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Improving the way Local TV LLC delivers the news online

In a never-ending campaign to improve online readership, lobbying eyes in a heavily saturated 24-hour news cycle, broadcast stations across the country are reevaluating site design and functionality. And in the new web-centric world, no publication can afford not to. 

Local TV LLC, which operates 21 broadcast stations from various networks in 16 U.S. cities, needed to update its legacy content management system. The broadcast management company’s team knew they wanted an easy-to-integrate and customizable WordPress VIP platform for its network of sites and a web design team that understood the modern web from a designability and user functionality perspective. 

The company was also looking to study how users consumed the news and navigate through its news sites, honing in on page views, site traffic and popular content worth giving hierarchy to. Local TV LLC came to Doejo in the spring of 2011 to help them expand on what its stations were good at: a dedication to hyper-local news and weather coverage. 

Doejo’s development and discovery team did a comprehensive job helping Local TV LLC define its audience, parsing through billions of page views from websites that reach more than 15 million people each month.

In what has been one of our most extensive projects to date, we applied the user discovery information we learned and produced a custom WordPress VIP design flexible enough to be used by all Local TV LLC stations. The new platform is much easier for editors, reporters and producers to upload content cleanly, efficiently and consistently. And after viewing the heat maps of where users were viewing the page and how far they would scroll, our designers made the pages more condensed with easily navigational tabs and more logical locations for content.

While reducing clutter and giving breaking news prominence at the top of the page, the page design allows for Twitter-style status updates on ongoing news items without compromising valuable ad space.

Developers also integrated social media platforms so readers can recommend stories and comment using Facebook, Twitter and other networks. Other third party integration natively ties in an online video platform, a social login and authentication provider, a hyper-local news platform and numerous advertising partners. To better manage ads, our developers also wrote a custom open-source plug-in called Ad Code Manager.

Read more about Local TV LLC in our case study here. And visit some of our newly desgined sites: KSTU Fox Salt Lake City, WNEP ABC Scranton, WITI Fox Milwaukee, or view the full list with links here. 

John Scribe

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A sneak peak at Uber Chefs, a new kind of cooking show

We’re excited to introduce one of our newest partner clients, Uber Chefs, launching next month! So for all you culinary aficionados, get your cutting boards ready.

Uber Chefs is a new online cooking show, with a subscription service opportunity, that will feature exceptional vegan, vegetarian and raw food recipes by top chefs. In an effort to demystify healthy eating, Uber Chefs will show how easy and accessible this type of cooking can be.

The site will launch before June 1st with a video featuring Chicago-based Chuy Valencia of Top Chef fame. He is the first of many mainstream chefs that Uber Chef will be targeting in the hopes that they will become a proponent of vegetarian eating and include it in their menus.

Chef-inspired recipes will be presented in an online cooking show format that will explain how chefs make appetizers, entrees and desserts in their personal kitchen.

For members, non-perishable ingredients including exotic spices and hard to find seasonings will be measured and distributed through a mail kit. Users have two options: buy food right away and in a short time it will be mailed to you or you can opt in for a subscription model which will allow you access to premium services such as a Q&A with dietician Carolyn Tampe. Tampe will also provide nutritional analysis for those inclined toward a vegan lifestyle but are unsure of the ingredients needed to obtain proper nutrients. Kind of like a how-to care package.

Dhara Mehta, a lifelong vegetarian with a passion for healthy eating dreamed up Uber Chefs after traveling to India and seeing how accessible a vegetarian lifestyle was there. Seth Kravitz, fellow vegetarian and CEO and Co-Founder of Technori, helped tweak the idea and introduced her to our CEO, Phil Tadros who has helped by sharing his connections throughout the city and helped fund the Uber Chefs startup.

Uber Chefs has not officially launched yet but you can still check out the Doejo-designed website and logo here. Check back on June 1st for the debut video featuring Chuy Valencia. For the latest on Uber Chefs, follow them on Twitter where they’ll be offering free promos at the launch!

Monique Copy Intern

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Jokes4Miles, fighting cancer one joke at a time

Jokes4Miles is an interesting concept on it’s own, even before it tugs at your heartstrings with the story of a young man’s fight with cancer. But if laughter is the best medicine, then this video submission project is the Pfizer of hilarity.

To cheer up his son Miles, who is battling a rare form of brain cancer, Len Austrecivh launched Jokes4Miles.com, which seeks video submissions from comedians to entertain his now-19-year-old son as he receives treatment at LA Children’s Hospital. From this idea the site has grown inspiring hundreds of submissions to Miles and other children from all over battling cancer—videos from famous comedians and athletes included.

Across the street from Doejo, at the recently opened Laugh Factory theater, Jokes4Miles held an impressive 30-hour Joke-A-Thon on April 24 – 25, which was free to attend.

Doejo worked on the Jokes4Mile.com site to make the site a bit more professional as the project started getting publicity ahead of the Laugh Factory event. Here, you can access some of the video submissions, get info on the documentary they’re working on and learn about this inspiring project’s ambitious future plans to get personalized videos for other children fighting cancer. 

John Scribe

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Building software as a custom business solution

At Doejo, we’re constantly creating custom solutions to everyday problems, or simply finding ways to make software more efficient—Like platform applications improving the way you organize audio recordings, or find affordable body shops for car dents, or choose the right college, for example.

An old Forbes article randomly caught our eye highlighting this growing need: building software as a custom business solution. In a post written by General Electric VP and global technology director Bill Ruh, he says we’re in a budding Industrial Revolution-like movement “maximizing the potential of the “Industrial Internet,” a software-driven movement that will advance industry and improve lives by connecting people and businesses…”

He uses the analogy of the Industrial Internet being the “the Facebook or Twitter of things enabled by customized, innovative software,” improving the way we communicate and therefore perform—improving and simplifying notifications, scheduling, reminders, payment processing, etc. With this comes the benefit of value-adding efficiency and shortcuts, taking the friction out of day-to-day processes and improving connectivity. 

Speaking of connectivity, this brings up another Forbes article by Axeda Corp. founder Dale Calder, who asks readers in “The Internet of Things: Like Facebook, But Bigger,” to “imagine the power and productivity that would be unleashed when everything you use and interact with is being extended by an army of developers.” This brings to mind the way iPhone’s apps now empower your phone to act as a TV remote control, a flashlight, a GPS, an eBook reader or an ATM, for example. At some point, someone, somewhere thought, ‘my iPhone could easily use the camera flash as a flashlight,’ and then made it happen.

Here’s a look at how Doejo is building software as business solutions for clients or as in-house projects. These are examples of how you can take existing technology people are already familiar with and apply it in a new, novel ways. Many of these problems were simple hiccups requiring simple solutions as well, we found over the years.

Wiggler: Internal Groupon project management tool

Back in 2011, we built Wiggler, which provides Groupon execs with a customized project management platform so they can stay on track of the surging company. Think of it as a corporate to-do list. Providing group management notifications, tracking copious milestones and organizing internal priorities are functions of Wiggler―from operations, marketing and legal to HR, product services and even mergers. We designed this private application to keep a staff of about 50 Groupon managers well coordinated smoothly and simply.

Weungry: A group ordering platform that’s GrubHub meets Seamless meets Evite

Weungry is an in-house project that provides a platform for restaurants to post their menus online for e-commerce ordering and group ordering, with a focus on the user experience. If a whole office wanted to order food, for example, a user can send an e-vite to the staff to order from Weungry and pick what they prefer from the menu. The administrator can then set a budget and either cover the cost singularly or have each person in the office enter his or her credit card information, streamlining the payment process before placing the order.

Another software solution we developed while working on Weungry was in improving faxes sent from online orders to the restaurant itself—many restaurant that use GrubHub for example, require orders be sent by fax. And we all know how unreliable faxes are. So our developers equipped Weungry to confirm that faxes are processed properly. This led us to create a separate application where you can take photos of documents to fax from your phone. 

TextHog: Easy expense tracking for the iPhone

In 2009, we created in-house expense tracking app TextHog. TextHog became one of the first message-based (SMS) expense reporting mobile platforms in the iOS market. We wanted the app to let users email or text everyday purchases into one location to track and manage spending.

Data is compiled into graphs for visual learners and spreadsheets via Quicken and QuickBooks for tax filing. Users can snap photos with their camera phones of receipts, create tags, categories, bill reminders and set budgets to stay organized.

John Scribe

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Introducing Mouthee: A social network for sharing recommendations with friends

It combines the best qualities of Facebook likes, Foursquare check-ins, Twitter shout-outs and Yelp reviews without all the noise and anonymous rants—because sometimes you just want to see what your friends are reading, what restaurants they love or what tunes they have playing on repeat.

Introducing Mouthee, a play off “word of mouth,” and Doejo’s newest iPhone app launch fashioned by founders Chad Silver and David Pritzker.

The concept is simple: Users make recommendations, “Rec it,” of their favorite restaurants, hotels, movies, music and books, all tied into the APIs of Amazon, iTunes, Yelp, Fandango, Last.fm and OpenTable. These platforms in turn aggregate scores of info into Mouthee’s clean user interface so you can read more about that book through Amazon, sample and download a song from iTunes or make a restaurant reservation through OpenTable, for example.

You can also “Get Rec’s” from Mouthee users or ask a specific user for their rave-worthy hotspot reviews. On the run? Well, Mouthee is location-based too, so when you’re looking for popular finds in your neighborhood, just browse what local Mouthee users are raving about—or avoiding. And if you’re the competitive type among your friends, or fancy yourself the tastemaker of the group, you are rewarded with points and higher rankings for your activity.

For Mouthee’s logo and brand identity, Doejo played off the acronym WOMBAT (“Word of Mouth Based Advocacy Technology”) with a toothy-grinned wombat character. Cute, huh?

Check out some of the logo ideations our design team played around with and download Mouthee for your iPhone today, while it’s still FREE!

John Scribe

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