The collections included jackets, jeans and shirts for men that transition from work to play. We shot at North Hills in Raleigh as our location.

Credits:

• Photographer - Hal Goodtree
• Stylist - Leslie Huffman
• Models - Todd & Thomas

Special thanks to North Hills.

From a viral Trader Joe’s ad that’s had 340,000 views on YouTube to TateShots from the venerable British museum, people are watching TV in a new way.

It’s true: they watch it on their iPhones and on their PCs. They watch at the airport, at a soccer game and at work. Television has become portable, and people watch it when they have a free minute, wherever they might be.

But new channels of distribution aren’t the whole story. A new class of producers is filling the void as the networks stumble and broadcast audiences erode.

Consumer cameras shoot hi-def. Video editing software costs a couple of hundred bucks and runs on budget laptops. And the technology has been around long enough that some people are learning how to use it pretty darn effectively.

We decided to enter the fray with a new show of our own: StreetStyleTV. It’s a quick hit of fashion, fresh off the street, real people wearing real cloths.

We were inspired by streetstyle photoblogs like The Sartorialist and Garance Dore. This is a similar idea, but on video.

We’ve started a website too: StreetStyleTV.com

It’s a WordPress site with a special theme designed for video. The theme, TV.Elements by Press75, ingeniously breaks a post into media and text elements. Take a look at how we deployed it.

The new television is already changing the way we watch. Soon, it will be changing the way we think and feel and act.

Credits:

• Fiquet, Luxe Apothecary
• Kristin Murray
• Production by Goodtree & Co.

Thanks to:

• North Hills
• North Hills Buzz

Malls, mixed-use developments, shopping centers - call them what you will, they dot the landscape of America.

Many of the larger developments have websites. For the most part, they’re pretty awful. So, when we were asked to produce a new website for North Hills, a mixed-use development in Raleigh, NC, our goal was to help bring the category into a Web 2.0 world.

Two months after the launch, we have every reason to feel we’ve achieved. Stats are great, everything works, and best of all, a continuing content stream is beginning to bloom. It’s interesting stuff, too - stories, bios, pictures and video.

So here’s a checklist of things we think a contemporary mall or mixed-use website needs.

The Basics

1. A page for each merchant
2. A picture for each merchant
3. Descriptive text for each merchant (more than just a phone number and an outside link)

It is surprising how few big developments have reached this level of information. See our collection of links for malls and mixed-use developments on Delicious (and please feel free to add links to other sites in the category).

The Finer Points

1. Interactive Map
2. Continuing Content Stream
3. Ad Platform

(1) The interactive map is a challenging bit of engineering and UI. We’ll write more about it soon. (2) In most cases, developing a rich content stream requires cultural change for clients. Training and continued support are mandatory to advance evolutionary adoption of web 2.0 tools like blogs and twitter. (3) Big developments like North Hills have the potential to draw big traffic. Why settle for pennies on the dollar when you could have it all with your own ad platform? Tune in again for a discussion about implementing your own ad server.

Best Practices

To boost the performance of a site in this category as measured by key stats like Time On Site and Page Views, here are a few best practices we can recommend:

1. Minimize outside links
2. Run outside content in an iframe within your site
3. Drive traffic to niches with CPC advertising
4. Pay attention to what Analytics tells you about your audience

The Last, Most Important Point

Like all other advertising and marketing ventures, success is rooted in a good agency-client relationship. We are deeply grateful to Kane Realty Corporation for their vision and their patience throughout this project.

Special thanks to:

• Anna Smith
• Mike Smith
• Bonner Gaylord
• Jon Masterson
• Katherine Knott
• Angela Slater
• Paul Newcomer
• Walt Stewart
• North Hills Security

For Goodtree & Company:

• George Gumpert, master programmer
• David Holt, design
• John Dixon, flash
• Leslie Huffman, merchant database and blogging diva
• Hal Goodtree, precious little

Thanks also to Allen Weiss, Michael Kimsal, Lindsey Chester, Paul Harnett, Dorothea Bitler, Jill Harris, Fiquet, Kevin and Stacey Jennings, Wick Morgan and Jason Peck. And thanks to Jake St. Peter and Mike McTaggart for their generous time.

Please contact us for more information about mall, shopping center and mixed-use development websites.

Silver Dove, originally uploaded by hal990.

Taken at Highsmith Home for the North Hills Shopping blog.

Boss Micro, originally uploaded by hal990.

Love taking pictures of products, small objects, food and stuff on tabletop.

In the Window, originally uploaded by hal990.

We used a different shot for the website, but this is my favorite from the shoot at Uniquities Mix.

Two Ales, originally uploaded by hal990.

North Hills is a unique place. It has more local merchants than national chains. It has restaurants, not just fast food. It has underground parking.

It took vision to redevelop an old-skool mall into a modern urban village. In building a new web site for North Hills, we’ve tried to live up to that standard.

North Hills told us to focus on creating quality content. Each store, restaurant and spa has its own page, its own picture and descriptive text. After researching the category, it was surprising to find how few developments had this much information.

We’ve taken over 1500 pictures for the new site (our favorite is the flash panorama on the home page). Many thanks to the management and merchants at North Hills for all their help and patience. Special thanks also to North Hills Security.

Goodtree & Co. credits:

• Leslie Huffman - Project Manager
• George Gumpert - Design & Programming
• David Holt - Senior Designer
• Hal Goodtree - Creative Director

Also thanks to Allen Weiss, Michael Kimsal, Paul Harnett, Anna Smith, Dorothea Bitler and Mike Smith.

More about the things we’ve learned from this project later. Surf up the NorthHillsRaleigh right now and let us know what you think.

• Producer: Hal Goodtree
• Director: Neil Tardio, Jr.
• Production Co: Bedford Falls
• CD/Art Director: Ron Thomson
• CD/Writer: Tom Daniels
• Agency: Siquis
• Music: tomandandy

Producer: Hal Goodtree
Director: Kevin Smith
Art Direction: Scott Skaggs

Photos by George Gumpert & Hal Goodtree. Design by Goodtree & Co.

Read the story behind this picture. Thanks to Wendy at the American Red Cross Flickr group.

Mission of the American Red Cross

Since its founding in 1881 by visionary leader Clara Barton, the American Red Cross has been the nation’s premier emergency response organization. As part of a worldwide movement that offers neutral humanitarian care to the victims of war, the American Red Cross distinguishes itself by also aiding victims of devastating natural disasters. Over the years, the organization has expanded its services, always with the aim of preventing and relieving suffering.

Donate to the American Red Cross.

Special thanks to Keith Weston.

See the photo on the WUNC/MySource page.

We write a lot about WordPress and blogging. One important trick of the trade is installing a custom theme to give your blog a unique look. Here’s how it works:

1. When you install the WP blog engine, it loads up the default theme, a plain white page with a solid blue header.
2. To give your blog its own flavor, WP provides an ample tool set for using a custom theme.
3. Hundreds (if not thousands) of custom themes exist. Most themes are free or just involve a modest cost. One of the best places to search for themes is the WP Theme Viewer. You can narrow your search by selecting a color, number of columns and lots of other criteria.
4. Select the themes you like best, download them to your computer, then upload them to your server inside the WordPress directory, wp-content/themes subdirectory.
5. Surf up your blog and log in to the admin panel. In WP 2.5 or greater, navigate to the Design tab (in earlier versions, navigate to “presentation”). You’ll see thumbnails of all the themes you have uploaded. Click on the theme you fancy. Presto! Your blog has a new look.

Some themes include a picture in the header. To really jazz up your presentation, you can replace the header picture with one of your own design.

Find the header picture you want to replace. It’s usually in folder labeled “images” inside the theme directory. Sometimes the appropriate file is labeled “header,” other times not. Just have a quick look at the files in the images directory and the header picture should be self-evident.

Load up the header picture in any imaging program such as Photoshop or Fireworks. Design a new header to your own liking, but don’t change the overall dimensions of the picture.

Upload the new header to the appropriate directory on your server replacing the old header (use the same file name). Shazamm! Your new header is now active.

————————————–

For our pro bono client SmartGrowthGirl, we used a photo of the author and combined it with an illustration we purchased from iStockphoto. The resulting picture adds personality and uniqueness to the blog, plus tells the story of what the blog is all about. See it here.

We also re-themed our own blog to better match our new website.

For advanced blogging geeks, you can even change the color, typography and layout of the theme by editing the css file. But that’s fort another day.

Our theme for SmartGrowthGirl is adapted from a theme by Nathan Rice called RockinBizRed, available as a free download from Rockin Themes. For our own blog, we adapted a theme called Mushblue by Mukka-Mu.

As the power of Web 2.0 percolates through the ranks of business, more and more people are interested in installing a CMS.

Content management systems allow users to update their websites in plain English - no coding or programming whatsoever. But open-source CMS prgrams like Joomla and Drupal are notoriously complicated.

WordPress offers an alternative. For our client Mike Jaquish, it was the perfect solution.

Mike’s a serious blogger - he’s been at it for a couple of years, understands blogging and has a dedicated readership. So choosing WP was a easy choice.

The hard part was making two blogs and a handful of html pages all look like one seamless site.

Thanks to Mike for his vision and trust. Kudo’s to contibuting artist George Gumpert for his ingenious php and html work.

In this new spot for Upstate Carolina Radiology, one boy tells the other “My Mom’s a Radiologist.”

“What’s that?” ask his friend.

“I don’t know,” the first kid says with a shrug.

But it turns out that radiology is fascinating - it has the ability to see inside the human body. In “My Mom,” radiologists explain what they do - screen women for breast cancer using digital mammography, open arteries to the brain, kill cancer.

The new spot is currently airing on Lifetime, Food Network and HGTV. You can also see it on YouTube.

Special thanks to the doctors, nurses and staff at Upstate Carolina Radiology, St. Francis Bon Secours Hospital and Spartanburg Regional Medical Center.

Credits:

• Director of Photography: Kenneth Wilson
• Gaffer: Randy Whiteland
• Key Grip: Steve Cabinum
• Sound: Sid Williams
• Stylist: Lorrie Hobler
• Editor: Joshua Steadman
• Writer/Director: Hal Goodtre

In this spot, the mission is to explain endoscopic laser ablation. That’s a procedure to treat varicose veins without traditional surgery. With an incision the size of a pencil tip, special doctors called Interventional Radiologists operate from inside your veins while observing the procedure with x-rays.

How to bake a little charm into the message? And how to get the actress (Kerry Murphy) to wash my pickup truck? See the spot on YouTube and find out.

Also airing on Lifetime, Food Network and HGTV.

Special thanks to my friends at Southern Vascular Institute.

Credits:

• Director of Photography: Kenneth Wilson
• Gaffer: Randy Whiteland
• Key Grip: Steve Cabinum
• Sound: Sid Williams
• Stylist: Lorrie Hobler
• Editor: Joshua Steadman
• Writer/Director: Hal Goodtree