Bulletin Board

A collection of short articles about technology. Topics include short-life Web sites, carpal tunnel syndrome, computer games for employee training, and the truth about Web site cookies.

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Limited Engagements

Web sites, unlike diamonds, don't have to be forever. Suppose your company is making a limited-time offer. Or launching a product. Or testing to see if your customers are willing to buy on-line. In those and other instances, a full-blown, brand-building, all-products-all-the-time presence on the Internet is just plain overkill.

That's the contention of the Creative Department, a nine-person marketing firm in Cincinnati that designs product- and message-specific sites with memorable Web addresses like need1.com, want1.com, and lookyhere .com. It then leases those sites to customers for 13 weeks (with an option to renew), driving visitors to the Web with powerful single-image ads in other media.

"We're staking the success of this on showing the product with a domain name that is also a call to action," says Steve Deiters, a partner and cofounder of the firm. "You're giving people an address that is almost like a vanity phone number. If they see it on a billboard or hear it on the radio, it's easy to commit to memory."

A trial run with the company's own Web site demonstrated that the Creative Department may have something here: in three weeks more than 1,100 people in the Cincinnati area typed in the URL get1.com after seeing a billboard with that address and a picture of a two-headed dog. (The faux site marketed WunderPets: cloning experiments gone wrong.)

The pricing, however, may be a problem. The service seems ideal for small businesses without a Web site. But the Creative Department is considering charging $40,000 for site creation, hosting, and use of the URL for 13 weeks for a national or large regional campaign--and that doesn't include the cost of non-Web advertising. Using the WunderPets response as a benchmark, that works out to $8 for each pair of eyeballs lured to the site. When you consider that it costs only $70 to register a domain name for two years--and presumably there are a few catchy ones left, even after the two dozen the Creative Department has snapped up--the proposition for small businesses becomes cloudy.

Deiters says the firm wants to attract all kinds of clients and will probably offer price incentives, particularly for companies that want to advertise only in one region. "We can be pretty flexible," he says. --Leigh Buchanan

You Put Your Left Foot In

For at least eight minutes every day, Designer Checks, of Anniston, Ala., looks a lot like an Arthur Murray Dance Studio. Most of the company's 400 or so employees stand up from their computers, step away from their desks, and gather on the company's production floor for a rousing rendition of the Macarena. Or maybe the Hokey Pokey.

The dancing is part of the company's campaign to fight carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS), which can cause finger, wrist, arm, and shoulder pain in workers performing tasks with repetitive hand movements. As the $43-million maker of custom checks grew, (it added more than 200 employees in the past two years alone), owner Grady Burrow feared a related growth in CTS. "It's silly to put people at risk when you can do something about it," he says.

So in March 1997, Burrow had the company's training coordinator, Pam Wiseman, recruit an occupational therapist to teach Designer Checks' employees how to sit, type, and lift better. And since one of the best ways to fight CTS is simply to get up and move around, she instituted a program of companywide exercise sessions.

Now every day at 10 a.m., 2 p.m., 5 p.m., and 7 p.m., department heads lead employees in two to three minutes of stretches that exercise necks, shoulders, and hands. Managers who were initially embarrassed by all the arm flailing have loosened up and are enlivening their routines with some very uncorporate dance steps. "It's a little silly, but it's fun," says Wiseman. "And it gives you a break." --Shane McLaughlin

All Work and All Play

Nine months ago Jeff Turner and his wife, Racquel, were duking it out in the popular computer trivia game You Don't Know Jack when Turner made one of those serendipitous connections that are the wellspring of great ideas. The game format, he realized, did wonders to focus the mind on new material. What if he applied it to employee training?

Turner, the CEO of J. J. Grace, a $3.5-million graphic-design business based in Van Nuys, Calif., was frustrated by the fact that his employees were not fully exploiting the company's most important software: Multi-Ad Creator, a graphics package from Multi-Ad Services Inc. Most of Turner's 50 designers wasted time pointing and clicking through the program instead of using the keyboard shortcuts. For example, a designer widening a logo would pull down a menu and type in a size; if the result was too narrow or too broad, he or she would go back to the menu and try again. Using the arrow keys, the designer could achieve the desired dimensions in a small fraction of the time.

Turner wanted to create a game that would painlessly embed 90 or so keyboard commands in the brains of his designers. He turned for help to former employee Steve Zehngut, who had left J. J. Grace to start his own multimedia company, Zeek Interactive. Riffing off Turner's concept and working in multimedia software called Macromedia Director, Zehngut cooked up "Monster Commands--the Key to Killer Production."

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