Craig Alexander ranks among triathlon’s greatest champions.

Racing his first triathlon at the age of 22, he has since achieved excellence in every aspect of the triathlon way of life, winning an impressive number of championships along the way. His record breaking feats include being the first man to win both the Half Ironman and Ironman World Championships in the same year.

Thinkun were asked to work with the team behind Craig Alexander to help create a moving brand experience for Craig’s supporters, triathlon fans and sport lovers.

The desired outcomes was to create a sustainable brand and website that would grow with Craig as he approaches 40 and looks to retiring from the sport and focusing on other endeavours in the coming years.

Our challenge included creating a strong online brand presence for Craig that would capitalize on his current greatness while also providing a means for keeping his legacy going once he stops competing, with the additional benefit of generating revenue possibilities for him in years to come.

By providing a platform for connecting with arguably the fittest man on the planet, the site would be a resource for people aspiring to better health and fitness, incorporating eCommerce, product affiliate and advertising capabilities.

The brand objectives were to extend awareness of Craig beyond the current Ironman/Triathlete audience by capturing the qualities that make Craig such an outstanding athlete, one who helps others in achieving better health, fitness and lifestyle choices.

The Solution

Creating a visual identity

Working with Craig and his team, we were able to define the central theme of Craig’s brand as one of perseverance and strength.

We created a visual identity that symbolised the values central to Craig’s success as an elite athlete. The CA infinity curve captures both the triathlon course and Craig’s capacity for endurance even in the most gruelling of races.

Craig is often known by his moniker ‘Crowie’, which we felt was a fitting name for the brand given Craig’s humility, even in the face of great successes.

Creating the online platform

This brand identity was then further developed into an online platform designed to allow fans to connect with Craig and contribute to the wider discussion of not just triathlon but heath, nutrition and fitness. We introduced a vibrant colour palette and interactive features that reflected Craig’s brand. The visual and tonal feel of the website was designed to convey the sense of dynamism that Craig brings to his life and the sport he loves.

His personal ethos of staying fit is captured in an interactive grid of stories collected under “Crowie’s Fit Zone”. This is a comprehensive section chronicling Craig’s Ironman training, healthy living tips, upcoming news and events and his Top 10 personal recommendations for products and services.

The responsive web design allows the tiles of the pages to configure automatically for different monitor screen sizes. Content is organised into categories and tags which enables filtering by topic as well as allowing users to discover content by introducing related content within each story item. This visual nature of content delivery ensures increased engagement and results in more time spent on the site. User contributed stories of their own fitness, health and charity endeavours have a corresponding section entitled “Your Zone”, the name tie in with “Crowie’s Fit Zone” further makes the connection between Craig and his audience.

Positioning Craig Alexander as a professional, hard-working, elite athlete helped us orient the brand, which is rooted in purpose driven health, fitness and lifestyle choices.

Bringing Crowie’s brand to life also meant positioning him as a sports/health for life advocate, and not just a resource for competing in triathlons. The Crowie’s Fit Zone was created to be a space where Craig’s could share personal insights, endeavours and expertise. Additionally the Your Zone space was created to allow a community of contributors to share their stories of self improvement and athletic achievements.

The interactive tiles allows users to filter by topics, bring their particular interests to the forefront. These separate yet related stories bring together Craig’s driving passions of health, nutrition and fitness, while making it easier to communicate to audiences of all kinds.

By creating a flexible yet strong brand, we helped Craig branch out into new online territory while strengthening his core values. In doing so, it also ensured that the brand would have the longevity to carry Craig’s legacy in years to come.

The even better news: We need to add two web design interns to our team.
Could this be you, or do you know someone who fits the bill? If so, email through a brief cover letter accompanied by your resume and some examples of your recent design projects to internships@thinkun.net

Job: Web design intern
Job level: Junior
Salary: Unpaid + the occasional Black Star Pastry cake and Courtie lunch
Expertise: Graphic design
Software: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign

What we can offer you:

1. An exciting work culture in the heart of Newtown
2. An experienced mentor to guide you
3. Great potential for learning and growth
4. Learn from, exchange ideas and build relationships with others in the industry
5. The chance to beef up your portfolio with some cutting edge projects
6. Flexible hours to suit your schedule
7. Exposure to many aspects of online marketing campaigns, not just design
8. Work with Thinkun’s wide range of clients such as GoGet, Mark Webber, Red Balloon, University of Sydney, L’Oreal, and many more
9. Our internship program included lunchtime lectures, regular feedback and reviews.

Take a look at some of our recent work at http://thinkunportfolio.com/

A brief description of who we’re looking for: As Thinkun’s Web Design intern, you will use your knowledge of design software including Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign amongst others, to apply your design skills to the development of websites, Facebook applications, mobile apps and other digital communication (as well as the odd bit of print media when required).

Not only will you create visually pleasing communication, you will also need to ensure that the sites and software you’re designing meet best practice standards for the web.

You will think about, create, design and implement solutions as part of a team, while remaining self directed and retaining an individual approach to work goals.

We require an energetic candidate with great work ethic, creative skills, good communication and organisational skills.

You will learn to handle multiple projects and tasks, which vary in scope and size. In addition to your design projects, you will also be required to complete some administrative tasks related to the smooth running of the Thinkun studio.

The position will be based in our office in the Flourmill Studios, a heritage conversion of an old flourmill in groovy Newtown. The Flourmill is home to a broad range of creative businesses and is close to Newtown station, as well as being cycle to work and dog friendly.

You’ll work on web and mobile projects across most of our clients, which come from diverse industries including sports, education, finance, publishing, consumer electronics, childcare and more.

We want someone who’s passionate about writing efficient and elegant code. You should shave a strong knowledge of MySQL and optimising queries for performance improvement. You will primarily code in PHP5 and sometimes use frameworks such as CodeIgniter. Javascript is increasingly important for web projects and we use jQuery a fair bit in our front-end design. You will also need a good working knowledge of HTML5 and CSS3. Experience with WordPress theme implementation and plugin development is desirable.

We value learning. You will gain skills by being regularly challenged by new tasks that you may not have experience of, but will be expected to research about and add to both your knowledge and the company’s collective knowledge.

Our office is in the Flourmill Studios, a heritage conversion of an old flour mill in groovy Newtown. The Flourmill is home to a broad range of creative businesses and is close to Newtown station, as well as being cycle to work friendly. To apply, please fill out the form below.

To apply, please fill out the form below:

What does it do?

Thinkun Remind is a simple but effective plugin designed to allow you to send a branded and personalised HTML or text email to anyone, such as a customer you’d like to remind to leave feedback for you, right from within your WordPress Dashboard. This can be used for almost any HTML or text email templates, and provides an easy interface for a user of any skill level to send a personalised HTML email.

Current Features:

• Create your own HTML or text emails and reuse them.
• Preview these templates as fully rendered HTML before sending.
• Include and manage custom fields to personalise the email, which can then be filled out to populate variables by even the most novice user on the Send Email screen.
• Export a history of all emails sent as a CSV file.
• Plus more to come…

Where can I get it?

You can always download the latest version (1.1.3) from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Questions? Just ask.

Five of the seven entrepreneurs featured in the book were present and were interviewed at the launch, including (from the left, after interviewer):

Jaimie Fuller, SKINS
David Handley, Sculpture by the Sea
Hayden Cox, Haydenshapes Surfboards
Will Young, Campos Coffee
Abigail Forsyth, Keepcup

The online book ‘In Hindsight’ can be viewed at http://inhindsight.nokia.com.au.

P.S. Check out Thinkun on Facebook.

Are you at home with all sorts of data handling? Have you used PHPmyAdmin extensively? Do you write SQL statements in your sleep? Are you available immediately to work at our Newtown offices either part time or full time for 2 weeks?  If so, please apply here or use the form below.

A brief description of the requirements:

You will primarily work on a project requiring a large amount of data manipulation and reporting. You will be required to import, clean, sort, filter and combine data based on rules that will be provided to you. For each request given to you, you will write the SQL statements needed and save the output as a dataset.

You must also be fairly proficient with Microsoft Excel. PHP programming skills are complementary but not essential.

Our office is in the Flourmill Studios, a heritage conversion of an old flour mill in groovy Newtown. The Flourmill is home to a broad range of creative businesses and is close to Newtown station, as well as being cycle to work friendly. To apply, please fill out the form below.

*Update*
This position is now filled.

Our subject for the first part of this series: Is Facebook going to be the death of webmail?

As far as I can tell, people have been talking about this possibility since late 2007, but there are two new pieces of information that make all the conjecture a little more solid.  The first thing:  In January 2011, a report from ComScore revealed that total web email usage was down by 8% in the United States over the past year, with teenagers ditching email at the highest rate.

The statistics really are quite startling.  For those users between the ages of 12 and 17, usage was down by a colossal 49%. Usage was down 1% among 18 to 24-year-olds, and 18% among 25 to 35-year-olds. Usage was also down significantly in older age groups – 8% among 35 to 44-year-olds and 12% among 45-54-year-olds.

The second thing:  This survey was completed just a couple of weeks before Facebook launched its new messaging system that combines email, instant messaging and text messaging, meaning that everyone who’s on Facebook will have access to an ‘@facebook.com’ address for mail.

There are no prizes for guessing the rest of the story. The same survey also found that younger users are now spending more of their online time on social networks, representing just under 15% of all the time they spend online.  Here in Australia, we actually spend more time on Facebook each week than the Americans, according to a Nielsen report done in 2010.

Going even further than the personal user, due to the increased use of social tools both inside and outside corporate firewalls, and the changing demographics (i.e. within a few years majority of users entering the workforce would belong to the Facebook age and would continue to communicate with colleagues via Facebook and Twitter), Gartner predicts that by 2014 20% of business users will be using social networking services for communication instead of emails.

Deny, deny, deny

Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg denies that they’re trying to kill off free webmail providers, but there are signs of panic in the ranks, particularly at camp Google. When you look at the numbers, it’s easy to see why knees are trembling:

Email by numbers:

• Hotmail: 362 million users.
• Yahoo!: 273 million users.
• Gmail: 193 million users.
• ‘Facebook.com’: Potentially 500 million users for its new messaging service.

Facebook’s new email system is modelled on instant messaging and on-line chat and will allow people to simplify their communications regardless of how they choose to do it with both Facebook users, and non-Facebook users. Texts, email or instant messages will all come into one feed and users can respond in any way they want. One person could text a friend, for example, who will see the message come up on their Facebook page instantly and respond via an instant message or email.

Zuckerberg says that his new toy isn’t email, but it can handle email, along with all the other different ways that you choose to communicate, creating a seamless integration that is bound to make life easier in a world where you sometimes feel like you need to create an account to use the bathroom.

With added Facebook love like entire conversation histories going back years being saved in users’ accounts and spam being completely filtered out, it really is a jab to the wobbly bits for any of the webmail providers. And it begs the question – why would you bother going outside that system to send email, when pretty much everyone that matters to you is inside.  If you’re anything like me – you have more friends on Facebook than you do in your address book.

Foot stamping and pouting

Even though Zuckerberg has donned his halo and a ‘Who, me?’ expression, the signs are that people at Google are not happy.

Google is now blocking a Facebook feature that allows users to automatically import Gmail contact data into Facebook, a move it says it made because Facebook refused to allow the export of contact and friend data from within user profiles.

Perhaps for Google though, all the foot stamping and pouting comes a little too late, because for a huge (and growing) percentage of the population, Facebook and the Internet have become synonymous, and Google is most useful for finding the people you know on Facebook.   Email is just sooooo 90s.   Sceptical?  Try to think of the last time someone who’s a friend of yours on Facebook sent you a joke or a link to something interesting via email…

Google’s answer (or should I say answers?) to the Facebook phenomenon have been a little pale.  In our next post, we’ll look at Orkut, Google Buzz, and the new Google Plus 1.

Sancta Sophia College is a residential college associated with the University of Sydney, with three streams to their business:

• Accommodation for university students
• Out of semester accommodation for the general public
• Hosting of events on the college premises.

The college’s old website wasn’t effective at defining  these separate business streams, nor was it geared to two other critical functions – keeping student residents up to date with events and news, and keeping college alumni feeling connected to the college, which is critical to fundraising.

In addition to those problems, the old site was in need of a design freshen-up, and it housed a vast amount of information, which needed to be re-organised and also extensively re-written.  What’s more, Sancta weren’t taking advantage of the growth in social media and sharing – especially appealing to the college’s primary target audience of university students.

Project objectives

1. Build a new site that enables continuous updates by college staff to make the site dynamic
2. Promote the business streams by incorporating key information for each on the home page
3. Bring events to the fore so that they are well publicised and attended
4. Engage the college alumni
5. Make the large amount of information from the old site useful and accessible
6. Update the site design
7. Take the first small steps towards social media integration

Project execution

Built on WordPress, the new Sancta Sophia website benefited from a complete rethink of the architecture of the site, and the use of space on the home page to promote Sancta’s business streams.  Thinkun edited down the site copy to make it more web friendly, and incorporated a Sancta Twitter feed as well as an easy to update event calendar on the home page.  These work in combination to ensure Sancta events come to the notice of all the different types of site visitors promptly.

Also on the home page, Thinkun brought Sancta news to the fore, by presenting the news blog-style with a set of keyword tags that ensures the prompt location of news content that’s pertinent to each type of site visitor, whether current resident, prospective resident or alumni.

Design-wise, Thinkun implemented a colour palette, shapes and imagery that complemented the architecture of the beautiful Sancta buildings and grounds.

Site features

• WordPress implementation with event calendar functionality
• Site architecture that defines content related to business streams
• Integration of Twitter feed and social media sharing mechanisms
• Blog used as mechanism to categorise and convey news related to type of site visitor

Project results

The new Sancta site design was tested on a representative group of current residents, with unanimous agreement that the new layout was more informative and visually appealing than the previous design.

Site visitors now gain a far better feel for the essence of the college.  Prospective residents are able to get a better feel for what it’s like to live at the college, while current residents and alumni can become much more linked in to daily life and special events.

Playground Weekender is a unique four-day music and camping festival, with a target audience made up primarily of people under the age of 40.  Every

year the festival has been held, their website has been designed and programmed in Flash.  This caused a number of problems:

• Flash is not compatible with ‘i’ devices such as the iPhone and the iPad, which means that the entire site was not accessible for people trying to view information about acts and tickets using those devices.
• Building a site in Flash is not the best way to ensure that search engines can index site content, which can mean that these sites don’t rank as well in search results.
• Any changes to site content need to be made by a Flash programmer
• Each year, the site had to be completely rebuilt from scratch

Project objectives

1. Build a site that makes the festival’s web presence mobile
2. Utilise the festival’s poster artwork to ensure that the site is still as visually appealing as a music festival site should be
3. Put the festival’s organisers in control of the ever changing site content
4. Enable fast, flexible and appealing viewing of video and imagery across all device types

Project execution

Thinkun built the Playground Weekender website on the WordPress content management system, rescuing the team from the mercy of the Flash developer who used to control the site content.  The unique site design mimics the look and feel of a music festival poster and retains the graphic artwork that is the Playground Weekender’s signature style. In addition, imagery from previous festivals displays beautifully across a myriad of mobile devices.

Site features

• Built on WordPress with video and image gallery plugins
• Puts the Playground Weekender team in control of frequently changing content
• Delivers content to the most important target group on the run

Project results

Thinkun introduced a new way of thinking to our client, which means that for the first time, they were able to stay in touch with the ‘i’ audience.  Added to that, we’ve saved them a heap of money because they don’t have to rebuild their site every year and they aren’t beholden to a developer for every single site update.

Visit the site at http://www.playgroundweekender.com.au