The Road DDA Travels
A couple of weeks ago we received an invitation from the township to a zoning meeting “of sorts”. Since these early meetings are usually exploratory, you can feel as you sit and try to listen without distrations that you could spend the time in a better way. Since David and I have attended many of these over the years, we are now smart enough to get more particulars before investing the time. So David called the department head involved. He explained that one of the businesses on our street would like to change the name of the street because the current name is not conducive to attracting customers/clients. Kind of a lost cause. We won’t be attending.
Does that company have any idea what changing the name of an existing street requires besides maybe ten years of effort? For starters, think of the simple things like all the stationery, business cards, checks, records that each business will have to change. And, the nightmare for the township would include informing the fire and police departments, emergency services, the post office, the maps would have to be changed and now that there is GPS, those people would have to be clued in. I shudder to think how one request like that can bomerang.
It would have been smarter for that business to do a better job of locating their enterprise before they settled on this street. When we started our own search for new quarters for our marketing and advertising agency, we tried very hard to think outside the box. We went as far as conducting our own traffic study (just David and I) at different times of the day to see what traffic patterns would be like at complexes we were interested in. We agonized over the distances our different staff members would have to drive if we chose a building too far east or west or north or south for those who already drive an hour to get here.
I had my own set of requirements which included private bathrooms, an eat-in kitchen, windows, trees ( in the beginning of our search, I even had porches so we could work outside on nice days). After a year of looking and talking to commercial real estate agents, and driving around weekends, we found our current location. Ironically, it is less than a mile from the original Dynamic Digital Advertising office.
The morale of this tale is that everything requires patience. Creative ideas are a triggering point for what will be fleshed out into a highly functional website, or robust backend depending on whethter the project is driven by programming needs or a client’s recognition that their website is a “me-too” unimpressive reflection of their company.
Every day, those of us who toil in this digital world, work to improve what we have to offer our clients. Our content writers are scrupulous about the time spent developing search engine friendly content, we keep an eye on the hours spent animating a body part (very time consuming, by the way), we keep good records through our tracs so our clients know where their budgets are spent. All this takes diligence and patience and discipline. And it is why I know that when the economic climate starts to improve we can parlay what we are into an even more competetive arena.
DDA is here to stay!
Entry by: elizabeth