A New Website for Arctic Club Hotel in Seattle

Sometimes a "brand".com site just isn’t enough to promote the true character of a hotel. This is when a Vanity Site is the right choice. The Arctic Club Seattle - a DoubleTree by Hilton hotel is an exquisite hotel that combines the grandeur and spirit of the 20^th century men’s club it once housed.  The Arctic Club Hotel’s eclectic interiors and first class amenities serve even the most discriminating business and leisure travelers. Our challenge was to capture the elegance and style of the hotel within a classic yet modern framework that incorporated content management tools and important social media features.

  

The result is grand, featuring large, glorious photos, hotel historic facts, easy navigation, all within a responsive web solution that scales gracefully from desktop to tablet to mobile device. We invite you to visit the site at: www.thearcticclubseattle.com

e! welcomes new design director, Kevin Reuter

In a flurry of new accounts and challenging projects, Kevin Reuter, e!’s new design director joined the Effective Design team earlier this Summer. A multidisciplinary designer, Kevin’s 18 years of design experience brings expertise in branding, design, web development, social media, signage, and exhibits to the table. With a natural grace in working with clients and teammates alike, Kevin champions complex design solutions with speed and ease, meeting critical targets for clients with great results. A joy to work with, we welcome Kevin to the e! team and look forward to the exciting projects ahead.

Super Dip.

Is everyone recovered from stuffing your face during the Super Bowl yesterday?  Here is a recipe for the appetizer item that went the fastest at the Super Bowl party of an e! team member.  It's Buffalo Chicken Dip, and it's delicious.

Buffalo Chicken Dip As Made by The Bitten Word
Adapted from Frank's RedHot

INGREDIENTS

8 ounce package of cream cheese, softened
1/4 cup ranch salad dressing
1/4 cup blue cheese salad dressing
1/2 cup buffalo sauce or buffalo style barbecue sauce
1/2 cup crumbled blue cheese (shredded mozzarella cheese can be substituted)
2 cups shredded meat from a fully cooked rotisserie chicken

DIRECTIONS

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees F.  In a deep baking dish, mix cream cheese, salad dress, buffalo sauce, and cheese.  Stir until combined.  Stir in chicken.  

Bake uncovered for 20-25 minutes, until the dish is heated through.  Serve with crackers, pita chips, sliced bread or vegetables.  

NOTE:  Depending on your tastes and the ingredients on hand, you can use 1/2 cup ranch or blue cheese salad rather than 1/4 cup of each.  Similarly, you can mix blue cheese and mozzarella, or use portions of each.

image: The Bitten Word.

The Impact of Social Media & Blogging

It seems ironic to talk about blogging on our blog, but it's almost the holidays and I'm feeling a little feisty. To those of us who champion social media and thought leadership as a means to reach your audience, the benefits are so obvious that they can be difficult to explain.

Thanks to the smart people at Volinsky Consulting who created an infographic that easily explains the benefits of an online media strategy that includes good SEO, blogging, thought leadership and social media.

Check out this clip or view the full infographic.

Deck the Halls! And the Walls?

Our gift to you this year is custom wallpapers for your desktop computer, mobile device or tablet. We hope you enjoy them, there's one that's sure to fit your Holiday mood whether it's Bah Humbug, Merry & Bright or just enjoying the Cold Weather (or not enjoying it so much). Feel free to share these links with anyone who could use a little Holiday cheer.

Happy Holidays from e!

Brrr!

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Bah Humbug

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Merry & Bright

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Snow

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Music Video or Game? Maybe Both.

Have you ever seen a music video that was interactive? Androp's latest release for their song Bell is part game, part user experience and totally fun. You simply type in a message and the game takes letters from your words to create a character that you can control through a series of environments. In our experiments, your character could be a horse, dog or a giraffe, depending on what you type. 

While jumping scorpions, running from tarantulas and dodging rhinos is fun in it's own right, the real beauty of the video game is the way the animals are cleverly crafted from letters, in real time. Watching those letters explode, then reorganize themselves after a collision, could keep me entertained for hours. 

Try it for yourself by visiting www.androp.jp/bell/.

Browser Trends: Chrome is Winning

It's been growing in popularity faster than Mozilla's Firefox and has now become the world's second favorite browser. *

Personally, it's become my favorite except for the fact that there's only a light version of Firebug (which I use a lot for development). So I end up using two browsers — Firefox for development and Chrome for everything else.

* Browser Trends December 2011: Chrome Becomes the World’s Second Favorite Browser
* StatCounter.com