The ideal candidate will be located in the San Diego area, although working onsite is not a requirement (we occasionally have events and/or meetings in San Diego).

Required Skills

• 3-5 years experience building customer-facing web applications
• At least 1-2 years experience with Ruby on Rails
• Proficiency w/ MySQL
• Comfortable w/ DB administration/optimization
• Fluent in Unix environments
• Experience working with XHTML/CSS/Javascript at an intermediate level
• Must have a “test first and frequently” mentality.

Desired Skills

• Interest in and/or some experience with Merb
• Experience with rSpec
• Experience working with XHTML/CSS/Javascript at an advanced level

Get in Touch

If you know your blocks from your procs, and would like to join the team, send your resume as well as any relevant work experience you want to show off to chris@integralimpressions.com. If you’re more the project manager type, be sure to check out Matt’s call for a Rock Star PM to join the team.

About the position

We are seeking a Project Manager with experience managing websites and web applications, facilitating client communications, and managing the development schedules.

The ideal candidate should have the following expertise:

• Experience managing small and large projects to completion.
• Organized and detail oriented.
• Experience with Basecamp project management software a plus
• Familiar with Use Case Scenarios, Creative and Functional Briefs
• Experience leading a team. You need to be able to drive projects to completion working directly with the developers, designers, and high level executives. The deadlines are aggressive and the job needs to be done on time no matter what.
• Minimum 2 years of relevant work experience.

This is an exciting job for a highly motivated and extremely sharp individual. Compensation is competitive including potential stock options.

To apply, send a resume and introduction letter to matt[@]integralimpressions.com. In the subject line, please include: Project Manager.

Since the end of last week, Bill and I have been working on finalizing our schedule. We’ve got all the major and minor milestones laid out, due dates assigned, and responsibilities delegated. We’re double-checking to make sure everyone involved can commit to the schedule. However, it’ll likely change very little if at all. Here it is:

Production Schedule

Looking for a logo

On Friday, I met with Bill and Chris Decatur to go over some initial concepts for our new logo. Chris is one of digital telepathy’s designers, and put together some initial concepts for our the meeting.

• Logo Concepts – Page 1
• Logo Concepts – Page 2

As we went over the concepts, there were two I gravitated towards and felt had real potential.

The Magnet

The magnet concept really played on the idea of us “pulling in” social content. I loved the concept here since this really illustrates the core of what we’re looking to do. Not only that, but using a magnet gives us some really strong direction for the rest of our creative, both visually and in terms of marketing copy.

The biggest thing I want to work on with this one is simplifying it. Logo design is often about taking a complex, or abstract concept and simplifying it visually. The trick is to do this without losing the ability to recognize the initial idea. Chris did a great job with this so far, but we just need to push it a bit further.

The other concern that I had was making sure we didn’t venture too close to Unison’s logo. Especially considering the guys over at Panic love to call out people who can’t seem to come up with their own ideas. I don’t think we have anything to worry about though. To be honest, Bill and Chris didn’t even know what Unison was until I took them to the website.

“The Squiggle”

I wasn’t really called “The Squiggle”. I just needed something short to use for a heading. Just to be clear, this is the concept exploration done in the bottom right of the first page.

What I liked about this direction was the simplicty. I love simplicity, I really do. I felt this mark was elegant, yet bold. What it was lacking was a strong story. It needed a reason other than just being simple for the sake of being simple. The whole “let’s combine the initials of the company” thing is straightforward and common. (Yes, I do know what you’re thinking right now. No, I’m not saying its wrong. Let’s just move on…) However, the act of bringing together, or combining, the “P” and “S” does actually tie in with what we do quite well. I want to see if we can push that angle more with this one and make it a little more apparent.

What do you think?

I put some of my initial feedback out there for a couple reasons. First of all, I think that by hearing my own feedback, it’ll give you some insight into our thought processes around these concepts, and allow you to understand them more than you would if you were to just see them on your screen. I can’t repeat everything we discussed (not that there were any secrets, I just don’t have the time), but hopefully I’ve hit the important points.

Secondly, I want to get the conversation started. We want to hear what you think about the direction we’re going. I think its rare to see these early stages of the design process exposed in this way, but I’d rather hear your opinions now. A couple months from now (or maybe even a couple weeks from now), we’ll be too far along to easily react and adapt to feedback, suggestions, etc. Good or bad, bring it!

Disclaimer: First of all, I’m not going to do this very often, or else I’d be attaching a disclaimer to almost every post I do. In fact, I’ll probably only say this once, so pay attention. Our goal is to share as much as possible with you, unfiltered. This means you’ll see things that are rough, and unfinished. Some of it may not make sense. Some of it may be flat out wrong (Yes, we do get things wrong from time to time. We are also allowed to change our minds on occasion). With any luck, it won’t all just be noise and you’ll actually get something out of it. If you have something to say about it, please do so. That’s the whole idea.

I’m going to walk you through our thought processes, and show you some of the documents we’ve been using to push us forward.

Brand Platform Worksheet

A friend of ours at a traditional PR firm gave us a document they typically work through when coming up with a new brand. Most of it was a bit excessive for our needs, but there were a few questions we answered which really helped us get a clear picture of sort of personality we were after.

Here’s that document.

The document itself is pretty short, but the conversation behind it was heated and lengthy. We gave names to a couple concepts in there that are core to our company. Primarily those are “social content,” and “extreme transparency.” Each one is really its own post, so I’ll need to elaborate on those in the very near future. In the meantime, know that they’re there and just roll with it.

Brand Questionnaire

Bill Bonnefil, from digital telepathy gave us his own version of a brand questionnaire. This one was a little more relevant, and helped us elaborate on some of our initial ideas on concepts.

Here’s Bill’s questionnaire

At the end of all this, Matt and I felt we had a pretty good mental image of our new brand. To test that theory, we jointly came up with an answer to a pretty simple question: “What do you do?” More specifically, we wanted a 10-words-or-less response. Articulating this clearly and concisely was actually a lot more difficult than we thought it would be, but we think we have a pretty good answer for you:

We build websites that favor social content.

We felt pretty good about that, and decided we could move on to the actual name.

Namestorming

Over the past week, Matt and I had independently put together some word lists (those of you that follow @cabad @chrisabad or @mattsurfs probably know this already). This morning we combined our lists, and looked them over to see what we could pull out.

This is our namestorming document

For the most part, this is unorganized chicken-scratch. We worked on this document collaboratively, in real-time, using Google Docs. I considered cleaning it up so you could understand it better, but ultimately decided against it. Showing you the original document gives you a more “raw” view of our process. It’s also less work for me.

This document consists of words that describe the brand’s attitude, the actual services we will offer, and also some industry terminology mixed in for good measure. At the end of it all, here’s the list of potential candidates we had:

• ClearlyWeb
• ClearlyContent
• TransparentWeb
• FranklyVisible
• ClearFavor
• FavorClear
• OpenFavor
• FavorFrank
• NakedFavor
• FavorNaked
• FavorFrank
• FavorVisibility
• Transvisibility
• Clearly – Media / Group / etc
• Exposed Impressions
• Open Impressions
• FavorOpen
• Open Kimono
• Glasshouse Media
• Uppenbar
• Open Tag
• ContentClearly
• Vizable
• Open Ideas
• Open Concepts
• Clearly Media
• ClearlyVisible
• TagClearly
• ClearlyTech
• Visible Type
• Transparent Type
• ClearlyContext
• Clearly Styled
• VisibleNature
• ClearNature
• OpenNature
• ExposedNature
• ClearWire
• WireClearly
• ClearlyType
• TransparentType

Community and Peer Feedback

Our next step is to take these initial ideas and look for some feedback. We’ll be taking these documents to our peers directly to see what they think, but we also encourage all of you to send us feedback in the comments below (if you’re shy, you can send them directly to me at chris[at]integralimpressions[dot]com). We want to know if any of our ideas stand out for you, but we’re also open to brand new ideas not on our list. We believe that by involving a diverse group of people in the process, we’ll hear ideas that we never would have thought of… and that excites us!

We’ve received great feedback so far, as well as fantastic support from some awesome people. Please keep it coming.

What’s more, we’ve decided to publish the whole thing out there for all to see. That’s right, we’ve been inspired by some of Ryan Carson’s efforts and decided we love the idea of sharing with the world. That’s what this Internet thing is all about, right? Between blog posts, Tweets, photos, video, and audio, we want to get as much of it out there as possible.

We like to believe there are other people out there who want to see what goes on at a tiny company like ours, behind closed doors. Well, the doors are closed no longer! We’re willing to share our processes with the community. You’ll see our successes as well as our set-backs. What do we want in return? We want active participation and community feedback. We’ll take it all, the acclaims and critiques alike. Whether you want to set us straight, or give us a high five, we want to hear about it.

Why are we doing it?

So why would we do such a crazy thing? We’ve been around for almost 4 years and feel we’ve got a pretty good thing going here. So why throw it all away? First of all, let’s get one thing straight: we’re not just throwing everything away. The best of what we’ve built up we’re keeping around.

The main motivation behind this re-brand is really to give synergy and cohesiveness to the lessons we’ve learned, the theories we’ve formed, and the tools we’ve built over the past few years. We want to take all that, wrap it up in a neat package, and say, “There you have it. This is us.” It’s not about starting over. Its about evolving and refining. We want to create “us, 2.0.”

Something else I’ll point out is that it’s important we not only do this ourselves, but we do it publicly. I don’t want to say much more about that just yet. We will keep as few secrets as possible, but this is one of them. We need to save something for the big “unveiling” at the end. All I can say is, if you enjoy following us on this little adventure, you’ll love some of the announcements we’ll be making once its all said and done.

One other benefit we hope to get out of a public process is accountability. When you’re at a company as small as us, there isn’t a whole lot of “responsibility overlap.” Often times the only person you’re accountable to is yourself. While that’s usually enough for us, there’s something to be said for knowing you have to explain yourself to other people. Rather than having a big company with big expensive meetings in a big expensive conference room, we choose this. We want you to be our ad-hoc team members, and the Internet our conference room.

So What’s Next?

We officially kicked this all off on Friday, so the wheels are already in motion. We’ve also decided we’re going to do this whole thing in 90 days (we feel sleep’s overrated anyways). Considering everything we’re looking to accomplish, we feel a 90-day process is a pretty tall order for a tiny company like us (we do still have client work to keep up on), so we’ve asked our good friends over at digital-telepathy to assist us. They’ve got a really sharp group of people over there, and we think they’ll give us some great feedback along the way.

There are other related tasks behind this (sales, marketing, technology, etc.), but we’re going to allow the creative/branding elements to drive the schedule since this is the area we feel we have the most ground to cover (although we do intend to publish about everything):

• New company name – 2 weeks
• Revised brand identity (including new service offering) – 3 weeks
• Overhaul our online communication platform (i.e. redo the website) – 8 weeks

This is a very high-level overview just to give you an idea of what direction we’re headed and how fast we’ll be running there. We’ll likely publish more granular milestones as we get into it.

We’re Off, and We Want to Take You With Us!

Here we go. We’re not 100% how this is going to work out, but that’s part of the fun right? I can tell you we’re all extremely motivated here, and we’ve got a network of awesome people who are equally excited for us. Those things put together make for an interesting ride at the very least.

As I said earlier, the main thing we’re looking for is community involvement. We’re willing to step outside of a “normal comfort zone” and tell it all. In exchange, we want to hear what you think. Feel free to start right now and comment below.

If you want to stay updated on events along the way, be sure to subscribe to our blog. For more up-to-the minute updates on what we’re up to, follow me, Matt, and Ben on Twitter. Thanks for joining us on this exciting adventure, and wish us luck!

Thanks to all the San Diego Bloggers that came out and helped make our MeetUp the best yet! We had 20 bloggers get together at Cafe Bassam yesterday for a little caffeine, wine, and conversation.

The location wasn’t conducive to presenting or speaking, as a result we mingled, talked amongst ourselves, and conducted some good ol’ fashion networking.

The purpose of the SD Blogger MeetUp is move the conversation happening online, to a social setting, where people can converse in person. We are all that much more likely to link exchange links, comment on posts, and support each other by ‘putting a face (and personality) with a blog’.

It was a pleasure to meet everyone last night. Again, thank you for your attendance. The next Blogger MeetUp is going to be March 25th, Tuesday at 7pm. The location is set for Cafe Bassam (as of right now), but that might change as the event approaches.

Your feedback is important to me- positive or negative- I welcome your help in creating an invaluable event for local Bloggers. Geoff, Jenn and Carole both took time to review the event on their blogs; special thanks!

If you missed the event last night, here are some of the local bloggers in attendance:

Tony Balsamo
Richie Edquid
Eric Bidwell
Luke Pilon
Jessica McKimmie
Kris Berg
Jennifer Van Grove
Geoff Young
Dan Melson
Deb Anderson
Carole Lane
David Matt Green
Patrick Crowley
Ed O’Connor
Erin O’Connor
Enrique Gutierrez
Dan Tentler
Matt Browne
Gabriel Lawrence
Arlene Doria

We hope to see everyone next month! Our community grows stronger by linking and commenting. Please do your part.

Best,

Matt Browne

• Negligible overhead. All OpenVZ virtual servers share the same kernel. This makes for such little overhead that it goes unnoticed.
• Flexible resource allocation. We can share resources among our virtual servers much more flexibly than we could with Xen. For example, our Level 3 hosting plan has 1GB RAM. But we don’t really cap it at 1GB, that’s just what we guarantee. In reality, we’re fine with a customer’s virtual server temporarily using more than that. If it becomes permanent, we’ll just ask them to upgrade. Our servers have a ton of RAM, and there’s always GBs to spare, so no sense in letting them go to waste. If we were using Xen, we’d have to cap the customer at 1GB and they’d need to upgrade to increase that, even if only temporarily. The same deal applies to CPU and disk space.
• Extremely quick upgrades and downgrades. We can upgrade or downgrade a customer’s resources in a matter of seconds and usually with zero downtime. How’s that for cool. Even disk quota’s can be altered in seconds – something that’s usually a painful operation with Xen.
• Stability. OpenVZ is the core of a commercial product, Virtuozzo. Virtuozzo has been through several years of production usage, and it’s rock-solid. We’ve not had a single problem with OpenVZ. What’s more, should we ever need commercial support we can always contact Virtuozzo.
• Performance. I can’t provide you with any benchmarks right now, but compared to some of the Xen solutions we’ve used in the past, OpenVZ seems a lot faster. Read into that what you will, but that’s our experience.

If you’ve also used both OpenVZ and Xen, I’d love to hear your experiences. What made the most sense for you? Why?

• Behind the Scenes – Quick updates about what goes on over here.
• Code – For those of you who know your objects from your iterators. Most of the time we’ll be talking about our web framework of choice, Ruby on Rails.
• Design – Here we share our thoughts on design-related topics such as usability , information architecture, and interface design.
• Marketing – Internet marketing is at the core of what we do here. We’ll pass along theories, ideas, tips, and tricks that will hopefully benefit you in your own marketing efforts.
• Products – If you use any of our products, and want to stay up-to-date on the latest changes and enhancements, this is the place for you.

If you’re the kind of person that just wants it all, our main feed, which is a combination of all the feeds listed above, is still around.

Each member will have time to introduce their blog and discuss their experience.

• How many comments do you average?
• What blogging platform do you prefer and why?
• What is the best way to get images and photos on your blog?
• Have you had any experience with Podcasting or Videoblogging?
• What tools do you use to promote your blog?

This is an opportunity for everyone to benefit from the unique experience of others. If you have any interest, Join the MeetUp group even if you can’t make this particular meeting.

Our Next Meeting: Tuesday October 30th, 2007 at 7pm near Downtown San Diego

Please RSVP at the Bloggers MeetUp Page

We will kick off the first San Diego Bloggers Meet Up with an open discussion on how to structure the group. The founding members will play a key role in shaping the first several sessions and will ultimately be responsible for the success of the group. If you have any interest in blogging, we welcome your experience and hope for your attendence.

Integral’s founder Matt Browne will be conducting a 30 minute presentation on Business Blogging. BarCamp will be held on June 2nd and 3rd, 1pm on Saturday through 5pm on Sunday located near Miramar Road. Please see the BarCamp website for more detailed information on the event. We hope to see you there!

I like to believe that we’re not so different from everyone else out there. What I mean is, the problems that we face every day, other people probably face as well. The solutions that we come up with for those problems, will probably also work for other people. With this idea in mind, we’ve decided to make take these solutions and make them available to our peers, in hopes that our solutions to our problems will work as solutions for other people’s problems as well. Some of these we will be able to offer for free (though still mostly undocumented, we’ve had a public subversion repository of Rails plugins for some time now). Others, will be fee-based.

Simple support ticket tracking

As we continue to expand both our product and service line, we found a need to track one-off support tickets in a very simple and unobtrusive way. We needed something centralized that we would be able to integrate into our various products and services well. Ticketish is the answer to that problem for us.

Highlights

Without getting into every little detail, there are a few key points that we find particularly useful for our needs:

• Multiple Projects – You can setup multiple projects under one account and see all your pending or active tickets at a glance. Each project has it’s own public support form and unique URL.
• Comment Threads – Each ticket has a comment thread so you can track communications back and forth regarding a specific issue.
• Attachments – Attachments are very useful for sending over a screenshot of that IE6 bug that just won’t seem to go away.
• Email Integration – Each project has its own unique email address. Both new tickets and comments to existing tickets can be created using this email address. This works especially well for existing systems (i.e. Exception Notifier) which already use email to send notifications.
• RSS Feeds – There are RSS feeds for just about everything, so you can track pending tickets, or tickets assigned to you, without littering your inbox.
• Public Interface – Each ticket has a public URL so the client can easily stay updated on the progress of their support request.

Private Beta

We’ve been using Ticketish internally for several months, but have had to make several modifications to allow other people to use it as well (multiple accounts, billing system, etc.). These new additions should be wrapped up shortly. At which time, we’ll be opening up a private beta. We are looking for people who are willing to put the system into use and get us some really good feedback. If you would like to participate in our private beta, please leave us your email address.

We are ushering in this new partnership with our readers by embedding a blog (with comments) directly into our new website, while our home page features the latest and most relevant article. We will also engage our readers with The Derivative, our newsletter that will summarize the month’s best and most applicable articles.

Make sure you have subscribed to our newsletter and you have updated your preferences to receive the communications you value most.

Not only have our products and services sections have become more concise and straight to the point, but the voice of the website reflects a change in the attitude of Integral Impressions. We have settled into our niche and are busy building marketing tools that transcend any other product in the market place.

We welcome you to try Outlandish, our Landing Page management tool. There is no faster and more reliable way to manage your most important landing pages. If you would like to consult with us about building a custom application to fit your needs, email me personally at matt@integralimpressions.com.

I want to personally thank the team for their hard work in getting the site together. Ben and Chris did a phenomenal job on the design and development of what will usher in the next generation of our firm. Great job team and I hope everyone enjoys the new look. Feel free to email us feedback!

Today, hundreds of marketing professionals use the Outlandish dashboard to determine which campaign is performing most efficiently. And as the ultimate compliment, Google launched their own landing page product to become our first large competitor in that niche. In 2007, thousands of marketers will embrace Outlandish as the first stop in determining the health of their advertising vehicles and landing pages will be effective at raising the bar of existing campaigns.

Our next application launch is an email marketing application called Nourish. Designed to compliment Outlandish landing pages, we will begin alpha testing in approximately 90 days. If you’d like to be one of the first to test this new product, please email us your interest. nourish@integralimpressions

With the ability to manage emails and landing pages married in one solution, we had one more management utility to conquer: the content management system commonly referred to as CMS. CMS is a fundamental application for changing text and adding pages to your website without knowing how to program. All our websites for clients are being equipped with a backend to manage text and basic changes.

Many marketers use several web based applications integral to their daily lives of discerning user behavior from statistical analysis. Many of us stare at unidentifiable statistics and fumble our way through an overzealous user interface. This is our first and most important opportunity to deliver the critical information marketers need to make decisions on, in an easy and readable fashion.

Look for Integral Impressions in 2007 to bring a suite of web based applications to life for marketers by continuing to build products of the highest caliber that meet critical needs for the advertising community. To learn more of the services Integral could potentially provide, please contact our sales development team. sales@integralimpressions.com

Thank you and we wish you a wonderful new year and hope you achieve all your marketing deliverables.