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Join us for a webinar as OHO's Managing Director and Chief Creative Officer Jason Smith shares 5 years' worth of nationwide research in best practices for reaching the adult learners segment for college and university distance learning and online/on-site hybrid programs.  The webinar, entitled "Reaching Adult Learners with Online, Hybrid, and Traditional College Degree Programs," will be hosted live, by OHO, this Thursday, November 15th at 12:00 pm.

Space is limited, so reserve your spot today: Register Now.

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A number of years ago, everyone from sensationalist bloggers to your next-door neighbor was sure the traditional news media, from weekly and daily newspapers to magazines, was on its deathbed. Little did they know the sentiment they were hearing wasn't a death knell for the news industry but rather a signal that the industry was changing. Digital distribution was soon declared king, and from dedicated apps to revamped websites, traditional news publishers quickly adapted to shrinking subscriber pools and shifting news consumption habits. Now, on the heels of Newsweek's announcement of a new digital-only strategy, the Vineyard Gazette, a news institution on Martha's Vineyard, has launched a completely new, OHO-architected web experience that brings the local news publisher into the digital news age in style.

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A Web-First Newspaper Website Redesign

The new website, which launched today, features a completely new design for the paper, a robust multimedia section to showcase the stunning photography and video regularly captured around the island by Gazette staffers, and a new font style, which was made possible through collaboration with Boston-based Font Bureau, Inc.

Device-Agnostic Responsive Design for Desktop, Mobile, and Tablet

But perhaps the best (and likely most subtle) detail is the site rocks a responsive design, meaning regardless of a reader's screen size or device, content on the new Vineyard Gazette site, from breaking news and featured editorial content to local events calendars and an archive of tens of thousands of articles from the publication's past 10 years, will feel, function, and look great. Using a customized cascading style sheet (CSS), OHO was able to optimize the site for a wide range of smartphones, tablets, and widescreen desktop displays so users could enjoy the same great reading experience found on the desktop without sacrificing functionality while on the go. Most users will likely be completely unaware of this bit of design magic (which is sort of the point), but for a taste of what we're talking about, a side-by-side comparison of desktop, tablet, and mobile will do the trick. Go ahead: we challenge you to find a missing feature or block of content!

Streamlining the Editorial Workflow and Adobe Web Publishing Process

Of course, good looks aren't the only thing to be found here, as the all-new Gazette also features a number of under the hood enhancements to optimize the editorial process for the island-bound newspaper website. The site's backend, which is built on Drupal 7, features custom integration with the paper's classified ad management platform, a robust taxonomy and tagging system, synchronization with the newspaper's subscriber/circulation system, and bi-directional workflow capabilities, meaning when drafting content the editorial staff can both import from and export to the Adobe InCopy and Adobe InDesign platforms at will.

Building Subscribers, Driving Readership, and Monetizing Content

The site even features a customizable paywall (that news monetizer's oft-sought white whale) so the publisher can change what content is free and what content requires a subscription to suit their business model on the fly.

To get the latest happenings on the Vineyard, become a subscriber, or simply see the site for yourself, which was architected, designed, developed, and deployed by OHO, we proudly invite you to visit www.mvgazette.com.

Pop quiz: when was the last time you checked your personal email on your laptop or desktop computer?  If you answered "don't remember," chances are you're part of a growing trend of email users who are, rather than powering on their old, dusty desktops, using their mobile devices (tablets, smartphones, etc.) more and more to consume email and web content.  In truth, as our mobile gadgets become smarter, feature-richer, and enabled to handle our ever-increasing data habit this trend only makes sense.  But it also underscores a critical need in the marketing community that's only just now rearing its head: a mobile-friendly email communications plan should be at the top of every marketing & communications professional's marketing strategy.

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It's long since been understood that email is the easiest way to reach consumers.  We all have email, we use it regularly (even moreso now with the advent of smartphones), and people today seem significantly more willing to give out their email address than, say, their phone number or mailing address (old stand-by's for the marketer of yesterday).  But simply reaching them isn't enough - if the user experience is poor or the content doesn't work on the user's device of choice, the user won't feel spurred and your marketing attempt should be considered a failure.  Now, more than ever, mobile-specific, device-agnostic user experiences should be considered even when planning for the simplest of marketing messages.

It's a Mobile-First World

Take, for instance, how you use your phone.  Any smartphone user, whether they be on an iOS device like a iPhone or an iPod Touch, an Android-powered smartphone, or something similar, knows that things like horizontal scrolling, tiny text, and impossible-to-press buttons or links are annoying.  For an increasingly mobile-first world, design elements leading to a poor mobile experience seem to put words in marketers' mouths saying "we don't get you."  Sure, in someone's Gmail or Outlook inbox on their widescreen desktop monitor the message may look great.  But if it underperforms even the slightest bit on mobile, whether thanks to poorly-adapted layouts or outdated technologies like Flash, your users will feel alienated, disengaged, and unmotivated to take action.

The web design community has long been divided in its approach to this problem with many deeming mobile-first design a wayward concept.  And while yes, m-dot sites are awful, smartphones are still underpowered when compared to their big, lap-heating counterparts, and the notion of holding back a site's functions just to make it mobile-friendly seems counterintuitive, mobile-first has evolved since our phones were first able to connect to the internet oh so many years ago.

Mobile-First ≠ "m-dot"

We recently received an email from Brooks Brothers' marketing department that spurred this notion and it quickly became clear that regardless of whether you're marketing clothing, corporate consulting or B2B services, or even home-made wares in your community, how your users interact with your marketing is as important as the quality of the product or service you're marketing in the first place.

Exhibits A & B: two messages from the same email campaign, one viewed on a mobile device and one viewed on a desktop computer.  Can you see a difference (beyond content)?

The image on the right is actually a screenshot from the Mail app on iPhone while the the image on the left was taken from Gmail on a desktop computer.  By using a finger-friendly, consistent menu structure and bold, image-driven design for their email campaign, Brooks Brothers was able to create marketing that's not only as smart-looking as their clothing line but consistently laid out and device-agnostic.  Mobile, tablet, or desktop, this email campaign can be seen, read, and interacted with easily and effectively, meaning less chance users will have a poor experience with the content and (worst case scenario) unsubscribe.

Users > Awesome Features

No website will ever have mass appeal and no email campaign can cater to all users or devices.  Look at Internet Explorer's nightmarish history with site rendering or Outlook's handling of background images to know what we're talking about.  But everything you do as a marketer should be with the chief goal of making your content effortless and seamless to take in by your audience.  Whether using complex, new web design concepts like responsive design or tailoring your layouts to the lowest common denominator without sacrificing style, it's important to keep in mind that no matter how many flashy features, awesome images, amazing callouts, and sprinkles of web development fairy dust you've incorporated into the email (or website, or portal, or app, or...) you've built, if your users feel alienated they won't hesitate to delete, unsubscribe, or unplug from your brand entirely.  Remember: on mobile the delete button is just inches away.

For those of you who were dying to see more than just our two shots of the Northeastern University School of Law 2012-2013 viewbook, we've got great news: Northeastern has partnered with zmags to digitize the entire book.  That means even those of you not on Northeastern's mailing list can take a gander at every one of its 28 gorgeous pages at your own leisure.

The digital viewbook can be seen here.  Happy flipping!

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Hey there and welcome back to our series, The Best Stuff on the Web, in which we break out our plumber's tools, make sure our belts are nice and tight, and inspect that series of tubes we call the internet to find the greatest stuff (best websites, most innovative designs, coolest features, most mind-blowing [insert awesome thing here], etc.) we've seen this year.  While our last entry celebrated the second coming of the zoetrope vis-à-vis the recent web trend of parallax scrolling, this time around we're looking at parallax scrolling's spiritual companion: the supertall, single page website.

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To anyone even remotely paying attention as they journey the web, the tropes  and bludgeoningly repetitive motifs of the standard website should offer no surprise: homepage, main menu, interior page, blah blah blah.  Yawn.  After having seen myriad pages use the same layout, design metaphor, and organization, we're fairly confident that though the general public may appreciate the consistent, familiar nature each new website brings, there are very few experiences to be had that are actually interesting.

A lot of this likely stems from the SEO explosion that happened over the last decade.  In a (merciful) response to the single-page Flash "experiences" of the 90's, Google worked with the web community to establish an evolved way of thinking of content on the web: create deep, content-rich, keyword-targeted, Flash-less experiences across numerous pages and expand your potential to capture search traffic.  And so, as Google's stock price climbed higher and higher into the sky, so too did the average number of pages of the modern website.

Truth be told, we can all probably agree it was nice getting from a Google search to the hours of operation page for our local coffee shop, the menu page of our local sandwich joint, or the history page for that famous pastry place we'd heard about (noticing a trend there?  Psh, we know you're a foodie too).  But all-too-quickly, "helpful, content-specific page" theory turned into "create as many pages as you can muster" theory, and websites, not to mention our web searches, became cluttered by needlessly complicated structures, half-baked content, and a hell of a lot of white noise.  To those keeping score: more in fact is sometimes less.

Enter the supertall, single page site.  Imagine a website with every page of content crammed onto a single page.  No dropdown menus.  No sub-pages.  Just a unified, one-and-done experience that breaks the confines of the traditional "page" paradigm.  Think that sounds crazy?  We think it's bloody brilliant.  Why?  One word: the-death-of-the-click (okay, that wasn't one word but sue us - we hate clicking just to get a bit of content and you should too).  That said, here are some examples of excellent supertall sites from our collective recent memory:

Skittles

Widely known for their trippy ad campaigns, Skittles is one of the modern kings of breaking the marketing mold.  A few years ago, the Skittles website featured not a homepage, but distinct widgets featuring content from Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc. that would pop up and vie for your attention.  Pretty cool if you ask us, so it should come as no surprise that their latest website similarly breaks the mold in the latest (albeit less groundbreaking) trendy fashion.

Featuring bold fonts, a sickeningly sweet rainbow palate, aggressive messaging, and Skittles' famous brand of off-the-wall nonsequiturisms, the Skittles website does the supertall site right, with little to no clicking required, a seemingly bottomless stream of user-generated content through social channels like Twitter and YouTube featured as the site's content (not an afterthought), and even the boring legal stuff tossed in for good measure (via an all-too adorable bowtie hover in the lower-right).  Truthfully, we'd be remiss if we said a candy website deserved a deep, complex sitemap to market their product (is there really that much to say about colored sugar orbs?).  But it seems like Skittles is a proud believer that the less you have to say, the louder it should be. Skittles: lowbrow never seemed so classy!

G'nosh

Who said party dip had to be boring?  Rather than leverage the passe landing page/interior page style used by seemingly every other CPG, G'nosh, the UK-based brand of gourmet dips and spreads, went loud with their page design that would normally, had it been confined to traditional spaces, break the page.

Large imagery, even larger, skewed type, and fake out elements make a bold statement that this brand is anything but blah.  Think that menu at the top will take you to a new page?  Wrong - it's an anchor list for the page!  Think anchor hashtags have to appear post-click?  Womp womp.  Think that block of text in the middle of the page is just there to fill some white space?  Nah, it's a hover-activated recipe filter.

Expectations be damned, G'nosh proudly makes the statement that their site, much like their dips, can't be bound by traditional viewpoints.  Nothing embodies the supertall page ideology better, we'd say.

Bonus Points

You can likely imagine that, given supertall sites quickly becoming something of a trend, there are countless other examples to be found across the web.  Another example worth a mention?  Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest (and likely some new fangled social media hub you've never heard of yet) and their use of lazy loading: it's supertall in sheep's clothing!

Think back to the year 2000.  Though surely a distant memory for many of us (the fashion, the music, dial-up internet - yikes!), the beginning of the new century marks a special place in OHO's heart.  It was the year we officially opened our doors for business and started, despite humble beginnings, our tradition of tireless customer service met with cutting edge work.

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Flash forward to today, with our ranks ballooning, our work evolving, and our list of happy clients growing longer and longer that we are humbled by our inclusion on Inc. magazine's list of the 5000 fastest growing companies in America - the Inc. 5000.

Needless to say, without those amazing people who call OHO home day after day, the technology we back getting better every day, and countless clients who consider OHO a true partner rather than a meer vendor, the growth we've seen, globally-crippling recession notwithstanding, wouldn't have been possible.

To read more about our place on the list or the Inc. 5000 in general, check out our press release.  You can be sure we've got our eye on climbing the list in the coming years (and, fingers crossed, one day cracking the top 500).  So be on the lookout for that announcement when the time comes.  But for now, let's just say thank you to everyone who made this possible and here's to the next 12 years!

Hey there and welcome to a new series we're putting on the blog: The Best Stuff on the Web.  In this series, we'll cover the best websites, design concepts, development trickery, and other fun bits we've seen across the web.  It's worth noting the things we'll discuss are not OHO's own work, but rather the stuff we've seen that makes us proud we work on the web.  You'll see a number of posts like this for the conceivable future, but this is our inaugural post so let's get things started.

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So what are we discussing this week?  Parallax Scrolling.

If you're like us, you've probably come across a webpage that seemed inordinantly tall, right?  No, I am not talking about a lazy loading infinite scroll site like Facebook's news feed.  I'm talking about a page that, as you scroll, loads different animations and content changes that are tied to the scroll.  Like a zoetrope laid out vertically.  With us?  Good.

Well that's parallax scrolling.  With its roots in video game background animations, parallax scrolling uses just HTML and CSS (no Flash - hooray!) to create a sense of depth to the content.  It's a simple concept in theory, sure, but whoever first thought of it as a way of inspiring the user to interact with the page contents without forcing the masses to use an ages-old plugin is bloody brilliant.

Here are a few parallax scrolling sites that just blow our minds (don't forget to scroll!):

The Volkswagen Beetle for Germany

A highly clickable, nostalgically-driven lookbook at the newly redesigned Beetle that does everything a car model lookbook does but better?  We know what our next car is going to be...

Ben the Bodyguard

The noir inspired visuals and wonderful color pallate are enough to draw us in, but the best part is as Ben casually walks his crime-riddled streets, a grimy, Bensky-tagged subway passing overhead and heinous acts happening all around him, you can't help but wonder: "am I playing Grand Theft Auto?"  Talk about immersive.

Samsung Galaxy S II

So what if the Galaxy S 3 is newer, sleeker, and probably better?  The microsite for the S 3 pales in comparison with this stunner for the S II.  The visuals are bigger than life, the elements have that slow rise that reminds us of Willy Wonka's fizzy lifting drink, and you really can't leave this page feeling uninformed.  A win.

Grey Goose

Another win for the "parallax sites are beautiful" category.  We don't love the nail-biting experience of "maybe this link will open here, maybe it'll take me off-site" provided here, but the lush visuals and "holy crap how'd they get so big?!" YouTube embeds are stunning.  Don't forget to click the menu buttons along the bottom (an incongruous place, but we like it) to see that it's not just the landing page: nearly the whole freaking site is parallax!

Other Examples

These sites have some great other examples of parallax sites that we don't have the space to cover but are worth checking out:

• http://webdesignledger.com/inspiration/21-examples-of-parallax-scrolling...
• http://slodive.com/inspiration/showcase/parallax-scrolling/
• http://css-tricks.com/fancy-scrolling-sites/

As you can imagine, there are tons and tons of parallax sites across the web (as this design concept is gaining momentum rapidly) so we're sure to have missed a few good ones.  Think we missed a parallax scrolling site that's worth an honorary mention or think parallax scrolling is yesterday's news?  We want to hear about it!

The brilliant minds of the OHO Interactive Research & IA team have put together their thoughts in a webinar on a concept that's sure to rock the usability boat: motivatability.  The webinar will be hosted, live, by OHO on Tuesday, July 31st, 2012 at 12:00 pm.

Registration is now open, so reserve your spot today: Register Now.

 After a intensive labor of love, we're thrilled to announce that OHO's latest project, a multi-section overhaul of Uncommon Schools' website, is launched and live to the world!

We partnered with Uncommon Schools nearly two years ago (time she is a'flying!) to create a meaningful, emotive website to drive their brand online.  And while phase one of the project gave Uncommon the beautiful, feature-rich, content managed website they always deserved, they weren't ready to call it quits upon launch last October.  And who are we to say no to a great client?

With design and technical functionality already addressed during Phase I, phase II was more about dreaming up new ways to make their already-great website even better.  By targeting key sections of the website that seemed apt for improvement, OHO collaborated with Uncommon Schools' marketing, leadership, and recruitment teams to create some awesome new site sections.

This included an unabridged overhaul of the Careers section (critical to Uncommon's mission of finding and recruiting the nation's best teachers) and the creation of an entirely new section called Our Stories, which serves as the home for all of Uncommon's amazing photos, videos, and print materials.

Check out the screengrabs below for a taste, but to see the new site sections for yourself, head over to www.uncommonschools.org.