/data to users and to the company that hires the agency (e.g. performance data), show up higher in placement in general and local search on Google, Bing, Yahoo! and other search engines, and are secure and stable, come at a higher cost than often useless templates, and with measurably skilled labor. If new features are to be built, or if ongoing support is required, they too require, time, skill and attention, and agencies should be remunerated for their efforts.

Mark Feldberg and Emilyn Page’s Carmel home. (Photo from the Wall Street Journal by Mark Feldberg.)

We at Mitra Creative are proud to announce our latest achievement–the creation of a new brand and progressive new website for NURTURE MARKETING (Nurturemarketing.com). Nurture Marketing (formerly the Nurture Institute), is a full-service marketing agency that offers a broad spectrum of traditional and non-traditional services (lead generation, communications, direct mail, e-mail campaigns, assessments and planning, branding, training and meeting facilitation), as well as a highly-developed platform of channel marketing services (they have built comprehensive programs for Microsoft, Nokia, and others).

The concept of Nurture Marketing was originated more than 20 years ago by the company’s co-founder and one of its senior partners, Jim Cecil. It focuses on combining good marketing principles with the nurturing of prospects and customers to dramatically increase sales revenues. Today, Nurture Marketing is not only a set of best practices, but also the name of a powerhouse of a company, led by Jim, and the company’s other partners, Eric Rabinowitz (Jim’s co-author on the successful books, “Nurturing Customer Relationships,” and “101 Business Love Letters“), Barbara Pfeiffer, and Jennifer Herold-Garcia. They believe in, and now ARE, Nurture Marketing.

We were invited to bring our business expertise, award-winning design acumen, and our technical expertise to the task of taking an objective look at the former Nurture Institute, and now (with the new branding), Nurture Marketing’s visual brand and web presence and uplift and modernize it–in keeping with Nurture’s progressive offerings and recent, significant growth. We took the company’s now-previous brand assets and revitalized them with a fresh, forward-looking visual sensibility. We also built a new website for Nurture from scratch — approach, design, development — utilizing a modernized, easy-to-use content management system framework, powerful, provocative 21st Century aesthetics, and a true Web 2.0/3.0-and-beyond information architecture. For example, we put Nurture’s Blog at the center of the site’s Homepage, enabling a “living dialogue” with prospects, clients, and business partners, and tying together follower and consumer communities.

Nurture Marketing’s management team is thrilled with the results. According to Eric Rabinowitz, “Thanks to the design, creative, and implementation team at Mitra Creative, we now have a magnificent new brand and website that reflect the quality of our work, and our service to our customers.” We are thrilled to have been given the opportunity to serve this wonderful company and team!

Mitra Creative is proud to announce our 2010 update of RickyLizalde.com, the website that we produced to showcase the fashion lingerie line of designer, Ricky Lizalde (of “Project Runway” Season 4). The revised design highlights Ricky’s exciting new 2010 collection.

We want to thank Ricky for his continued work with us!

With the release of WordPress® 3.0, the popular Blogging platform has taken another step toward becoming a full-fledged CMS (Content Management System) along the lines of Joomla® and Drupal®.

The first thing a user will notice about 3.0 is the new default theme. “Kubrick” has been replaced by “Twentyten.” Twentyten allows you to choose your own header image, and with the click of a mouse, you can determine whether a Page layout should be one or two columns. WordPress 3.0 also includes a greatly improved menu management system, so that a non-technical user can create customized menus on a Page-by-Page basis.

Version 3.0 has not changed the fact that WordPress allows you to choose from a wide array of plug-ins. Again, with a few clicks of a mouse, you can download and install a plug-in that will give you a contact form, manage comment spam, optimize your Pages for SEO, and even go so far as to provide you with an e-commerce solution.

The role of a website is changing. It is no longer the unique representation of a company or individual on the Internet. Today you can follow a company or individual on Twitter or and Facebook, connect on Linkedin, and post comments to a Blog.

For each Page you build in a WordPress website, you have to confront the questions–is this a Page or a Blog? Do I allow comments or not?  In a way, it provokes the question: what is now a Website vs. what is now a Blog? With modern tools available, a Website should no longer be just an online brochure. It should, similarly to the example cited above about the use and “conversational” aspects of Social Media platforms, encourage active dialogue with site users, including information seekers, consumers, those who are interested in what you have to say and what you show/demonstrate on your site, and more. Because WordPress started out as a Blogging platform, it is highly suited for this interactive world.