A few weeks ago, Kaleigh and I were winding our way down the green hills of Goonengerry into Ballina. We noticed a haze coming from the South, but wrote it off as a side effect of the high winds and the construction at the Ballina bypass. 

I recently read an article on the Globe and Mail website that discussed Canada’s dear old Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, and his lack of internet domain awareness. The article titled “Harper Not Master of His Own Domain Names” was taken down shortly after it was posted, not too sure why, but it made it quite clear that Stephen Harper doesn’t have the best internet identity.

Harper doesn’t have control of stephenharper.com or stephenharper.org, and as far as I can tell, he doesn’t have stephenharper.ca either. The article mentioned that the .com site is actually a portal to escort services while the .org site is an anti-Harper site. Not a good look Harper.

You gotta get your hands on those domain names, people. As General Greg says, it’s one of the first steps you should take when setting yourself up online. It’s better to secure it now, than get embarrassed later.

Speaking of embarrassment, here is my favourite photograph of the man in charge of my home and native land.

Nighean our creative director sent me this with the comment– Sound familiar? Sadly, this spoof on client and agency relationships is accurate in far too many instances.

Things come to me. Much like lightening striking. Most of the bolts hit the ground and disappear leaving little trace. Then there are times when these bright ideas strike a tree and ignite. This feels like one of those realisations that will turn into some real goodness.

Ebay is clearly a leader in the world of ecommerce. You don’t need Forrester syndicated research to know that the number of visits and transactions on their sites is mind blowing. How come so many people buy and sell successfully on ebay? The list is long but lets cut to the roots of my epiphany: ebay’s graphic user interface. I feel so geeky and professional using that word which basically means how easy it is to check stuff out and buy it on ebay. Images and copy are sure not fancy, but boy do they work hard. How often do you see shopping carts with crappy or no images and sparse copy that leaves you wondering what the heck you are considering buying.

Look at this item on ebay I was pondering purchasing for our growing Dexter Dairy.

Nothing fancy. Great image, clear price, lots of room for copy. In closing. If you want to improve your e commerce results copy ebay.

One of my best friends is a classic for one liners, odd words and all things eccentric. I first met Rob Jull in 1986 when I was working at Upper Canada Brewing. I had just started as Upper Canada’s beer sales rep right out of university. Rob had just got back from Europe and was working on the bottling line. We became good friends and ended up selling allot of beer together. A bit of a prelude to this video clip which immortalizes on of his favourite one liners: oh oh oh…bitter dregs.

Rob is very passionate about wine and now runs a business specialising in all things fine wine vinifera.com and definitely no bitter dregs. Rob’s website is one of the first site’s built by Bush and it is a great example of doing less better.

Speaking of doing less. If you have read this far and are interested in talking to us about websites, social media and digital marketing we have time to take on some new projects–we are literally down to working on–you guessed it ah, ah, ah.. bitter dregs.

Since landing at Bush Australia, I’ve had the pleasure and the challenge of shooting various products for our clients. Most times a consistent, diffused light will give results that compliment the product. The problem that usually came up in the early days was simply that the exterior light wasn’t right, so I found myself scrambling around Bush headquarters looking for anything that would change the quality of the available light.

After cutting up T-shirts to wrap around lamps, I quickly smelled the burning cotton, and recalled all the “burning down the house” speeches I absorbed throughout my early years. In the back of my head I knew that buying a proper light tent would save me a lot of time, but I was keen to use household items to get me by. The Cromwell bed sheets seemed to diffuse the sunlight nicely and worked quite well for a few products – that is until the wind picked up. For a few hours the passing neighbours got a show of a foul-mouthed Canadian, chasing sheets around the property and wishing he just bought the damned tent. 

A couple hundred dollars and thirty minutes of internet shopping ended up saving me hours of post production time in every product shot since. It simply pops out of it’s portable case, and within no time, I’m packing it back up knowing I shot what I needed. Special thanks to the Bush family for the back patting and assuring me that things would get easier.                                                          

Today was a special day for the team at Bush Branding & Marketing as they celebrated their 2000th project. Appropriately project 2000 is further development of bopm (Bush Online Project Management) system. BOPM was developed by Ben Unsworth during a 1 month work exchange back in 2002. The system is built in cold fusion and will be redeveloped in php and mysql by Andrew Bleakley and a team of coders who we are putting together a brief for.

Pictured at the Bangalow Hotel from left to right Jon Sturge, Kaleigh Wisman, Greg Cromwell, Nighean O’Brien, Luke O’Brien and Andrew Bleakley. Thumbs up Lukey to all our clients and two thousand projects.

One of the many nice things about running your own business with a great bunch of people is the lack of politics and tendency to get all precious about things. How many digital agencies would blog about testing vimeo out and post a six year old video of their six year old daughter going to school? I know of at least one.

Aubrey Cromwell first day at Coorabell Public School from Gregory Cromwell on Vimeo.

I hope you find the video entertaining and that you also get to know a bit more about vimeo which seems to be a preferred tool to the increasing popular youtube.