Mitra Creative is honored to announce the launch of VALERIE STEELE FASHION, the official website of the world-renowned educator and fashion icon, Dr. Valerie Steele.

Dr. Steele (Ph.D., Yale University) is Director and Chief Curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT). The new web site is her first foray into the online world, after publishing numerous books and articles throughout her career and curating more than 20 exhibitions in the past decade. We have launched Valerie Steele Fashion on the heels of the release of her new book, Gothic: Dark Glamour (forthcoming, Yale University Press in conjunction with FIT, 2008).

We at Mitra Creative want to wish everyone a Happy Lunar New Year. 2008 is the Year of the Rat (鼠). May it be joyous, prosperous and creative for all.

恭喜發財 and 恭喜发财, Gong xi fa cai and Kung hei fat choi to you and yours!

Our firm, Mitra Creative, produced the official website for the legendary San Francisco nightclub, The Endup.

We just followed this exciting project with the launch of THE ENDUP.COM BLOG, a comprehensive multimedia Web 2.0 application. Our design and development teams seamlessly custom-integrated two open-source applications, WordPress and Plogger photo gallery, with multiple powerful plugins to create the Blog. The result is a fun, viral, fully-branded user experience for The Endup and their customers.

Many of my company’s clients approach us with requests for “SEO”. While there are still ways to get your website noticed by search engines that go beyond basic “good housekeeping” on the site itself, very little else, especially today, but the quality of the content will, ultimately, keep your site ranked higher than others.

I found a great article on this topic on SearchEngineWatch.com (part of Incisive Interactive Marketing LLC). Click here to visit the article. The key is giving birth to a “healthy baby”; namely, to develop the site with the right principles and ensure that your content is as clear and, as the example in the SearchEngineWatch.com article states, something that would be found as clearly as you would a book on a topic in a Public Library.

I have worked in the High Tech industry for more than a decade in marketing, communications, consulting and business development roles. The most consistent trend that I’ve observed while serving in these positions is the shift in the reseller and integrator environments, in terms of brand equity, mission and sales focus, to the IT business solution.

In the new millennium, small, medium and large business enterprises have de-emphasized the value of purchasing technologies as commodities. Today, vertical end-users and CFO’s are more often final arbiters on technology purchases, forcing reseller channels to retrench their client outreach. This puts critical business issues (CBIs) at the forefront instead of bits, bytes and service cost reductions alone. Solving real business problems, in terms of how a client raises their shareholder value, how they interface with their customers, how they comply with regulations, how they reduce real estate burden costs by virtualizing technologies, etc., gets the power-sponsor to respond and sign a deal.

My current firm, Mitra Creative, supports the marketing needs of a number of reseller, integrator and custom software development company clients. We are building new branding, communications, salesforce automation and digital/print advertising and promotional solutions every day that respond to the needs of high tech companies to sell to business end-users. We will delineate these trends and some of the solutions that Mitra Creative and others have devised to respond to the current requirements of tech marketing and business development in coming entries. Stay tuned!