Welcome to John Sammon's Internet Marketing Portfolio and Blog
John Sammon has been professionally designing websites since 2000. In the last few years, he has advanced his skills beyone web design and into internet marketing. He is skilled in a number of programs such as Flash, Dreamweaver, ASP, HTML Hardcode, and SQL Server. Among the many diverse experiences in web design he has created dynamic websites using asp, viral video campaigns using flash and asp, and created several different internet commercials.
Friday, May 16, 2008
Portfolio Updated!
I am continuing to work on and update my portfolio of work. Today I uploaded a project I did in the Fall for one of my flash classes. It's a flash website for Fridays Live. I created a flash website and interacts with a custom content managment system to that anyone on the show could update the website. I chose not to implement it and work on an html version of the site because of concerns that search engines would not find the site.
I also updated my portfolio site with some commercials that I've done in the past. You can see all of my commercials here: http://www.jsammon.com/commercials
This was a video piece I put together using iMovie. Today I am working with Final Cut Pro for one of my classes. It tends to be a pain in the butt because you have to shoot and record to a Mini DV tape and then transfer over the video, capture the video, then edit the video. The editing part is fun though. I'm stuck on transferring my final piece back to DV for class.
We have to do 2 more assignments for the class where we put together two 2 minute pieces. One is silent and tells a story the other can contain music and sound effects.
I'm working very hard to update my portfolio page right now. I've been cleaning up the flash site and am making steady progress. I hope to knock it out this weekend.
I'm currently working as part of a team on a large website project for the College of Visual Communication at Ohio University. The project is called Soul of Athens (www.soulofathens.com). The site was introduced last year and has won several awards for it's unique portrayal of Athens, Ohio. The site is unique because it utilizes flash and flash video.
This year we will be doing another version of the site. My class, VICO 588 has been charged with the development side of the project. We are in the procees of evaluating the site and redesigning/restructuring it. I've used my experiences in marketing and web design to provide feedback on how to improve the site's structure. We chose to go with Drupal, a php based content managment system, to build the site. So this year the site will be a hybrid and that will help with getting more traffic to the site.
Since the site is in flash the only traffic coming to the site from search engines is coming when people type in "soul of athens." We are going to include text on the pages to describe the video stories. It's been fun so far providing feedback on the project and working with the group. We plan to launch the new version of the website in May.
I found out today that my glorious run of grad school will come to an end earlier than I expected. I had planned to be at OU at the very least until Nov of 2008. However, I was informed that I will be done at the end of summer quarter (August 2008). It's both exciting and sad at the same time. Realizing that it will be ending sooner than later, I am shifting my focus to some other projects.
This will now be my last quarter working on Fridays Live, a student produced sketch comedy tv show at Ohio University. I decided to dedicate today to working on cleaning up their website for their 16th season. Today I launched a facelift of the site here: http://www.fridayslive.net. I'm still waiting for content for the site but I'm also planning to launch a wordpress blog so that everyone from the show can post content. It will be fun because people who are fans of the show can get an idea of how many people work on the show and the different things that they do.
I also got some great feedback on my www.phenomsportsgear.com website from Dave Stack of http://www.musicstack.com and http://www.pluggedincleveland.com. I will list a few tips that he gave me in my next post.
The early success of my first two website intitiatives: athenshub.com and phenomsportsgear.com (launched this year) are eating up memory on my virtual private server. Today I kept getting http: server errors on my site. I was informed of the problem by my hosting company: http://www.hostmysite.com. I guess it's just the nature of the beast. Right now I have 512 MB of memory and I'm going to upgrade to 1 Gig. So hopefully that will hold me down for a while. But again my cost for hosting will go up. That will suck!
There are two projects that I will start and finish by the end of the summer. One is replicating athenshub.com for New York City. i'm creating www.newyorkcityhub.com and launching it by June. That should be pretty cool and a true test of my Search Engine Marketing Skills. Athenshub started to generate traffic pretty fast and my brother lives in NYC. So hopefully that will be a success.
The other site will be a blog/affiliate site for people who like to work out with music. I really enjoy integrating music in my workout and I'd like to have a site where I can throw out my playlists and have others throw out their own. I was on itunes today looking for some good songs and their imix playlist search appears to be messed up. So hopefully I can provide a useful website.
Hey Everyone! Welcome to my portfolio/blog. I have so much going on these days that I figured it was easier to do a blog and discuss the different projects I'm working on.
Currently I'm working on completeing my affliate sporting goods store http://www.phenomsportsgear.com. I started it in December of 2007 and finally it's coming together. Yesterday I worked on putting up links for the individual projects for each MLB Baseball team. I'm also working to get the OK for other affiliate companies to list their products on the site. I was approved by footlocker to sell their products. I'm using the affilate program called http://www.linkshare.com.
I plan on marketing the site primarily by optimizing the site for search engines. The last time google indexed the site, it didn't have a lot of products on there. However, now there are over 1300 products up on the site. Traffic is starting to pick up though.
Check out the site and let me know what you think.
