A collection of inspiring photography, Web design, illustrations, website architecture and online images, Five Minutes Daily shares the Web’s most interesting imagery from the perspective of the IWS creative team.

Yeah, it’s got examples of our own design work, but we are casting our net wide to show off stuff that we think is cool, cutting-edge and creative.

Get your daily dose of inspiration; visit FiveMinutesDaily.com!

IWS has long been a supporter of Make-A-Wish as well as other charities and causes in the Washington, D.C. and Phoenix communities. We believe we have an obligation to give back and try our best to walk the walk.

In the next week we will be rolling out a campaign to raise the funds necessary to grant this wish. We will also be developing ways you can participate and hope you will join us in this worthwhile cause. Together, we can all “swim with dolphins!”

To learn more about Make-A-Wish, please visit their Web site.

I know what people expect me to write. There’s this running assumption in the office that I’m some sort of pirate.  Yes, I wear a lot of stripes, anchor-patterned shorts, and on Wednesday and Thursday, I carry a fun-size bottle of rum in my boots.

But the only thing I constantly pillage and plunder is my checking account, and I limit eye-patch wearing to the privacy of my living room.

The most compelling reason why this pirate assumption has spread is because right before I joined the team, I spent several months on board an old-school sailboat. I’ve tried to use proper technical terms to describe the boat — a brigantine, a square-rigged vessel, but the response is always the same:

“Oh, like a pirate boat?”

Yes, like a pirate boat.

So what is a Web Designer doing on a pirate boat? I guarantee you I did not do an iota of Web Design while helping run, maintain and navigate a sail boat with 29 other people from the Dominican Republic to Jamaica and more.

I was part of a program from Sea Education Association, in which students learn nautical science, oceanography, environmental science and cultural studies, to name a few.

Have I come out of that experience as a better designer? Of course.

Maybe I didn’t have coding sessions on the quarterdeck, but design is an art that encompasses much more than knowing how to use Photoshop and Dreamweaver.  Designers still have to work as a team, communicate successfully and find inspiration. And I did all those, repeatedly, almost constantly, for months.

Sometimes communication was a life and death matter.  If someone was not paying attention to their job, it could’ve cause catastrophic consequences. The SEA Program instills in students a sense of ultimate responsibility that many of them have never experienced. There was a sense that your decisions were so important that there was no option but to get them right. And while that might sound harsh, sometimes in the working world, that’s the sort of pressure people deal with.

A Web Designer is not an island, pun intended.

I find it helpful and necessary to step aside from the giant 28-inch monitor, and go do and live adventures that seem unrelated, sometimes if only for the inspiration, memories and friends you might find along the way.

Measures of success obviously can vary from project to project, but they can also vary within a project. In most cases there exist three levels of measures, for our purposes we’ll call them primary, secondary and tertiary.

Usually primary measures of success relate to an offline activity. Although some people may spend more time in front of a computer than away from it, there is still a real world out there – a world that revolves around exchanging money, voting, construction and other human activities. Thus some examples would include making a donation on a mobile phone, getting people to vote for a particular candidate, or winning approval for a new hospital. One or more of these are usually the “problems” a client will have when looking to partner with another firm. These are easily the most important measures of success.

Secondary measures have to do with the activities that lead to one of the primary objectives mentioned above. Since primary measures involve a serious commitment on the part of the end-user, a gradual process of building up to the ultimate goal is required. These nodes of engagement could include participating in an online poll or survey, posting a message on a Facebook Wall, or forwarding an email.

The way to judge the likelihood that the secondary actions will be taken by supporters remains the hard data of the tertiary measures. These indexes – like pageviews, open rates or Twitter followers – are the things successful managers follow on a daily basis; and their analysis will uncover trends among your audiences.  This will in turn allow you to optimize campaigns to drive up the response rates measured in the primary and secondary goals.

Taking a step back we have seen that measures of success directly correlate to a campaign goal.  Measuring those goals can be done on a variety of levels in this case primary, secondary, or tertiary.  These levels could also be called Offline, Engagement, and Indicators, respectively.

The goal of this post was to pass on some knowledge for the offline world, I hope it is measured as a success.

According to ComScore, blogs combined receive 77.7 million unique visitors each day in the United States. Furthermore, 77 percent of active Internet users read blogs, according to Universal McCann. That’s an audience the size of over 175 million people in just the United States alone.

Of course it’s great for your company or organization to have a blog, but what happens if it’s not reaching the right audience, or a sizeable one for that matter? That’s where blogger outreach comes in. Is there something your company just created or launched? Is there a really big event coming up? Is there something exciting you just have to share? It there an issue that’s a hot topic that concerns your organization? Those are all great opportunities to use bloggers to help disseminate your message. So, how do you get them talking?

#1: Provide an incentive. You may be thinking “What else does John from Oshkosh, Wisconsin have to do besides blog about my cool new product?” but the reality is that many of these people pour their heart, soul and free time into their blog’s content, and they often can be picky about what they choose to share. So, in order to ensure that your time is well spent, make sure you provide an incentive. Maybe it’s cold hard cash, an exclusive peek at the new product, an all expenses paid trip to the event or some free schwag – whatever it is, providing incentives shows bloggers that you respect them and value their time and efforts.

#2: Pitch when it really matters. An obvious example is with new technology. You don’t want to pitch a review of a cell phone after it’s already hit the market, you want to offer bloggers a free new phone, months before anyone else can get their hands on it. If there’s a new tech toy coming out, you better believe interested consumers will do their homework months in advance and often will have made their decision before the product even goes on sale. You want to make sure that your pitches are relevant and timely.

#3: Branch out to reach a wider audience. Let’s say your organization is dead set against the latest health insurance reform bill. Instead of speed dialing your go-to political blogger, think about who else you could be reaching. Think about who’s most concerned about health issues on a daily basis. Got your answer? If you guessed moms, give yourself a pat on the back. Looking for a mommy blogger who is on the conservative side would help spread your message and reach an entirely new audience. But remember to make your message relevant to them, not you, for example pitching scenarios of how the bill could potentially affect moms and families.

photo: Nele en Jan