Food Thinkers is the home of food and beverage.

It helps people elevate their time in the kitchen from an everyday need to one of life’s rewarding moments. Filled with articles, videos, and podcasts on cuisine and nutrition, Food Thinkers strives to broaden people’s perception of how cooking can contribute to a fulfilling lifestyle.

Went to the site www.chickenfoot.us, watched the video for “Soap on a Rope” and I LOVED IT!  Sammy sounded as good as he ever did, and Satriani’s sound was crisp, and a district groove to it.  Off to the myspace site! www.myspace.com/thechickenfoot listened to more, and was hooked. I was smiling, generally smiling which is something I haven’t done for a long while.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I bought the album, turned that bad boy up, started to do some work, and damn!  Now I’ll be the first o say, the slow stuff was of no interet to me. I’ve never been a fan of power ballads, but I was eally surprised by the groove and quality of the songs. More importantly, it was fun to listen to, something “rock” has been sorely missing fo a number of years.

So it’s not Van Halen, it not the Chili Peppers, it’s Chickenfoot. Stupid name, great band, and an album that will always make me smile.

Take Greenopolis.com for example.  Conceived by Waste Management, this social networking platform has just been abandoned for a less risky social media website.  To me this is a prime example of what happens when an engineering group takes control over what should be a marketing effort.

Originally, Greenopolis.com was conceived as a social networking site that would be built using a Drupal platform.   It’s flexibility would allow for partners to not only be sponsors, but more importantly, they could be interactive within the website.  Partners would be able to build modules that could plug into the existing site, thereby building a collaborative social network that wasn’t soley based on a single provider.  But without a clear business model, Drupal’s flexibility turned Greenopolis into a single source application instead of a collaborative effort between different technologies.

My observation, as creative director at the web development company in charge of the project at the time, is that the issue started when the engineering team began to truly understand what Drupal was capable of.  They inadvertenly started to turn the site away from a partnership to a single provider site.  In other words, by focusing so much on Drupal and it’s capabilities to “be anything,” the engineers slowly started to build Greenopolis out of it’s business model.  The focus became what Drupal could do and engineering functionality, not what the partners and their applications would bring to the site.

Because the client didn’t have a clear vision of how the site would actually work in the “real world,” when they took the project over in-house, they began to realize that the development firm hadn’t been the problem, it was their lack of clear goals for the site.  So when they couldn’t get the membership and traffic to the website that they had counted on, they simply turned it into a generic social media application doing exactly what they didn’t want to in the first place.  They are now just another green social media site in the pack.

Many of the “higher ups” on both sides, blamed the failure of the site on Drupal, but what it really came down to was the lack of a clear business plan.  What the important lesson here is that if you don’t have a clear vision and plan, then it doesn’t matter what tool you use.   Knowing what the goals of your site are is more important than knowing what solution you are going to use to create it.

Comic Places is the brain child of Seth Cohn, an expert Drupal developer, and myself which we created for the DESIGN4DRUPAL Convention at MIT.  What we decided to do was to create the “uncommon” Drupal theme.  We wanted to develop a content rich website that looked and acted like a comic book.  The key to this was if you weren’t a designer, or didn’t have time to cut images, or wanted different layouts for different pages, you could achieve it all through the admin panels.

Through a regular Drupal installation and some public modules the theme featured:

• Custom Home Page Cover with automated issue number
• Corner JQuery showing off next page content
• Custom Panel placement; Pick your page layout on the ‘fly”
• Image placement and effect courtesy of Imagemagik
• Font replacement by the tag
• Content area published through title and alt tags, pulled out and placed via CSS
• Comments via talk bubbles and horizontal placement to act like a comic book
• …. and many more

The presentation at MIT went very well; it worked exactly like we wanted it to.  We put it together in our spare time in less than 30 days prior to the Conference.

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Geenopolis is the final result from the proof of concept, My Think Green Network (and Green for the People). This website was built for Waste Management to create an educational online community that brings together individuals, communities, organizations and corporations to make positive environmental changes in their daily lives and communities.

The final Greenopolis site was built inside the Drupal framework, and was a test of taking core Drupal functionality and making it user-friendly for the website members

As Creative Director on this project, it was my job to control the layouts for the different types of navigation that would be used by the various member types such as Administrators, Editors, Contributors, as well as end users.

It was also my responsibility to make sure the brand was consistent across the various sections of the website, such as eGeenU, MarketPlace, and EcoTeams, all which had different applications supporting it.

Liv Greene was created as an online personality and guide to the site. Her character’s function was to personalize the experience to the targeted demographic and make navigation throughout the site easier.

Related Images:

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