Creative Solutions for Marketing & Advertising
We offer modern creative and strategic services to people that want to tell their story through marketing and advertising, with an emphasis on websites, social media, content development.
Our clientele is diverse but tends to fall into three main areas — Industry & Manufacturing, History & Education, and Hospitality & Recreation.
We like to highlight projects that present unique challenges and follow along with the basic rules that we try to apply to all of our projects.
Services
We do just about everything you would expect when it comes to design, development, and marketing, including PowerPoint presentations, video, and brochure design. However, as technology changes, so do the services we focus on. If you are serious about your online strategy and effectively communicating with your target markets, then the six services listed here are vital to your success.
Responsive (or adaptive) design is pretty simple. It means your website should ‘respond’ to the device that the visitor is using and adapt to the screen, so the visitor can actually use the site. It does not mean that your website should look the same on a desktop PC, tablet or smartphone. In fact, if you are viewing this site on a desktop PC, simply resize the window and make it very narrow. You will see how the layout responds to the size of the browser. You don’t need versions of your website — desktop and mobile. You need one well-planned, well-designed website.
WordPress is the world’s most popular open-source content management system (CMS), and we use it as the foundation for nearly all of the websites we build. While there are many alternatives to WordPress, we feel that it’s the right solution for all of our clients. It’s fast, flexible, easy-to-extend and it fairly easy to use for most people. On top of that, the popularity of WordPress makes it a very cost-effective solution for all kinds of websites, from simple one-page landing pages to full-blown e-commerce solutions.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to make a huge breakthrough in 2018. One of the key ways AI is being used is for customer service chatbots. Chatbots can talk to your customers, answer all kinds of questions and can even be used to send marketing campaigns. Chatbots also have the ability to learn on their own, depending on the service used to build it. A well-designed chatbot can help streamline and expand your customer service and can answer questions from an unlimited number of users — at the same time.
Social media is now relevant for a business of any kind and any size. From Twitter to Facebook to Instagram, social media provides your organization with the means to grow and engage an audience like never before.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) changes all the time, but the tried and true aspect that never changes is the fact that content is king. We do professional SEO work that provides long-term benefits to your organization and your brand. We also keep up with the latest trends and sort through all of the buzzwords and fluff to figure out what really matters to our clients.
We can help you make sure that your website is compliant with government requirements, including Section 508, the Americans with Disabilities Act and state laws.
Markets
Over the years, we’ve worked with people in many different professions. We’ve done real estate; we’ve done insurance, but the majority of our work falls into the areas listed below. We like to work with clients that want to use technology to solve their marketing issues and communication problems. By nature, we’re problem solvers, and we’re up to the challenge of helping you figure out the best solution for your needs.
Industry & Manufacturing
We have clients in manufacturing, distribution, repair and consultation. These clients are traditionally focused on business-to-business marketing. Search engine rankings, pay-per-click advertising and lead generation are vital to their success.
History & Education
We are a leader in the design, development and implementation of online digital encyclopedias for historical societies and humanities councils. Our Encyclopedia Content Management System (eCMS) has been created exclusively to manage digital encyclopedias. We also work with education vendors that develop online courses and lessons. Projects for these clients are content-driven and are targeted at teachers, students and researchers.
Hospitality & Recreation
From restaurants to golf courses to sports teams, we have worked with a wide variety of customers in these markets. When it comes to these clients, communication with their customers is vital and social media plays an important role.
Featured Projects
Rules
We approach projects with the same basic steps as any other company. We start by learning about your company, how you do things and what you need to accomplish with your website or marketing. Rather than go into the details of those steps, we think our time (and yours) is better spent understanding the basic rules that we try to apply to projects.
Sometimes, our customers have a 5- or 10-year plan in place, sometimes they don’t. Either way, the marketing and communications strategy that we will develop with you needs to be aligned with the goals of your business. This helps ensure the return on your investment. We will start the project by defining the business goals, so that everyone is on the same page. From there, we’ll do some research and make recommendations. Everything we propose will relate to your business goals, with the purpose of improving your bottom line.
For the most part, it’s all been done before. When you understand that basic concept, it makes it much easier to get past the early stages of your project and devote the most time where it should be spent — developing solutions that meet the needs of your customers. If you think you have some innovative new way to navigate a website, that’s great. We’ll take a look, but the cold hard truth is that it probably won’t be a good solution. People are used to things working a certain way on a website, and it’s usually best to stick with what they know. Think about a car. The steering wheel is on the left side of the car, and the fuel tank door is too. There’s a reason it’s like that. The person that fills the tank is usually the driver. Having the fuel tank door on the same side as the driver makes it more efficient to put gas in the car. Website design should be approached the same way.
We get it. You want to make a splash and do something that makes you stand out from your competitors. The best way to do that, without question, is by focusing on your customers and helping them accomplish a task as fast as possible and better than your competitors. When it comes down to it, your customers are the ones that matter. They don’t want to waste time getting information, buying products, reading articles or giving donations. We don’t present solutions that get in the way of people doing these things. We suggest solutions that are efficient, effective, and work for your customers.
You probably plan on being in business for a while, right? Well, our goal is to design a solution that lays the foundation for long-term success — and then we want to work with you over time to ensure you see that long-term success. Our best clients are the ones that we work with long-term. They appreciate that we want to understand their customers, learn about their business, and grow with them. It’s our job to stay on top of trends and technology on your behalf and to help keep you ahead of your competition. We thrive on research and we’ll keep an eye on your competition for you, but we’ll also follow trends in other markets, and suggest solutions that will enhance your business.
We offer solutions that align with how you do business, but also make sense for how you run your business. We want to grow your brand as you grow your company. We call it Growth Driven Design, and it puts a foundation in place that you can build on for years to come. As your company expands or your organization increases, you should be able to grow your online presence without reinventing the wheel. You may not need a Facebook page or LinkedIn page for your company today, but someday (and probably sooner than you think) those will be channels that you need to leverage. We want your website and online properties to look good, but we also want them to be powerful tools that impact your bottom line and can grow with you. While you focus on running your operations, we’ll focus on keeping the wheels turning.
You can’t be afraid to challenge yourself. If you find yourself saying, “That’s how we’ve always done things.” or “Our process is too complex to work on a website.” then you’re getting in your own way. You’re not thinking about the people you’re trying to communicate with or sell to — today and in the future. It’s 2018. The Rolodex and Yellow Pages are gone, replaced by email marketing and social media. One of the most exciting things these days is how fast technology is moving and companies that capitalize on advances like voice search and customer service chatbots are going to be set up for long-term success.