Viewmark endorses theater troupe, receives 4 stars in Edinburgh Scotland

Call it "luck" that a Viewmark supported theatre troupe led by Colorado director Kelly McAllister, was given the opportunity to open this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the world’s largest performing arts festival and one of the greatest celebrations of arts and culture on the planet. Each year, Greenside Venues randomly selects just twenty shows to open the festival. The event invites professional theatre guests and media from around to world to preview the works of several performing arts organizations who have traveled to Scotland to participate in the festival.

BANNED cast backstage at Riddles Court

It was the second year in a row for this troupe to be invited to perform in Edinburgh and expectations were high. Viewmark, who now focuses on the performing arts community, identified the show as a candidate for their new strategy. After all, last year the group’s show received five-stars and became a local sensation for its stage portrayal of the community buyout of the small Isle of Eigg in the Scottish Hebrides. Then, the show went on to be selected by Broadway World readers as the Best New Musical of 2023; naturally, Viewmark was delighted when the troupe agreed to return in 2024 and accepted the endorsement.

BANNED cast opens Edinburgh Fringe

Early on, the troupe discussed how the new show needs to be different than “Eigg.” and the members decided to reinvent “WYSIWYG,” an April Alsup musical about the sensitive issues of online dating, gender and sexuality. The new musical has now become known as just “BANNED,” since it follows a group of gender misfits through the events leading up to their debut at a local performing arts festival. There were all sorts of clever marketing tactics deployed that followed the clandestine theatre troupe to the festival.

BANNED cast attending "Tattoo" at Edinburgh Castle

After opening night it was clear that the theatre troupe had another hit on their hands. The Scotsman, Scotland’s National Newspaper, gave the show four stars and praised the composer April Alsup. “The songs are strong and memorable, in nicely complex arrangements too – tunes are swapped back and forth in complicated ensemble numbers, and the cast offers glowing harmonies as well as vivid solos.” It also hailed the actors, the choreography and declared that “Online dating gets a merciless take-down, while the pleasures of sex are dutifully celebrated.”

BANNED cast celebrates opening night at Posto Pizza

“Best of all, however, BANNED offers a deeply human perspective on issues of gender and sexual identity, its flawed characters navigating their own mistake-filled routes through pronouns, preferences and plenty more,” the review continued. “It’s a complex, compassionate show of missteps and misunderstandings, and one that warmly applies the tolerance it requests of others onto its own damaged but likeable characters.”

BANNED cast heads home from University of Edinburgh

Theatrical success doesn’t come about in a vacuum; it really does take a village to mount a new musical production and Denver has a vast array of organizations that support the performing arts. From rehearsal spaces to performance venues, from theatre professionals to theatre goers, this community is the perfect place to incubate a meaningful, relevant and important show for international stages.

For more information on “BANNED the Musical” or to watch a video of the Edinburgh performance run, visit www.banned.show.

Viewmark sponsors Denver's Performing Arts Project

Viewmark announced today that it has inked an agreement to support Denver's Performing Arts Project with knowledge, technical expertise and financial support. The plan provides a roadmap for upcoming Colorado productions and/or touring shows to use Viewmark resources. We are confident that our commitment to Colorado and the Performing Arts Project will make Denver a better place to live.

Viewmark staff near Fairplay Colorado

Viewmark changes course and future direction as principals retire.

It's been over 30 years since I founded Viewmark. We were one of the first web design firms in the country and were on the ground floor of an exciting new industry. It's hard to imagine a time when you could visit all the new websites of the month, I remember Bill Gates saying the web was just a passing fad. One year, Viewmark won gold, silver and bronze for web design at the Colorado BMA gold key awards. We built the eCommerce system for Baby Einstein (now Disney), the ticketing engine for Central City Opera and the CMS for so many more.

Right before the millennium, we won "best education site" on the web with HP, we received an International EMMA award and I met Tim Berners-Lee at the MOMA awards ceremony in San Francisco. It really has been quite a ride and I really have enjoyed every minute of it. Life has lots of twists and turns and you never know when an opportunity like that will present itself; in any case, over the last year I've been able to wind the company down and position it more as an organization dedicated to supporting the performing arts in retirement. Here's to the next chapter, cheers and happy new years to come!

Celebrating 20 years of Pubcon!

This year we're celebrating 20 years of Pubcon. It seems like it was just yesterday we were in London. Now 20 years later, we're all gathered to talk about search engine marketing and optimization in Las Vegas for a simple one day affair at a downtown Pub on Fremont street. Congrats all!

Joe Laratro, Brett Tabke, Dana Todd, Glenn Alsup (Pubcon Keynote) 2006

Glenn Alsup Pubcon Super Session 2006

Performing Arts Awareness Case Study

Jeremy Bullmore once said "Brands are created like birds create nests". 

OBJECTIVE: Provide support for the creative efforts of our employees through the Performing Arts Project.

BACKGROUND: Viewmark is primarily a web design firm, but there always seems to be someone involved in some sort of extracurricular performing arts project around Denver. We believe that by helping our employees get visibility for their creative endeavors, we help them, our company, and the Denver community.

CHALLENGE: Create an effective online brand awareness playbook for the Performing Arts Project with an emphasis on providing the Denver community and our employees with a promotional avenue for their works.

SOLUTION: The PAP Internet Implementation Strategy for Performing Arts Professionals. A blueprint that utilizes Viewmark's expertise and fundamental principles of marketing, methods & measurement. It includes guidelines for websites and social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Blogger, YouTube, Spotify and SoundCloud, as well as powerful procedures and analytics for participants to get the most out of the World Wide Web.

RESULTS:: Over the the last few years, the Performing Arts Project has seen an increase in visitor traffic to their website by several orders of magnitude. At the same time, Viewmark employees have a conduit for their creative passions and a strong sense of company loyalty.

Hosting Milestone with AWS

We've maintained a rack of servers at Viawest (now Flexential) and formerly RMI (Rocky Mountain Internet) for 25 years. So it was quite nostalgic to breakdown our cabinet and move all our servers to storage and recycling. Over the last few months we've moved all our customers to the AWS platform. We even have a physical server in Frankfurt for our German customers. We have no regrets with Viawest, they were a good company, but the Amazon cloud was just a better fit for us moving forward.

With international SEO, a little goes a long way.

I have been fortunate to have traveled internationally rather extensively in my life. Early in my career I worked for a very small company that was acquired by a very large one. At the time, there was no such thing as video conferencing or the internet and we (the product marketing staff) were asked to visit a lot of different areas in the world to discuss 3D modeling technologies.

It’s ironic because the intensive traveling actually inspired me to start Viewmark. It was just a coincidence that new digital delivery platforms emerged, like CDs and the internet, that helped solve the intrinsic burdens associated with global product marketing. In essence, the new digital communication mechanisms allowed anyone to “have their cake and eat it too” by making it easier to sustain professional relationships around the globe without sacrificing significant time with family and friends.

Still, I can tell you from personal experience that there can be a lot of value in immersing yourself in a foreign country. Any American who has worked in Europe for an extended period of time will tell you that making an effort to speak the language of the country you are in goes a long way, but I readily admit that many of the responses to my attempts came back in English.

This reminded me of an experience I had in Sweden many years ago. It was in the late 80s and I was on one of those whirlwind marketing tours of Europe. I arrived in Stockholm after a long week on the road and decided to take a quick swim. The solarium was on the top floor of the hotel and when I entered I found that everyone was swimming naked. This is not commonplace in the States, but I said to myself, “When in Rome do as the Romans do”. After taking a short swim, I settled near the entrance, then several Americans walked in. Stunned with my appearance, they ask me, in English, if there was a sauna in the area. All I remember was responding with the only words I knew at that moment “Krona, Krona, Krona”.

In some ways international search works the same way. We have found that regional search engines like, Baidu, Naver, Yandex, etc. favor results for web pages where the titles and descriptions can be easily deciphered in the native language of the search engine and the major search engines have country specific sites where the results focus on links that are written in the country’s main language.

There are published reports that show the US percentage of global search traffic at 22% and if we add ~11% for countries around the globe that use English as their first language (UK, Australia, Canada, etc.), we can surmise that only one third of the world uses English when searching on the internet. Note: This is not to say that only one third of internet users will read English content. We feel this is significantly higher.

When a user arrives on your web site you can easily detect their language preference. Translation firms use spreadsheets or APIs to integrate content into their systems for localization and the costs for doing so are relatively low. At the same time, content management systems give you the ability to seamlessly provide the localized content on your web site.

International SEO is not one size fits all, but a little can go a long way! We have seen double-digit percentage increases in a company’s overall search volume by simply localizing page titles, meta descriptions and message bundles. The question to ask is: How global is your company and how well are you prepared to leverage the international search opportunities that are currently available?