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Capella gains the most credibility when you hear about it from a friend. That’s why our marketing department wanted to create a “Refer a Friend” tool to give learners an easy way to spread the word. The process begins with a brief form for the referrer to fill out, including a field for a personal message. The referee is then sent an email from Capella University on behalf of the referrer. From there the referee is pushed to a landing page with three learner videos and given links to call or request more information.

When designing the various pieces of this campaign, I tried to make it as simple and obvious as possible. The form breaks up the information into three brief steps, there is a large button in the email, and the landing page has three big thumbnails. The text in each piece acts as supporting information. The email is built with tables for layout and inline styles, and the form and landing page are built with XHTML and CSS. Andrew Gruhn built the flash piece, which delivers different flash videos depending on the connection speed. For those on dial-up there is an audio-only version.

View the learner videos landing page

Get back, Jojo!! This post is mainly for my man Rett to consider, but if anyone else actually reads what I write, then it’s for you too. What I would like to start doing is posting short quotes onto this site, wherever would be deemed plausible. They wouldn’t necessarily be things that I’ve said, but ideas that float around in Read the rest of this entry »

No, not the amazing television show that spawned such favorite quotes as “more power” and “grunt, grunt, grunt.” I’m talking about actual home improvement. It’s funny, because a few years ago I could have never imagined myself geeking out over a fuel cell-powered nail gun. Now I’m all about it…and I don’t think I ‘m alone. Read the rest of this entry »

I love going to yardsales. In fact one of my earlier ideas, appraise my find, came to me because of some of the crazy things I’ve found at yardsales. Take for example my “electrocued weenie” contraption. It’s a metal appliance shaped like a house with four slots in the bottom where you can slide in hot dogs. You place a little metal piece in each hot dog, turn the timer on, and your weiners get electrocuted. I think we paid $15. I think it’s worth $2,652. Read the rest of this entry »

Ok, I haven’t thought much about this, and I definitely haven’t looked around to see what’s already out there, but I wanted to jot this down before I forget about it. We recently had our second story floors redone and in the process had to move everything out and back in. Read the rest of this entry »

Dream and reality…what’s the deal? I’m not going to get into a whole Matrix discussion with this post. I would like to say that there are some factors which help determine what we consider ‘real’ and what we think is a bunch of mental cream dreams. Physicality is one of them. We tend to focus on the visual aspect of dreams and seem to forget or not experience physical senses while dreaming. And when we do remember physical experiences when we wake up from night’s sleep, we may chalk it up to memories of previous physical sensations. Like we remember what we feel during the day and process it during the night. Maybe I’m generalizing here, but no worries. Linearity is another factor. Read the rest of this entry »