Mumbrella wants a digital agency
As Mumbrella approaches our second anniversary, it’s time for us to ask for help.
This is us calling a pitch.
You see, I’m grateful for the understanding of readers thus far, but it’s nearly time to go pro.
Mumbrella’s logo, such that it is, was bodged together by me in about ten minutes on the day we launched. The plan was to come up with something a bit more grown up a couple of weeks later. Two years without a proper logo is getting a bit silly.
But that’s the least of it. The rest of our site design was done in a matter of days. And without a full-on designer.
We started off with just one content stream. Then we split it into News, Opinion and Dr Mumbo. Then we added Jobs. And an events board. Plus there’s our business directory. And of course our freelance file.
Just over a year ago, The Mumbo Report was born – you’ll find that in our video section.
When we ran out of room along the top, we added the FYI section down the right hand side.
At some point we need to stop hanging baubles on the existing Christmas tree, and redesign that front end. We’re about there.
But that’s the least of it.
With all that going on in the front end, you can imagine what that’s doing to our back end. We use Word Press as our content management system.
Word Press is blimmin’ brilliant. But we’ve amended our amendments and then amended them again.
There’s a bit of untangling to do. We probably also need some help in making sure that we’re maximising our SEO potential in the way we’ve got things configured.
And we certainly need some help in developing or adapting a plug-in or two. One or two of our plans around this point are a bit on the confidential side until we get to know each other better.
But the Secret Stuff is quite interesting.
There’s also some other boring but important stuff. Our traffic’s grown to the point where there are peak moments as we send out our daily email when readers can struggle to get onto the site. We’ve upgraded our server several times. But we need help developing a bombproof solution. Maybe it’s the cloud. Maybe it isn’t. And ongoing support for staying up in the day-to-day, and continuing to develop in the longer term. So we need to be working with someone with a strong tech backbone.
At this stage, I’m asking for expressions of interest.
What’s on the table is a mixture of hard cash and contra. Along of course, with being in the industry shop window when you help us deliver the brand new Mumbrella.
So if you’d like to talk about it, please email me at tim@focalattractions.com.au. Those conversations will help us draw a more formal shortlist of two or three.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Tim Burrowes
Linkedin
WOW you have such a long way in such a short space of time. A testament to such a fabulous website! Please keep getting better and better, I love reading Mumbrella! 🙂
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Email incoming Tim! Had a little fun on twitter too, hope you don’t mind! 😉 Fil’s shooting it off very soon – how exciting! I agree with Sarah, you guys have killer juicy content and are nailing it in such a short space of time! High fives… Sam Mutimer
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Tim,
Call me crazy but here’s an idea for you:
Why not break the mold of looking for a traditional client-agency relationship here. – Crowdsource the digital strategy first – in an open wiki. Allow the industry to build your model and then execute using whatever agency rises to the challenge at any one time.
By involving the industry you would be indirectly promoting it, thus solving part of the issue, as well as sharing and growing the digital community through education on your journey. All this without having to pick a favourite. You could argue you’d be giving your strategy to competitors – I’d argue you’d be showing thought leadership which is ftw.
Like I said. Call me crazy.
@eunmac
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Wow. Kudos to the agencies that have the gusto to put up their hand and say ‘Yes please, we’d like our work put under the most intense industry scrutiny such that we could make or break our entire reputation based on how we deliver on this particular project’. At the end of it, they’ll either be the subject or envy of derision from their peers!
Yes, we here have that gusto. Unfortunately though, we don’t have the in-house technical expertise to deliver on this one.
Good luck with it Tim. I guess the success of your site so far would lend weight to the ‘content is king’ argument – so I look forward to enjoying more Mumbrella content in whatever format it is presented.
Unless, of course, it includes autoplay video ads 😉
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What’s the hard cash component worth?
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Tim – i think you should leave everything the way it is as we’re all familiar with it and it does the job it’s intended to do.
No redesign just for redesign’s sake, please!
or to scratch a two year itch
or to gain closure on an issue that personally has been in the back of your mind but which has no such materiality to your readership.
just my 2c worth
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Tim, well done with the site so far – come from nowhere to be best in category/industry! No mention in your brief about improving monetization,..??…I’m assuming Mumbrella is not a charitable organization although you might probably argue that on some points :P. It’s just that….well, for any digital publisher I’ve come across, that’s the primary (only*) goal…isn’t it??
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I liked Iain McDonald idea of crowdsourcing your site.
For creative design try some Aussie legends 99designs.com or designcrowd.com
Or simply run a industry competition.
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Reckon it looks great the way it is.
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Tim, have a look at this list of great digital agencies – they might be able to help you.
http://www.narrowdesign.com/future/
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why fix something that ain’t broke. A couple of things about the site
1/ It works
2/ It reads fine
3/ It works
4/ it is user friendly
5/ It works
6/ Already working, no need to spend a cent.
7/ I would argue readers of mumbrella just want the stories. We get enough bells and whistles at other sites.
8/It works
9/ A fancy site doesn’t improve the stories
10/ google are still using the boring logo they began with.
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crowd sourcing ‘eh?
that’ll pay the mortgage in one of the world’s most expensive countries…
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Just do 99designs.com mate
You don’t have to put up with any wanker’s then!
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I’ve got this great idea where we use autorefresh to make sure readers are always aware of the latest stories…
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@warlach too funny!
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Don’t try and fix what aint broke.
Work on your revenue model… maybe? I don’t know, maybe you are rolling in it. Good luck to you either way 🙂
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Warlach – you’re a genius!
I have this other idea where you auto-load videos and/or ads and force people to mute their speakers.
Brilliant.
Tim, you owe us royalties.
On a more serious note, well done on how far the site has traveled.
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Genius Nehadk! How about this: an expanding ad from the sidebar that fills the screen every time the page is loaded and which has a loud, autoplaying video embedded! .
Think of the reach that video will get when the page reloads every 30 seconds and the video window, which you can’t close, takes 22 seconds to finish!
(Oh, and, naturally, all jokes aside, congrats on the success.)
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Hej Tim,
howdy from Sweeedeen. Just a thought from my morning commute.
You should really consider creating a mobile optimised version of the site. Considering your focus on link sharing and social media traffic driving, and the number of tweets/posts linking to your content, it would be a good move. Primarily because such a high proportion of twitter/facebook users are on their mobiles – and click interesting shared links only to be disappointed when landing on a difficult to read page. I myself have had log on on my desktop at work to type this comment, as the comment field doesn’t render correctly on my iphone.
So get a digital agency with super strong creds in mobile. Test them on their recommendations on mobile web vs APPs, make sure they get the critical implications for search and sharing that will result and that they can build for mobiles that are something other than an iphone.
This can blow B&T, Adnews and other wannabe blogs out of the murky blog water.
Good luck in the RFI
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I have to say, the simplicity of the site is one of the things that I really enjoy! Not overly flashy – because it doesn’t have to be. The content speaks for itself.
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That’s a shame…I love the site…it’s so ‘Mumbrella-ish’
🙂
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Girls on bikes, babe of the day, self promoter of the day and bikini madness…
Dear Tim
I think Iain McDonald’s idea is great – crowd sourcing: so here’s my ideas.
They’re probably self evident and I’m sure you’ve been looking at your contributors and realised that the need is there, anyway at the risk of stating the obvious here’s what I think you should be doing.
‘Girls on bikes and babe of the day’
You get so many comments – so it’s clear that people want to get involved.
But you can tell by reading their comments that a lot of your readers are out of their depth with things like media, marketing, digital and stuff like that.
By including a girls on bikes section or a babe of the day section you’ll be pitching them at ‘their level’ – it’s much more inclusive. They get to comment and post about things they really understand. Girls in bikinis, ‘hot fours’, you know what I mean.
Trust me this will work.
I know a few girls that I can hook you up with – they’d be into modeling for you. I would be too. I can send you photographs. Let me know.
‘Self promoter of the day’
I feel for some of your guest writers; it must be hard writing an article and trying to make out like it was ‘content’ and not self promotion. I’ve read a few of these and it’s clearly a struggle for them. Trying to hide their real agenda and make it sound like an informed point of view takes a lot of work. I think it would be easier if you just has a section for them so they can tell us why they are fabulous and their competitors are idiots.
This way you can really draw a line between content and self promotion. I think we’d all like that.
‘Stuff white people like’
Ok, I know it’s already a successful blog and someone else’s idea – but it’s a good idea for Mumbrella too. You deal with a lot of serious issues, like homophobia – and that’s good. But a lot of your readers don’t have a clue or are in denial. They need a safe place to go where they don’t have to deal with the tricky stuff you cover like, sexism, racism, homophobia and things. This way the rest of us can have a better conversation. Everybody’s happy.
I have lots of other ideas. A dating section for example.
I get lots of interesting emails from people who read my comments on Mumbrella. I think I do better here on Mumbrella than I do at Adult Match Maker. They are smarter and at least as ‘curious’, you know what I mean.
It’s lonely out there Tim. I think your readers would appreciate the service… I do. And I will again on Friday night when ‘Anon’ and I finally meet for a drink. Who would have thought that my comment on Stephanie Rice would have worked out like this?
He’s 43, single and says he’s ‘been curious about transsexuals for a long time now’ he couldn’t do anything before, but now his marriage has broken down he’s free to stop ‘living a lie’.
The plan is to meet at the Colombian and then Toko for dinner – for me it’s a chemistry thing. I worry that coming out of a broken marriage he may be too needy. That ‘need’ thing can totally ruin chemistry.
Anyway, if it works out I’ll let you know.
I’d be happy to pitch you the rest of my ideas, can you short list me?
Love
X
Lavinia
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Sounds like the stuff behind the scenes needs fixing, but like sven, Scott, Stephen, The Differentiator, Jimmy the Pom and Sonja …. I like what we see just the way it is.
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@Lavinia I absolutely love you
The amount of dog shit that gets dressed up as serious content on this site is heavy.
You lighten things up like no-one can
I want to know who the real Lavinia is!!
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Update the comments thread:
– authorize users & still enable anon
– nested replies
– up voting / down voting
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proceed with caution…too much redesign and you could lose your street cred
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Don’t move too far away from the current look, IMO!
While I agree the site could use some sprucing, I do like the simple lay-out. Love Lavina’s “Self Promoter of the Day” idea, as well.
It’s true WordPress can get pretty clunky once you have 50 billion plugins, as you have scripts all over the place, which can slow things down.
Also agree pretty strongly with Marek’s suggestion on Mobile… an iPhone friendly version of the site would be great. There’s some decent wordpress plugins for this already if you don’t include it in the new design brief (though you probably should).
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Tim,
Listen to the crowd! Changing mUmbrella is like Google asking an agency to pitch on the home page. Dooon’t do it!
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Get the Romanians to do it for a 1/20th of the price 🙂
http://www.vworker.com/RentACo.....fault.aspx
http://pixelbot.ro/
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Tim, I tend to agree with the masses – if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. I like the ‘simplistic’ look as I think it conveys a sense of ‘urgency’ – a good trait for both journalism and advertising.
Warlach & nehadk … pure genius! And hey … once you’ve hidden the “Close X” button to blend in with the background in some place a user would least expect it … why not count the click on the Close button as a Click-Through as well to prove how wonderful the vid was!
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Instead of paying thousands for a new website design get a heap of designers to compete to do the design at http://99designs.com/ then hire a conversion specialist to put it in the CMS of your choice… then your site will have looks, brains and be easy to use…
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I’m with Iain – only thing i’d add is that if this thread is anything to go by, crowdsourcing from the general mumbrella readership might lead to a lot of opinionated noise.
A more focussed approach might be to facilitate a gathering of relevant heads and workshop it under the guise that the whole process is an experimental event to be reported in a special feature.
Tim i guess you’re in a rare and fortunate situation to be able to get away with it.
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we’ve commissioned designs on 99designs and also by an elite agency and while i can’t justify the price differential there was a marked difference in the final result. If first impressions count and you want something to last, skip 99 designs, IMHO
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I attended an event a while back where you spoke about Mumbrella. I was going to ask if the bloggy look and feel of the site was a deliberate ‘strategy’ but didn’t.
I agree with the other commenters that you don’t want to make the site too glossy and flashy, that approach tends to overwhelm the content and ease of use.
Good luck with the re-design.
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This seems like a good time to say this to many “nice, clean look” folk pushing the “ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach:
As Tim states above, the site has grown beyond it’s structure, both in the front end and the back end. The user experience is messy and detracts from using the site. That’s NOT to say that the site should be glossy, full of flashy elements or similar, the content focused layout that works well for Mumbrella are design choices that should, I agree, most definitely be taken into account when laying out the new site.
Yes, the current design is servicable, but it’s like not buying your kid new clothes as they get bigger because you like the old ones: sometimes they just need new pants, even if they do look similar to the old ones to the untrained eye.
And that’s my two cents.
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What’s with all the suggestions for 99designs?
You people would be screaming bloody murder if a client decided to crowdsource their marketing or advertising, but it’s ok if it’s branding or web design?
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I’m quite horrified with the amount of group loving for 99designs.
Warlach makes the most sense here. Redesign but keep the content focused layout in mind. And choose a quality agency for god’s sake. You get what you pay for.
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Hey Tim, if it is really time to go pro and get an agency on board give me a call and we will run the pitch for you. Then you could report on the pitch process from the inside.
Hi Tim,
Perhaps the site could do with a redesign, perhaps, what your really need urgently is two things.
1. Agree that your site can be quite slow at times, my personal recommendation would be Bulletproof Networks http://bulletproof.net.au/ . Just have a look at the clientèle they keep online and the great speeds they deliver it at. They’ve also proven themselves to have plenty of technical ability.
2. You really do need a mobile-friendly version of the site. Really Really.
Hope this helps
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In regards to the hosting, I meant to use Bulletproof as the ‘if you wanna spend a bazillion dollars’ option.
If you’re after a provider with great Performance, Tech Know-how, Customer Support and Value, I’d have a serious look at http://ventraip.com.au.
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Hey Tim let me have a crack at the new design.
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A sneak preview of the first Mumbrella TVC
Here’s the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pCdrnAETSU
It’s been great working on the Mumbrella account. Sure, they’ve not appointed me, and sure they don’t even know who I am, but I figured I’d be proactive.
I think I’ll start working on the Coca Cola account tomorrow.
I don’t think that not having any relationship with the client is really an issue anymore.
From what I’ve read on Mumbrella about social media the consumers really ‘own’ the brand now days.
I remember reading how brands had to let consumers have control – I figure if I ‘own’ the brand and have ‘control’ I may as well start making their advertising, it makes sense right?
The only real problem I can see with this is getting paid – do I send an invoice now? Or will they just send me a cheque? The social media people haven’t made this part very clear yet.
I think just choosing an account and working on it has got to be a lot easier than getting shortlisted, pitching and getting appointed – from what I can tell that’s hard work. I think my way is simpler. I think we’ll see the bigger agencies starting to follow my lead. It’s ‘on trend’ I believe.
Yes, I started an advertising agency today, I had a few hours at lunch and figured I’d try running my own agency. It’s been fun so far. I have no idea what you people are complaining about. Once you take clients out of the picture it’s a piece of cake.
Though, I’m really looking forward to going to lunch with clients. I’d be great at that. I’m good company and very ‘attentive’; you know what I’m talking about.
I can make people feel ‘special’ and that’s important. I’m really a ‘people’ person.
I don’t know what the job market is like nowadays, but if any of you would like a job let me know and you can work with me. I can’t pay yet, but I’m sure we can figure something out. I’m negotiable; people like that about me.
Tim, can you send me my cheque now?
X
Lavinia
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Pls add:
– add article tags
So much learning (mainly from comments) here buried in my delicious account.
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MEC?
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