Matt Inman - 0at.org - Marketing & Design

About Matthew

I am a 27 year old web designer, web developer, and online marketer from Seattle, Washington. For some samples of my work, check out my design portfolio. I also have a design and marketing blog, which I try to update fairly regularly.

In addition to design, linkbait, and viral marketing, I am proficient in PHP, CakePHP, MySQL, Ruby on Rails, Perl, and FreeBSD.

Press

• Living on Dividends - SEO Guerilla Marketing
• Wrevenue.com: Mingle² SEO Genius Matt Inman
• The Guardian: How to get online advertising for free
• SocialMediaRockstar.com: Interview with Matthew Inman
• web virtuoso, the state of the web according to Matthew Inman

Notable Achievements

In early 2007 I designed and coded a full-featured online dating website, from concept to launch, in only 66.5 hours. In a typical 9-5 job this would amount to about a week and a half. The end result was Mingle².

Once development was done, I began promoting the website through linkbait and viral marketing. According to Yahoo! Site Explorer, I generated nearly a quarter of a million links in 4 months. The website was eventually featured on MSNBC.com, USA Today's Blog, Digg.com, and thousands of other blogs and websites. In addition, the site ranked #1 at Google for "Online Dating," "Free Online Dating," and pretty much every other dating related search query you can think of, beating out websites like Match.com, eHarmony, and PlentyOfFish.

By July 2007 the website was getting nearly 2 million page views a month and the number of daily signups had gone up by 2000% (two thousand percent). I was then approached by JustSayHi, a competing dating website who was interested in an acquisition. I ended up selling it and Mingle² and JustSayHi were merged. I now work full-time Mingle² doing marketing and design.

Check out this Alexa Graph, which compares Mingle² to JustSayHi and shows the dramatic inversion of JustSayHi's traffic once the sites were merged.

Currently, Mingle² receives over 1 million page views a day.

Prior to working for JustSayHi, I was the Chief Technology Officer of SEOmoz.org, a search marketing firm based out of Seattle, Washington. I joined SEOmoz in 2003 when there were only three of us. In addition to being the CTO, I performed duties as a web designer, developer, and systems administrator.

Web Designer: I was the web designer of SEOmoz.org and the creative force behind their online identity. I made everything from desktop wallpapers to business cards, production websites to the translucent logo on the office door.

Web Developer: While working for SEOmoz, I was responsible for maintaining the SEOmoz website itself as well as a handful of client websites. I built all the SEO tools and maintained the high-load infrastructure behind them.

Linkbait Developer & Viral Marketer: If there's one marketing firm that's become synonymous with linkbait, it's SEOmoz. Being a former top 100 digg user, I was tasked with crafting content that drove page views far into the millions. My work has also been featured on BoingBoing, SlashDot, Wired Magazine's blog, and countless other social media websites (Reddit, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon).

Being featured in Newsweek, the Washington Post, USA Today, Slashdot.org, Digg.com (in excess of a dozen times), there was never a dull moment working at the 'moz. In addition, I got to watch a company of originally three people mature into one of the most well-branded SEO firms on the planet.

I built all the SEOmoz tools, but the Page Strength SEO Tool is the one I'm the most proud of.

The tool is designed to satisfy the curiosity of webmasters, surfers and web marketing professionals seeking a better metric to quickly assess a website's relative importance and visibility. Google PageRank is a terrible metric for measuring the potential of a URL to rank in the engines. It's updated infrequently and Google has publicly stated that PageRank values are mostly for entertainment purposes. Page Strength was an alternative to PageRank and ended up being our most popular tool, which also made it the most difficult to scale. I built Page Strength using a perl back-end and a CakePHP/Ajax front-end.

Before my departure from SEOmoz in 2007 the Page Strength tool had calculated nearly 1 million page strength scores.

Quizzes, Widgets, & Gadgets from OnePlusYou. This collection of viral quizzes and widgets have collectively earned nearly 15 million page views over the past year, and built hundreds of thousands of links across the blogosphere. Here's a few of my favorites:

• How many five year olds could you take in a fight?
• How many cannibals could your body feed?
• The Booze Test
• Blog bumper stickers
• What are your chances of surviving a zombie apocalypse?
• How much is your dead body worth?
• The Death Report - find out morbid facts about your birthday

Miscellaneous Stuff

Below are a few various other websites, illustrations, and articles I've created

• Illustrator/Author: The 8 Phases of Dating (and other guides)

  This was one of the most popular guides I've illustrated. I also created 10 reasons to grow a giant beard, 10 reasons it would rule to date a unicorn, 9 reasons not to date a t-rex, how to turn your car into an unstoppable murder machine, and how to tell if your cat is plotting to kill you. Each of these guides, upon launch, received millions of page views and drew thousands of links from across the web.

• Illustrator/Author: The State of the Web, Summer 2008

  I created an illustrated collage of things that were happening on the web in the summer of 2008. The collage received over a quarter million unique visitors in a few days and put 0at.org in Alexa's movers and shakers.

• Designer/Developer: ZombieHarmony - a dating site for zombies

  I created ZombieHarmony to get the word out about Mingle². Within 24 hours of launch the site had received hundreds of thousands of unique visitors and was featured on blogs and websites all across the web. Eventually it even made it into the print edition of Entertainment Weekly!

• Illustrator/Author: Social media websites in illustrated form

  This got featured on pretty much every major social media website's homepage, and the founder of Reddit even used my illustration as the reddit logo for the day!

• Designer/Developer Web 2.0 Awards

  I designed and developed the 2006 and 2007 Web 2.0 Awards. These annual awards helped SEOmoz become a highly recognizable brand in industries outside search marketing.

• Author: How to make square corners with CSS

  A funny article for Drivl, geared towards web designers who seem to obsess over making rounded corners.

• Author: How dating my ex was like playing Doom II on nightmare mode

  I wrote this blog post as dating linkbait to market Mingle²

• Designer/Developer: AJAX Powered IP to Location Lookup

  I created this years ago and it was the first time I'd ever used AJAX. This simple little app takes an IP address, finds its geographic coordinates, and then plots them on a google map. What I especially like about this app was that it only took a few hours to build, and over the course of two years it recieved several million page views.

• Author: SEOmoz Blog - Oatmeal's Posts

  These are all the blog posts I made at SEOmoz - many of these received tens of thousands of unique visitors.

• Designer/Developer: SEOmoz Tools

  I built and maintained all these bad-ass tools. Check out the Rank Checker or Page Strength Tool.

• Designer/Developer: FilmCritic Movie Quiz

  I designed and built this linkbait to promote FilmCritic.com

• Strategy/Design: What's your blog's reading level?

  This nifty app tells you what level of education is required to understand the material on your blog. I came up with the idea and provided the design and an overview of the code requirements.

• Author: How to Ruin a Web Design

  Quite possibly one of my favorite pieces of linkbait. If you are a client of mine, or have ever been a client of mine, you need to read this.

• Author: 8 web design tactics to help you when you're stuck

  An article for web designers who are stuck in a "design rut."

• Author: What code DOESN'T do in real life (that it does in the movies)

  This was one hell of a piece of linkbait. In addition to digg, it was featured on BoingBoing and Slashdot.

• Designer Drivl.com - Your Daily Dose of Awesome

  This is still one of my favorite designs. In addition to being featured on a bunch of CSS galleries, it was awarded the best designed site of 2006 by LAist.com.

• Author: 5 HTML elements you probably never use (but perhaps should)

View my design portfolio for more examples of my work

Other Skills

In addition to web design, I am also a seasoned web developer. I got my start as a perl programmer and eventually wound up creating mod_perl driven web applications. Due to its portability, I eventually switched to PHP and now do the majority of my development using CakePHP, an MVC framework for PHP (think Ruby on Rails, but the PHP equivalent). I am also very well versed in MySQL database optimization, having spent two years answering MySQL support questions in #mysql on efnet. All of my websites uses semantic HTML and CSS and I am a strong advocate of web standards. My server OS of choice is FreeBSD.