Blue Mouse Monkey Blog

Shelise and Fara, with Blue the Blue Mouse Monkey

We’re sad to see her go, but happy about the reason: Blue Mouse Monkey’s studio manager Shelise Gieseke has left to have her baby! Shelise has been with Blue Mouse Monkey for almost three years, and we could not have done it without her. THANK YOU, SHELISE!

We’re thrilled to welcome Fara Heath as the new studio manager. With her background in entrepreneurship, communications, and the performing arts she’s going to be a great addition to the team. WELCOME, FARA!

Blue Mouse Monkey was pleased to partner with Subtext to create a new site for one of Portland’s leading printing companies, Bridgetown Printing. The original Bridgetown site was a single page placeholder, so everything in the new site was created from scratch, including new information architecture, look-and-feel, and content. We’re proud to participate in the growing trend towards responsive design with this website. Check it out on any device such as your iPhone, Kindle, or large desktop display, and the layout will rearrange itself to fit the context!

Blue Mouse Monkey, Inc. is now officially certified with the state of Oregon as a WBE – that’s a Women Business Enterprise. It took two tries – the first attempt was thwarted by a joint lease agreement. Now that the BlueMM office space lease is solely under Julia Stoops’ name, the certification was approved. It also helped that Blue, the furry Blue Mouse Monkey, is a girl.

Blue Mouse Monkey wants you to learn about your economy through a new lens! Did you know that existing, expanding companies contribute most to U.S. job creation? Not startups and not big companies, but medium sized-companies. In fact, from 1990 to 2008 existing companies generated 71 percent more new jobs than startups. And from 1995 – 2009 Stage 2 companies (those with 10-99 employees) represented only 10.9% of all establishments but they contribute a whopping 33.2% of total job expansion. The YourEconomy.org website has a larger dataset than the US Census Bureau, and they are able to crunch the numbers and come up with these previously unknown facts. See Blue Mouse Monkey’s case study and visit the YourEconomy.org website.

The Blue Mouse Monkey has a name (Blue) a gender (she’s a girl) and a personality (adventuresome.) She posts snapshots of her travels to the Blue Mouse Monkey Facebook page. Here she is in Seoul, Korea, and the Douz palm oasis in Tunisia. Check out the page to see Blue in more exotic locations – oh, and don’t forget to Like while you’re there!

Blue Mouse Monkey’s Julia Stoops and and Shelise Gieseke presented a talk yesterday about User Experience Design called “Website Hotseat: Do you know what your visitors are feeling?” at the WVDO (Willamette Valley Development Officers) annual conference.

After a brief overview of what User Experience Design actually means and why it’s important, Julia critiqued several websites point-by-point on their level of user-friendliess. Which, unfortunately, was generally low.

The presentation seemed to have struck a chord with many attendees and Julia and Shelise received lots of good feedback. Julia’s personal mission is to beautify the Internet one website at a time, and today’s talk was a reminder of how much work there is to be done in that regard.

Blue Mouse Monkey is thrilled to announce the launch of the new YourEconomy.org website. Your Economy, a project of the Edward Lowe Foundation, is an interactive resource center designed for users to explore and analyze economic activity in their own regions and nationwide. YE houses more economic data than the U.S. census bureau, and it can depict the dynamic journey of business communities evolving through time. However, the existing website was so complex and confusing that the YE founders had to train users in how the system worked, and they were compelled to manage a continuous flow of queries about usability.

Blue Mouse Monkey rose to the challenge to make the YE website user-friendly to a wide range of audiences, including the White House, state governors, economists, industry analysts, economic development experts, and the media. An intensive audit of processes, and analysis of user-experience requirements led to a complete redesign of the information architecture, user experience, look-and-feel, and written content. And the bright orange and yellow color scheme is a conscious departure from the stereotypical “blue for business” palette.

Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch

Suzy Vitello and I are distantly “related” in the literary world by virtue of our involvement in separate writing groups that sprang from the ur-group, Tom Spanbauer’s Dangerous Writing. While we’ve never sat at the same writing table, we’ve chatted at parties now and again, and we’ve worked together in our other lives — in the world of communications, branding, and websites. Suzy is an editor and copywriter, and I’m a web designer, and we have delightfully collaborated on many projects together over the years.

And she edited the text on my Parts Per Million website!

And I got to redesign her new author website!

And she interviewed me on her blog! Check out Writers and branding: an interview with Julia Stoops for our discussion on the importance of author websites, the effect of DIY technologies, and the impact of art, teaching, and creative writing on my branding and web design practice.

The Blue Mouse Monkey team: John Redder, Shelise Gieseke, Jimmy Thomas, Julia Stoops

2011 has seen some bittersweet personnel changes at Blue Mouse Monkey. In July Jimmy Thomas, developer extraordinaire and my office-mate for 3 1/2 years, moved to Japan, where he’s persuing a new life teaching English. To live in Japan was a long standing ambition of Jimmy’s, and I wish him well. But I miss his generous good nature and most excellent CSS skilz. We made some wonderful websites together.

And this December saw the departure of John Redder. For the past year John has provided incredible insight and support with process analysis and improvements, and project management. I’m still amazed that we “hooked” John at all — he brought to my little company experience and expertise from a higher plane, and I feel so lucky. Blue Mouse Monkey is a better company for John’s efforts, and we are sad to see him return to the bigger pastures from whence he came.

But all is not lost! We have some excellent new freelance developers in our stable, and in-house, our studio manager Shelise Gieseke is expanding her role and ably stepping into John’s role as project manager. With new, streamlined systems in place, we’re even better positioned to take on larger and more complex projects. I feel really ready for 2012.