Web design rockstar Khoi Vihn, design director at NYTimes.com, gave a ringing-endorsement point to a deck that accompanied a presentation by designer Jeff Croft.

Every two years, NFIB hosts a National Small Business Summit, a biannual event to explore important policy, business and economic issues facing small business. In the past, we worked with NFIB to create an event website for the Summit, which included news stories from the event. Good, but we wanted to do something more dynamic in 2008.

While tools like Flickr, YouTube and Twitter each serve a unique purpose, we've found that pulling them together into one interface can often serve your audience best, particularly when you're sharing information about a single event. While each individual feed is still available, if someone only wants to see the photo updates, for instance, but the event-focused website shows a complete picture of the event -- photos, video and all. For many associations, online marketing is still website and email focused. Hammock's approach is different. We take unique advantage of social media but still provide a central home for all event-related content. If you can't attend, it's the next best thing to being there.

Hammock partner Susan Weiss of the national advertising sales firm the James G. Elliott Company shares some perspective on the value of advertising in today’s environment in the latest issue of their company newsletter Ads & Ideas:

It’s a question that marketers struggle with during periods of economic unrest: cut costs by reducing or eliminating the advertising budget, or else maintain or increase the brand’s advertising exposure?

Today’s b-to-b marketing decision makers have learned the lessons taught during past economic upheavals. Meeting a recessionary climate with aggressive advertising is, historically, a way to grow business during a recession and maintain continued growth after the recessionary period ends. A study conducted by BtoB magazine earlier this year finds that most business-to-business marketers are determined to hold or increase their marketing budgets during 2008.

If you're a fan of anyone or anything, it's always great to be around other people who share that passion. But if your coworkers, family or closest friends don't share in that excitement, where is a fan to turn? Online, of course.

Several of us here at Hammock are fans of the TV show LOST. (The new season in February can't start soon enough!) But any time we want to talk with like-minded fans when we're not in the office with each other, a simple Google search of "LOST fan forum" will bring up 984,000 results.

Think about your favorite websites, the ones you frequent most often for news, sports, shopping and entertainment. What do they have in common?

Now think about your own website. Does it have those same characteristics? If not, it may be time for a simple update or a total redesign. Here are five questions to ask yourself:

Hammock creates innovative multimedia
post-event supplement with video

In 2008, NFIB turned to Hammock to help solve two of their post-Summit needs: 1) Provide members who did not attend the Summit highlights of the event beyond the traditional few pages of coverage in MyBusiness, NFIB's member magazine, and 2.) Generate additional advertising revenue. To meet these goals, Hammock worked with NFIB to create and distribute a special, multimedia, digital edition supplement of MyBusiness covering the highlights of the Small Business Summit.