After an intense couple of days in the blogosphere, we thought we’d lighten the mood. And, I thought what better way to lighten the mood than with – that’s right, some good ole’ fashioned applied nerdery. After all, that’s our shtick.

We’re always looking for new, cool tools to help us hone and refine our site, so when I stumbled upon this one I was psyched. For all of you web and UI (User Interface) designers (or if you’re just plain curious), this is really cool. It’s a service called Crazy Egg (www.crazyegg.com) and it helps you “visualize your visitors.” (It’s also built in Rails by the way.)

(view demo)	(view demo)

It tracks where they click (and how long it took them to click) on the page and displays the results in some really innovative (and useful) ways. This can be invaluable when you are testing different UI designs. (i.e. “What if I put the ‘contact us’ link in the corner? Would that entice folks to click it more?”) My favorites are the “heatmap” view and the “confetti” view. (Try the demo.)

Oh my. Look ma’, we’re famous.

You may have read about us in the Savannah Morning News today. Sorta hard not to…”Creative Coast” was in big bold print on the front page (above the fold!) The headline notwithstanding, the article was about an individual who’s been pestering us lately. While that’s all well and good, that’s not what really interests us…we’ve wasted enough time talking about him already. The more relevant issue is a concept that the article mentions and one of the reasons we were being attacked: Regionalism.

Savannah Colleges and Universities (full size)	Savannah Labor Draw (full size)

By “regionalism” we mean a regional approach to economic development. As Rick so appropriately put it:

For the record, we are proud of our efforts to promote Savannah and Chatham County as a location for business and have a solid track record,” he said. “While SEDA’s efforts are directed very specifically within Savannah and Chatham County, we recognize that our city and county benefit enormously as a regional hub for business, health care, hospitality, etc.

By now I’m sure you’ve all heard of this whole cSpot thing that we help sponsor. If you haven’t, here’s a blurb from their website:

We are a slew of creative professionals who got tired of seeing each other only once or twice a year. So…we created a group. And we called it cSpot.

At any rate, it’s this Wednesday, July 25th at Venus de Milo from 6-8pm…and it’s free and it’s fun. You might even find a job or an employee. We sure did – I met Angel at cSpot and now she practically runs the place.

They get together every month, have a few cocktails and do the whole schmoozing thing. Anyone can just show up – the only common denominator is that they are in “creative” industries or they are creative for a living….or, they’re just cool people. Design, development, marketing, pr, writing/editing, music, art, video, you name it…they’re pretty non-discriminatory. You can even just be looking to meet some cool quirky folks.

Oh, and let us know if you can come!

Hope you can join us…

Oh yea, just like Diddy says. And we’re not kidding, the arts mean business. On Thursday I attended the “A Cultural Affair”, a Recognition of Savannah’s Creative Industries – held at the Jepson and sponsored by The City, SEDA and the CVB. I must say, it was an interesting event. In front of a relatively packed auditorium, the guest speaker was Randy Cohen (of Americans for the Arts) made a enlightening presentation about the economic impact of the Arts.

To quote from the first paragraph of the study (download the Savannah report):

The key lesson…is that communities that invest in the arts reap the additional benefit of jobs, economic growth, and a quality of life that positions those communities to compete in our 21st century creative economy.

Amen.

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. Lucky for us, Savannah was one of the 156 communities that participated in the study – the most comprehensive study of its kind ever conducted. Even luckier, Savannah managed to generate over $46 million in expenditures (nonprofit arts and culture orgs and their audiences, excluding event admission). That’s FOURTH overall in communities our size. Hellz yea.