An article entitled, “Why Do Websites Cost So Much Money?“, by Christine Anderssen (Tailormade4you), which appeared on January 10, on GOARTICLES.com(1), very succinctly summarizes the reasons why reputable web design and development firms charge more for their work, even to their smaller business clients/emerging enterprises.

Anderssen makes clear, simple and effective statements about the value of using professional interactive agencies: “Frankly, building a website so that it works in all browsers, has a good design and presents all the information about the company in a pleasing, eye-catching and user-friendly fashion takes proficiency, and this costs money.” More importantly, she adds that when you utilize a good firm, you are “paying for the advice, the support and the long term relationship.” We at MITRA CREATIVE agree—-these are some of the key factors in deciding to engage an experienced agency. There is value added through working with professionals who can see your brand from an external perspective and can translate your business requirements, messages and calls-to-action into engaging, highly web-usable designs instead of “just” designing websites. It is equally critical to work with visionary design agencies that continue to innovate within their discipline, but that also know your business and its culture well enough, and stay with it long enough, to maintain the consistency of, and to grow, your brand.

Most critical is brand. Simply put, design firms that truly understand business in addition to art and technology elevate brands by giving them credibility and respect and by making the appearance of companies forward-thinking. They do so using today’s most impactful, powerful and pervasive medium: namely, visuals on the web. A picture is now worth a billion words… everywhere.

(Article Copyright © 2010 Jayde Online, Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

All of us at Mitra Creative encourage you to donate to Hope for Haiti Now or the American Red Cross for the PEOPLE OF HAITI.

As all of us at MITRA CREATIVE wish our families, friends, clients, colleagues and followers a very Happy, Prosperous New Year, we want to share with all of you a great article that we read on the popular and highly informative, “social, media, brand” information resource/Blog called Penn Olson. The article, by contributor Willis Wee, speaks of the “4 Reasons To Employ Social Media in 2010″:

READ THE ARTICLE HERE

We usually comment on what we read, but this article — containing a compelling, concise video called “Social Media ROI: Socialnomics” (from the insightful work and writings of Erik Qualman) — brilliantly summarizes the Business Social Media landscape and we feel it does not require further narrative.

We very much look forward in 2010 to providing valuable information, articles, information about Mitra Creative’s happenings on this Blog, and working with many of you to support your interactive/media design and development, marketing communications strategy, corporate digital video production and Web 2.0/3.0 and other needs!

Yahoo! News published an article today that nicely summarizes the impact of collaborative digital communications platforms in the first decade of the 2000s.

The article’s author, Laura E. Davis, quotes Professor Paul Levinson of Fordham University who states in his book “New New Media”: “In particular, what makes these newer media so important is that it turns the consumers into producers.”

READ THE ARTICLE HERE.

An informative article describing the impending Comcast-NBC deal appears today on Yahoo! TECH: READ THE ARTICLE HERE.

The article, from AP Business Writers, Deborah Yao and Ryan Nakashima, brings up the inevitable questions about whether or not it may be “questionable” for the “hard-wired” delivery service to own a network. According to Yao and Nakashima, Comcast’s direction may in fact change with this acquisition–that: “The future is in content, and the pipes that carry it matter less.” As the lines of propriety of content ownership continue to blur, and the matter of control over what we see, hear, consume, etc. over different media and where we get it expands every day, licensers, consumer groups, etc. are ready to engage in battle.

What this merger will undoubtedly make happen is another important visit to the issues of rights and permissions over content, of ownership and profit and of the unstoppable socialization of media. The debate and the incremental results are sure to continue for a long, long time.