The presentation took approximately 40 minutes and there was roughly 20 students in attendance.

First, I explained the importance of having a solid web presence, an expansive social media outreach, and how it’s important to reach new students. I just covered some of the basics, from a business standpoint, just how important having a good website and presence is to the success of an organization.

At this point, I showed them Social Media Revolution 2 to further emphasize the importance of social media in regards to reaching new students.

From there I dug into the meet and bones of setting up a social media presence and using basic web services for their benefit. I discuss Google Calendar (as well as Google Voice, Blogger, YouTube, and all the rest of relevant Google services), Facebook Pages, Twitter accounts, how to set up a poll or survey, and how to setup special events. I spent roughly 10 minutes going over the basics, with the handouts providing links to all the resources.

From there it turned into a discussion about social media and its presence in the attendee’s life. We discussed some brief ideas how an organization’s events can reach to incoming students. From there we flipped gears and focused on designing a website. Again, it followed the layout of the handout, and I provided some basic insight to the very basics to get a website running. Hopefully some will utilize those fancy new templates that are sprouting up for their own club or organization.

I really focused on how easy it is to find resources on the internet. You can set up a large portion of your web presence with zero coding knowledge. I showed examples of how simple and easy it was, and gave them the tools to start their own journey to re-design their web presence.

Another vital point, and a point I’d been mentioning throughout the presentation, is the importance of teamwork. Combing the skills and talents of an organization is important to the success of its website. Using a graphic designer, illustrator, photographer, writer, or marketing gurus to help out on every aspect on the website is hugely important. It’s so important to great a group effort and work as a team to make a truly kickass website.

Before concluding, I showed them the video Did You Know 4.0 and asked the question: “What’s the point? Why do all this work on a website, especially for a small organization?”

I hoped the video painted a decent picture, but being educated on the Internet is vital. Not only to your personal growth, but having this sort of knowledge is vital to growing as a professional and for the real world.

The closing statement was:

Ask yourself: how is this not worth it? Being able to show employers and companies that you’re comfortable on the web, with social media, and have experience putting it all together? You have a perfect opportunity to learn these technologies, make mistakes, and then get better at it. This is the way the world is heading, so why not give yourself a head start?

I fully encourage that you go out there and attempt to reinvent your digital presence. Put a team together. Put in the work. And while you’re at it, try having a little fun.

Thanks for your time.

Boom. And I’m out.

As some of you know, I’m the founder, webmaster, graphic designer, and guest shoutcaster over at QuakeLive.tv. Quake Live TV runs very much like a business, but we’re all volunteers and our costs are paid for by donations (thanks to an awesome, supportive community).

So what is Quake Live TV? Well, it’s an organization that broadcasts live, competitive video game matches with some of the top professionals. While a lot of our coverage is of community-run events, a lot of our coverage is of the professionals competing in high-level tournaments. We’ve covered over 1,000 competitive matches in our one and half years of operation, with some of our more popular live broadcasts reaching thousands and thousands of live spectators simultaneously. In the past year, we’ve had over 400,000 visitors on our website.

To sum it up: we’re the #1 broadcasting organization in North America Quake Live coverage, and we’re slowly becoming one of the more reputable names in eSports.

While some people scoff at the idea of playing video games professionally, some do pretty well. For example, Anton "Cooller" Singov (who is coming to QuakeCon) has made more than $130,000 in his career. Sure, he’s not going to be able to retire on winnings from professional gaming, but it’s still a good chuck of cash. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Singov

For those of you that are curious as to what competitive gaming is all about, I wrote a four-page magazine article that details the ins-and-outs of the scene.

Page 1: http://mattc0m.com/College/Spring%202009/Magazine%20Writing/page-1.jpg
Page 2: http://mattc0m.com/College/Spring%202009/Magazine%20Writing/page-2.jpg
Page 3: http://mattc0m.com/College/Spring%202009/Magazine%20Writing/page-3.jpg
Page 4: http://mattc0m.com/College/Spring%202009/Magazine%20Writing/page-4.jpg

Back to the big news:
Quake Live TV is going to be the exclusive broadcaster of QuakeCon 2010.

So, what is QuakeCon? What does this mean?

Here’s a snippet of the Press Release:

Quake Live TV, a community-run broadcasting organization, is set to provide exclusive video coverage of QuakeCon 2010. QuakeCon, the largest LAN party in North America, is hosted annually in Dallas, TX and is home to the Intel® QUAKE LIVE® Masters Championship. Known as one of the most prestigious gaming tournaments worldwide, this year boasts a prize pool of over $50,000. After three years of main-stage action QUAKE LIVE® remains a top choice for competitive gamers.

Check out the rest of the press release on GamesIndustry.biz. I actually wrote the majority of the press release.

Essentially, QuakeCon is a big deal. Biggest LAN in North America, biggest free LAN in the world, and it hosts thousands of gamers at the event with tens of thousands tuning into the coverage from around the world.

My company is going to be that coverage.

I’m really happy to go there and be working alongside my fellow founders Steve "GreasedScotsman" Huff and Ben "FishStix" Goldhaber. These guys are legit. Also along with our promotion to the official coverage team means we get comped rooms, VIP passes, interviews with Bethesda and id Software execs, and a lot more really cool things.

In fact, if anyone has any questions for id Software, Bethesda Game Studios, Splash Damage, Respawn Entertainment (the founders of Infinity Ward, the guys who made call of Duty), Arkane Studios, or any of the pro gamers… let me know!

Anyway, I’m super excited about this and just wanted to share it. Hopefully you guys tune and I have your support!

Matt "Mattc0m" Richards
www.quakelive.tv

I designed a set of cards for a maternity company called Haute Momas. It offers two coupons on the back of a card, with a pretty standard stock photo for the front. Still, it turned out pretty darn good – I am a bit fan of the color scheme I selected. Has a very professional, yet light “smoothness” to it.

View Full Album

This next set is from a flyer for a theme week for Program Board (an student-run organization that organizes and programs all the events on campus). I was experimenting with a lot of new colors, and it turned out pretty damn slick.

Getting correct colors for the printing was pretty challenging, but it turned out very eye catching and I’ve received a lot of positive feedback from it.

Tell me what you think of both projects!

Oh, and a shit ton of design work.

As you may or may not know, I’m a fairly accomplished professional designer. I’ve been designing fairly steadily for about five years now, and have created dozens of websites. I’m nearing the one hundred mark. I’m not great by any means, but I’m getting better and better, and my work is really beginning to shine.

Anyway, enough about me! Let’s talk design.

My first big project is Games Cast TV.

The idea of this project is to unify and expand e-sports by providing a single site for all your video needs. With the homepage being a dynamic, functional page with AJAX notifications, Javascript-based IRC chat, and Flash-based live streaming, you can watch continuing e-sports coverage without ever leaving the frontpage. The second big feature is having the largest searchable index of e-sports videos. It’s gonna be pretty intense.

So the idea behind the design is having a very clear, specific focus. There’s an air of general simplicity and minimalism in the design. The focus is truly on the content – the rest of the site being devoid of many colors. Each inclusion of color has a very specific purpose, and is meant to draw your attention. I drew a lot of inspiration from Hulu, Last.fm, Image Spark, and Maxvoltar for this project. Usability and clean aesthetics are my two goals, with maybe just a little “Web 2.0″ spice.

My first version
Really big on the minimalism, but really boring too. It was at a concept stage

Second version
Again, really plain, but I tried adding visual flair through icons and some gradients, as well as bringing focus to the middle.

Third version
This is the first version where concepts were less important, and the visual appeal took a bit more precende. It’s shaping up, and has an inspired header from both Hulu and Last.fm. Contrasting colors gives the site a lot more focus.

Final Version (alpha v0.2)
This design is still very early in it’s Alpha stage. It is roughly 50% complete (design wise). It is completely coded with HTML / CSS. Optimization and IE support has not been addressed yet. I’m still working on some visual upgrades, jQuery additions, and other coding tidbits as well.

However, you clearly can see the design is starting to take shape. A strong footer off-balances a somewhat boring header. It lacks a lot of fluff and visual flair, but is still a strong design. The use of color is very specific, drawing your eyes to certain portions. The middle of the page will be taken over by an actual streaming footage when the site moves online.

The design is meant to be very interactive, with an abundance of overlays, rollovers, and other effects letting you know how and where to interact with the design. This not being a functional website, mind you, means none of these features actually work yet. This is just the design part!

My biggest accomplishment is the CSS structure. I load a variety of CSS files, with many of them being dynamically loaded dependent on the user’s browser, resolution, or preferences set within the site. First, it loads a master.css, which loads the reset.css, text.css, 960.css (grid system, currently unused), and style.css (includes mainly header and footer markup). Then, a page-specific CSS is loaded (in this case, frontpage.css). Then, a color css is loaded. In this case, default.css (though black, red, and other colors will be available). Finally, a layout css is loaded, in this case default.css. However, widescreen.css will be available for widescreen monitors. Sweet!

This structure is very different from how I normally write my CSS, so doing it in this way is a bit daunting. Hopefully IE optimization won’t be too much of a bitch. But it makes customization the site down the line, as well as adding other themes for color and layout, to be extraordinarily easy.

Personally, I am very happy with how this design turned out. Sure, it may seem simple and a bit boring. But I’ve worked a ton on the little details, and I think it’s got a very good approach.

Other projects:

• Unto the World
• Shepherd University Intramurals
• Adopt a Pet (Final for my Advertising class)
• Shepherd University Program Board (I designed it awhile ago, but I continue to improve and update it)

Check out what I came up with:

• Advertisement for male magazine
• Advertisement for female magazine
• Alternative advertisement for female magazine

FPS Gaming Community launched earlier this month, and I’m very proud of how it’s turned out. It runs off a WordPress installation, but it’s very non-blog-like in functionality. It’s got a nice Web 2.0 feel to it, while having this great dark, blue glowing vibrancy to it.

I got the theme from Elegant Themes (I’m now a huge fan), and edited it quite extensively. I’m very happy with how it turned out, design-wise.

So what is FPS Gaming Community, anyway? Well, to put it plainly, it’s a community for gamers. Like the name didn’t give that part away! But what sort of things does said community do?

• Maintains a collection of fast, updated game servers with friendly admins and consistent rules.
  We’re sponsored kindly by the folks at FPS Gaming Solutions.
• Has a Ventrilo voice chat that anyone from the community may use to stay coordinated.
  We’re sponsored kindly by the folks at MainVoice.
• Events and activities that all members can get involved with! From “Late Night” sessions to pub events to tournaments and more, we plan on making gaming more fun and social.
• Clubs that any member can start up that focuses in on their particular interest – whether it’s a specific game, collection of games, a certain niche, or even a competitive team!
• A website and forums that offer even more cool content as well as a place to come together as a community and mobilize (hopefully for world domination, if everything goes to plan).

So, basically, check it out. The domain is www.fpsgamingcommunity.com. I’m very proud of how it’s turning out, and can’t wait to see it expand even further.

It’s really hard to explain the entire site in one blog post – so please take the time to explore it a little yourself! Head over to www.quakelive.tv today!

Just how well received has the site been received?

• 1,000+ registered users
• 13,000+ unique visitors
• 300,000+ page views
• Support from Quake Live itself, Ustream.tv’s president, djWheat, Slasher, NGL, & the entire Quake Live community
• Links & articles on GotFrag, ESReality, SK Gaming, QuakeLive.com, Quake Unity, Quake Life, and many more

Be sure to check out the media player, browse our match history, or visit the forums!

As always, be sure to let me know what you think!

• Quake-Live.TV (coming soon page)
• Logos
• Web Design

The majority of the work has been completed by GreasedScotsman, who has done around 90% of the work so far on the website. It’s really looking great – it has got a ton of functionality built into the website.

We’re still working on the completion of the site as well as working on getting the best quality video streaming for the site. Since Quake Live does not offer spectator functionality, we’re building a streaming solution through Ustream.

I’ve just launched a brand new website, Fable 2 Sector. It will feature forums, game guides, hints, help, media, and many other features. Check it out!