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Rockstar Comments is a new comment site I started because I got really bored and well I had one before. If you have looked at the Anonymous Space entries you can tell this is old news for me but with a spin…. I am better at designing now.

The user interface has been tweeked a lot to give users a better experience of the site and so they can look through the index of images more quickly.

The marketing atmosphere has changed but I am fairly certain that the old ways of doing business still hold true. Give them something of value in your marketing apporach and be real the rest is just a matter of time.

Stay tuned for more information.

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I bet you didn’t know I was a rock star. Well actually I am not. I cannot even play an instrument but that doesn’t not mean I cant act like a rock star or even feel like a rock star.
To be perfectly honest with the domain situation the way it is this was one that I liked and it conveyed the theme of the site. The basic theme was my I belief that you are awesome and in your universe and that is what matters. I am a big believer in perceived reality and knowing that most people are governed by their subsequent fears I really wanted to offer something different. I actually created this podcast as a way to do my part in helping people realize that most of our day to day fears are not real and that we can recreate ourselves when ever we decide to.
That is not to say this is easy. On the contrary it requires a complete mental shift from not only what we were taught but from what we are continually being taught throughout our entire life.

Fear is a great way to control large groups of people. When you need a group of people to do exactly what you want keep them in fear. Tear down their self-esteem and make them dependent on you as their only salvation. This seems to be the way many marketing firms work today.
In my opinion they are wrong.

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If you really want to get someone’s attention you have to set him or her free. Our society as a whole is tired of fear. We fear running out of money, losing our homes, not paying for our kids college, not being attractive to our partner, being alone… these and many other fears are how many people attempt to control us.
We are offered salvation if we buy this product of stay at that job. We conform and with every sacrifice we loose a little bit of who we really are. Our uniqueness.
You want to get someone’s attention tell them something different. Let them know that they are fine just as they are. That you don’t need this product to attract that cheerleader but hey it smells great and will enhance how you perceive the world cause nice smells are nice… That confidence is what you need so look inside. Buy the car you like take the job you love and remember that it is your relationships that you need to really value. Your wife… your kids… your mother…
These are the things that bring true depth to your life and we are here for you. We are striving to make the world a little better. We sacrifice to ease your suffering. We fight the good battles and will never fail to act if evil is attempting to prevail.
We also understand that your concept of good is just as valid as ours and that perception is what is real and we want to help you perceive the most important thing with more clarity. Yourself. Because you are awesome… you are a miracle a combination of atoms, molecules, cells and organs that have taken billions of years to align them selves in the perfect way to create you. And if that is not a miracle I don’t know what is… So tell those who tear you down or tell you you are not complete that your done listening to them.
When you can do this you too are a rockstar! Embrace your inner rockstar!
See good marketing is ethical don’t you want to be a rockstar now.
Hehe…
Oh yeah the site!
Well its your basic podcast with me as the star. It holds many of my older podcast that used to be housed on The Recovery Podcast . Yet another casualty of the Hythiam shut down.
It is multimedia and very exciting just like me and I added a neat little Iphone layout so be sure to check it on your phone.

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Anonymous Space was the most successful site that I created and promoted. It almost makes me sad that it was taken down in its prime but it was fun while it lasted. The site was my idea, my concept, my baby and I developed it, marketed it and nurtured it to what it became.
A few of the stats about the site.
Total visits:
1,640,374
Total Pageviews:
22,068,826
Banner views:
176,550,608
Average time on site:
9:52
Total time on site:
Over 23,000 hours
Direct Visits:
384,104
Myspace visits:

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249,211
Best day visits:
16,663
Best day views:
242,220

Feel free to click the images for more information.

The site was a great source of traffic to push in other directions. It lead to the success of 12 Step Space and the fact that The Recovery podcast was listened to over 50,000 times.

Not only that but it was a lot of fun to manage and was a much needed resource at the time. My marketing efforts and unique style of managing the site was one of the biggest reasons why it was so successful. Many people who try to achieve some type of success in the web 2.0 arena find that their personality is getting in the way. It is a fine line between hands off and direct managing that takes some time to learn. But when you have mastered it it will apear that nothing at all is happening.

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Anonymous Space was one of my big guns that I created in 2007 and was up until 2009 when the new owners mistakenly shut if down. Come on who shuts down a site that has an Alexa ranking in the 20,000 and is still climbing. Who shuts down a site that is serving 100’s of millions of inbound links. Well no use crying of spilled milk especially if you where not the one who spilled it.
Concept:
This site was a based on a simple concept… Image sharing. This model has been done again and again but Anonymous space was one of the first. The premise was simply to offer a place where people could upload and host images for their social networking sites. The point was to keep it simple and make it easy to use.
Design:
We used some Javascript to limit what had to be present in the html alone. This allowed us to save space for presenting images and images where why people where there. We didn’t want to distract people with fancy design and kept the design simple although another site is under production that will appear more exciting due to the fact that this site may have been a little to plain which may have contributed to why it took some time for it to really take off.

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Modifications:
While the site itself is based on an open source engine I did bring in a developer to make the user interface more friendly. Don’t get me wrong I love the CMS it ran on but it was developed be developers and they would have really benefited from a designer to help with the interface. The final design allowed members to feel like they had more ownership over their contributions to the site and made it more attractive and friendly.
Marketing:
We started it out as a site targeting the recovery community, which offered a good user base to draw from, but the site attracted everyone eventually due to the inclusive name of the site. In its prime the site indexed over 20,000 images and they were sort able and placed in categories.
Its to Simple:
Honestly the site is too simple to really write to much about it. It served images and did traffic that was amazing in comparison to anything else I have ever worked on. This is a great place to point out how important it is to keep your concept simple.
What Happen:
The site was up from over 2 years and was finally a casualty of Hythiams money issues and a new more unsuccessful marketing strategy. Personally it was a bad move because the site was established which really is the most difficult phase. All that was left was to determine how to make it profitable.

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In early 2008 the Recovery Media Network was going strong but you can never have enough traffic so I came up with this idea to increase the traffic to the sites. The recovery community is obsessed with time and rightly so because many people go without using for decades a task that non-alcoholics and non-addicts find astounding. So why not present this fact to the web.
The Catalyst:
While working on The Recovery Podcast I came across a few Youtube videos that where very unhappy with the fellowships and went on and on about the fact that there ware no results or clean time/sobriety in the community. I thought the best way to convince them they where wrong was not to tell them but to show them.
The Design:
This was to be a flash based website for a few reasons. One was that the base of the site was a flash api that people could place on social networking sites. This application would not only keep track of their time but would show an aggregation of all the time added into the site. I had done something similar using Php that had thousands of years of time in the database and I wanted something that people could show off on their page.

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Marketing:
The point of good user marketing is to let your users market for you. With this in mind I knew that the site would be successful because it had a marketing loop built into the concept. As people added their time to the site and pasted the api on their pages more people would see it and want to add to the database. As the number of years grew so would the number of links on peoples webpages. Also the api would have adjustable banners and videos built into the application so they could be easily switched out.
Simplicty:
The beauty of the site was in its simplicity. It really only did one thing and was easy to use for almost any user. Many sites have discovered that offering sites that do everything for everyone means that people get confused and nothing gets used. So I had begun to move to sites that offered a simple solution to a known issue. Sure the site could have offered more but that would have just lead to confusion and we wanted this site to simply do this one thing and do it well. This is the basic concept for sites like Twitter.
Quick Tip:
Find a simple problem and offer a simple solution for it and people will use it.

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The Junfo user interface was a very challenging thing to design because it needed to do so much and have the ability to do even more. To date it is the most comprehensive user interface for web searching I have scene and being an individual who spends much of his time doing web based research I wish this site had gone into production.
The Concept:
The idea was to start out simple and then allow the user to figure out how complex he wanted his search returns to be. Most search engines treat everyone the same and for some people it comes off to complex while to others it does not offer an interface that allows the type of search returns that are useful. So lets dig into the design…
Landing page:
One of the things Google does very well is to greet the end-user with a simple landing page. No adds. No crazy boxes. Simple. Clean. So I took that idea to allow people to not feel over whelmed by the interface when it was turned on. As soon as the user type in a search return and hit submit he was down the rabbit hole and we didn’t want  anything to keep them from jumping in. The trick is to get the user to use it and with this landing page there is no reason not to try it out. Regardless of what the returns look like the user is already invested because they are getting search returns to something that interests them.
The Rabbit Hole:
Unlike Google this site was more of an api and did not hold any information in a database. This was required to keep from infringing on copyright holders because we were only offering a tool to better structure search returns offered from other sites.
Unfortunately this process takes time but through DOM we were able to conceive of a method to allow for certain returns to start showing up in a way that seemed exciting and useful to the end-user.
DOM cells:
The site was composed of two major DOM types and a third smaller object that where presented in 3 columns. The main section would present the most searched types of returns. The center cells would offer more returns and structure them in a more readily digestible way. The right cells were for other types of returns that are not searched as often but still might be useful to the end-user and finally the left column was to offer web link social networking and site interface tools.
Cell Placement:
The point of the site was to allow the users to structure the layouts as they desired. The DOMs would be drag able and place able to any other part of the site allowing for an unending variety of site layouts.

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Cell Search:
Each cell could be its own independent search return box allowing the user to compare search returns with in the same page. You could also use the setting elements to tell the engine how you wanted the search string to be applied to this box.
Ajax:
Using asynchronous javascript we were going to allow each cell to refresh independent of the page so the user could refine the search in one box without affecting other cells on the page.
Login:
The end-user could log in to have a wider range of user setting options. The user could interact with other users on the junfonation social network where users could do link sharing right in the search window. Since this offered user based rating systems it would also offer the best search returns to the end-user.
The user could also save page layouts and search criteria for the site and quickly turn them on and off within the user interface panel.
Tutorials:
With the advent of web screen recording we would have offered a large database of tutorials on how to best utilize the system.
Sponsors:
In order to fund the site we would offer sponsored returns in a number of the boxes in the format that is being offer. Ie: If the location map was being used and someone was searching for pizza the sponsored adds would appear at the top of the list and in the map with different colored location pins.
What happen:
There was much more to the concept but as stated before the funding was just to difficult to come by as the process would require a tremendous amount of work with a specialty team to ensure the site was highly optimized and gave the correct returns in a timely fashion. Nonetheless I did enjoy conceiving the user interface and UX of the site and look forward to similar projects in the future. This project is still open.

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Talk with Cam is a website for one of the foremost authorities on property management. When the owner of the site came to me he was a well known author of many articles in this arena but he had the foresight to realize that print was fading out as a form of media presentation.
He was also an avid listener of my own podcast, The Recovery Podcast, and wanted something similar at an affordable rate. After discussing what he was looking for in his site we agreed upon a design that would convey a pleasant feeling while still referring to property management.
The most important aspect of this project was that it had to be completed extremely quickly. He was releasing several new columns and needed the site done before it went to print. I of course made sure the site was up, stable and that he knew how to utilize it before his articles went to press.
Today his site is a great compliment to his articles that are still being printed in several circulars.

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12 Step space was a social networking site that ran from 2006 to 2009. It had blogs, galleries, video chat, audio sharing, profiles and much more. The site was my concept and I did much of the development work myself. The design, architecture and framework where redesigned by me with help from a developer I recruited into the business. This site was part of a group sites that fell under the STO LLC and subsequent purchased was by Hythiam and renamed to the Recovery Media Network.

Concept:
12 Step Space was a social networking website for the recovery community. Having extensive knowledge of this community lead me to believe it was ripe for this kind of site. Since word of mouth is one of the best forms of marketing a community that congregated several times a week was perfect for social networking. Also at the time the site was released there were no competing sites to speak of.
All of this led me to believe it would be successful.
Startup:
The biggest issue with a social networking platform is finding start up members. A social networking site depends on members to interact with it and create a community. You can create a wonderful site but if you have no users the site is going to fail. Realizing this I started a Myspace marketing program using my members and attracting others. At the time the site was ready for release I had an opt in email list of over 500 members who where ready to start joining, posting and blogging. Now all we needed was the site.

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The framework:
I researched what was available at the time and spent several days comparing them before I landed on a commercial content management system. It was designed for social networking and had everything the site needed to be successful. Unfortunately I could not thoroughly test the platform since it was commercially developed and encrypted. These two issues actually lead to the downfall of the site that would have been unforeseen at the time of its release.
Architecture:
Its one thing to have functionality but as many designers know you have to make the user interface and information architecture are intuitive or the end users will become confused, frustrated and leave. Using software we mapped the default structure of the sites page layout and menu system then redesigned it to be more congruent with what a user would expect.
Style:
Having mapped the information architecture and framework it was time to skin the entire site. Design is not just making things pretty but it is the use of design principles and spacial reasoning to effectively manipulate the end-users visual experience of the site. Done properly this helps the user interact with the site and feel more comfortable navigating within it.
12 Step Space Sold:
In 2007 12 step space and several other sites where sold to Hythiam to help market their treatment protocols to our members. I was kept on as Creative Director and Webmaster as a subcontractor for Hythiam for the next two years.
12 Step Space Shut Down:
In 2009 Hythiam brought in a new marketing director who restructured their budget towards Health Insurance companies. Because of this all efforts targeting the general public where shut down. Against my advice they shut down 12 Step Space and all of the sites they where using for promotion on the web. Possibly the worst marketing move I have ever scene since 12 Step space had 16,000 members and the sites I was running for them where generating over 4 million page views a month.