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 beyond 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, John Sammon has created dynamic websites using asp, viral video campaigns using flash and asp, and created several different internet commercials.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Work for Rawle Murdy
I was given the opportunity to showcase my skills for Rawle Murdy, a marketing, advertising, and public relations agency in Charleston, SC. I was told to redesign their website, create a few html email blasts, and a few interactive flash banners for their website. I went to the drawing board and produced this work. In creating the new design, I studied their current website. In my approach, I decided to stick to the look and feel of the site and demonstrate their cutting edge abilities via flash video in the website. Because this was a test, I did not have enough time to script and come with concepts for commercials and viral videos for the firm so I used a screen shot from "the office" as a filler. Here's what I came up with:
My approach here would be to create a flash website that incorporates a mix of video and flash animation on the front page. I would animate the various chunks of the site in like I do on my site. I think the design and the overall feel give a very professional look. That combined with a series of flash video (like on soulofathens.com) commercials and segments would really make the site innovative.
New York City Hub Launched and Athens Hub happenings
Hey Everyone,
It's been a busy summer job hunting and finishing up school. I managed to launch my latest site: http://www.newyorkcityhub.com. I'm still working to seed it with events, rentals, real estate, and job listings. However, I've uploaded over 20,000 restaurants into the restaurants database. It's a "work in progress" and I'm hoping to make more progress seeding it and marketing it (especially SEO) this summer.
I continue to be impressed with the results of the traffic on http://www.athenshub.com. I didn't know what to expect with Ohio University being out of session but the traffic has remained strong. I've hired Danny Cox, a phenomenal journalism student at Ohio University, to help me out with the site. Danny and I have been working to do more traditional marketing of the site and are reaching out to the community to try and get feedback on the site. I'm planning on launching a subleasing section, book exchange section, and complete list of rentals in Athens, ohio by the end of the summer.
School ends July 24th and I'm still searching for employment. Hire me!! Haha.
I'm really excited to share the news that htttp://www.newyorkcityhub.com will be launching next week. It's a site where people in New York City can post events, rentals, real estate, and jobs for free. I've been working on the site for the last 3 months and I'm finally ready to go live with it next week.
The biggest challenge has been getting the site protected against SQL injection attacks. A sql injection is where something like a virus spiders your website and searches through your code for SQL queries. I use these queries in my site pages to communicate with my SQL database. These SQL injection viruses penetrate this communication and inject and take out information out of your databases. It's a very frustrating thing to happen and these kinds of attacks have been more frequent in the last few months.
Luckily, there's a fairly easy fix for it. You must change your code and put your queries into stored procedures. I hired Jason Moran, a great asp and asp.net programmer, to assist me with the conversions.
Needless to say, I wanted to make sure there were no flaws in my code for the site. I'll update you on the progress of the launch next week.
Ohio University - Shoot Out 2007 Entry - In the Gutter
As the year winds down, I wanted to share with you an experience I had working on Shoot Out 2007, a competition put on by the School of Telecommunications at Ohio University. Essentially you form teams and all teams are given a genre , a prop, and a line to use in a movie. You have exactly 48 hours to write, produce, and edit a 3 mintue piece. On Sunday at 6pm, all the movies are submitted, show, and judged. It was a crazy weekend without much sleep but a very worth while experience.
I was apart of "Team Fabiano" or Baby Hollywood and was surrounded by very talented people that I worked with on Fridays Live. I participated on the writing team, acted, and helped with graphics for the final piece. Our film took 2nd place in the competition and was a huge success. I was one of the few Viscom majors participating on a team in the competition and I was exposed to the proper way to write a story, shoot a scene, and how to edit video. As I said before the project turned out great and I look forward to seeing what our team produces next year. Here's our entry:
I'm taking a Final Cut Pro class this quarter and am putting a few of my class projects up on youtube. The first project was to be a silent movie no more than two minutes in length that tells some sort of a story. I casted Craig Reck and Aaron Missler in this short piece about satisfying a late night food craving in Athens, Ohio. Enjoy!
May 2008 Website Projects - Soul of Athens and College of Wooster
Hey Everyone,
It's crunch time as school comes to an end. I'm planning on launching New York City Hub this summer and working more on Athenshub.com. I just shot some short video segments that I'm going to use to promote Athens Hub on youtube. They should be up shortly.
Here are a few things that I've done in the last month:
Soul of Athens Press Release E-blast
I designed eblast from look of site and worked with team of people to produce press release:
College of Wooster - Portfolio Presentation
A flash site I did highlighting some things I've done in the past
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.
