We’ve always been a little different from your average web design or graphic design agency. We have an unusual name for a start and we’re very much into making cool stuff.

2008 saw us working with an Auckland company, Mintshot, that was also into making cool stuff. We were fortunate enough to be offered the job of redesigning their web site as well as being offered the opportunity to develop a range of interactive games for them.

The first few games were variants of a popular “Find the prize and win it” theme. While the last two involved guessing a boarding pass number to win a flight to the gold coast and disarming a bomb to stop your prize from being blown to kingdom come (we really enjoyed this one ;)

All of these games were integrated into a live scoring system managed by a remote service that monitored to see if a user had won the prize. Basically, every time a user had an attempt, that attempt was checked to see if it was the lucky one … and a success or try again signal was returned (no cheeky random number generation stuff here).

Martian made all the graphics, the flash components, the animation, the visual effects, the 3d imagery and even the odd sound effect here and there … great fun indeed and truly a great way for us to push our boundaries.

I’ve updated our portfolio to include some of the flash interactive work that we’ve created and you can get to it right here.

You don’t know where your next job will come from and while you should always strive to gain new clients the ones you have are a potential goldmine of repeat sales.  But, you need to remind them that you appreciate their business and that you would like to do even more with them.

Traditionally this has been accomplished through old fashioned phone calls or printed mailers.  But these forms of communication have high costs both financially and in the amount of time they take - time that could be better spent on your business.  Mailers are expensive to print and we all know they end up in the rubbish bin.  You may as well save time and just poor your money into your own bin.

Ringing your clients is great, you cannot get any more personal than that.  But think about it.  Do you really ring them?  How often?  How many of them? I bet you don’t ring them all.  And what are those calls costing you in time?  Even if you have only have 100 clients in your database and you take the time to ring 5 a day, which will take about an hour, that equates to 12.5% of your work time per month on the phone!

In this current economic climate it is essential to market to your clients but you have to be sure you are not wasting  time and more importantly, money.  So what is the answer? Read more »

Now I have never been one to buy into the gimmicky cleverness of techy gizmo’s.  When Mark bought an iPhone I laughed at him.  I called him a sheep and a slave to marketing.  I chortled over how he had just piddled away money on a shiny new toy that, by all accounts, was not even a very good phone.

Then a few months ago, while I was berating myself for not having a map in the car Mark introduced me to the Google maps feature on the iPhone.

This was the first time I had really considered the flashy iPhone as any sort of realistic business tool.  Mark showed me how it updated his contact lists, his to do lists, the internet access and the business application you could download to make life and work just a little bit easier.

I immediately went out and bought one.

Now I cannot be without it.  It wakes me up in the morning and tells me what I have to do that day.  If I have a few minutes to wait I no longer twiddle my thumbs, I update my to do lists, check website updates, email clients or plot routes for my next meeting.  The screen makes the interaction with the phone so much easier than the conventional cursor key/text key functions of regular phones.

So for anyone out there who, like me, poo-pooed the iPhone, I say “don’t knock it till you try it”.  It’s not the gimmick you may think it is.  It’s a real business tool.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I’m off to feed my virtual iPhone pet, “flossy the sheep”.

A lot of people have been asking “how did you lose your broadband?”.   Once I explain it they are shocked to realise how easily it could happen to them.  So here is the story and a few things you aught to know if you’re attached to your broadband or hoping to get it….

The Story:
Martian was moving office.  The last filing cabinet was going into the back of the truck.  It’s 8.00pm and all is well.  Cue the the Telecom Rep…. I receive a call to confirm that the technician will be around the next day to hook up all the business lines and our service will be transferred across - we just won’t have any broadband…. Read more »

We after about 6 weeks of having the internet dribble down at dial-up speeds the Martians are finally back on broadband!

It’s was amazing to see the difference between dial-up and broadband.  Dial-up is not just slow and annoying but a lot of the time you are unable to establish a firm grip on the web.

In today’s super fast internet world using dial up is like trying to lassoo a racecar with a wet noodle.  It was an interesting, and infuriating, lesson in how the internet has grown over the last few years.  I remember dial-up when the web first made an appearance - and sure it was a bit slow but there was not a lot of data heavy content on sites.

Now websites have more content, and more complex context at that.  The simple flash banner or video is common place these days and the code behind the scenes is crammed full of extra functions that were merely a twinkle in a web developers eye a few years ago.  This is to be expected.  With faster connections and better browsers more can be crammed into a site without affecting download speeds - on broadband.

I found a lot of the time that dial-up would drop off, stall or the browser would simply give up due to insufficient data being received.  This worked both ways.  Uploading a couple of hundred kb of file to our mail system turned into an hour long game which involved a lot of finger crossing and fervant praying.  This is the sort of stuff that we take for granted these days.  Click, done!

So come on Telecom!  Get the hardware in place so NZ can catch up with the web.  Dial-up is not an option in this day and age….

I’m not a huge fan of golf, but I do love flash and I do love seeing flash being put to great use.

The World Golf Tour experience allows golf enthusiasts to play the world’s most challenging and exclusive courses with HD graphics on a PC or Mac platform for free. WGT’s online community allows friends, families and golf fans to play a round of golf simultaneously, competing in tournaments for prizes, sharing scores, testing out the newest equipment and reading the latest news in the golfing world.

Go for a round here.

Martian Design & Interactive now offer a fantastic system for running email marketing campaigns!

it’s really simple to use. We just design you an email template, integrate it into our email marketing platform. You provide us names and email addresses of your customers and we deliver your marketing messages via email to them.

After the campaign has run you can log in to our system and and see stats for how many people opened your email, how many of those clicked on a link, how many unsubscribed etc etc. Its a HUGELY powerful and cost effective form of marketing with truly trackable results.

If you have a web site already then we can supply you with some code so that you can add a “subscribe to our newsletter” form directly onto your site … or if you don’t have a web site as yet then we can certainly build a brilliant one for you.

Next time you are thinking about a marketing campaign then get in touch and we’ll work some email marketing magic for you.