Archive for 2008
May
8
As is the case with most of our clients, the web site design is only part of the project. More often than not they entail the incorporation of Forms, Image and Video Galleries, Virtual Tours, Member Portals, Data Management and Integration, pulling RSS feeds and News Applications, eCommerce engines, and handy Content Management Systems sitting on the backend for easy web site updates. All of this of course is tailored or customized to suit the individual client’s needs. And we get a lot of different needs.
Tuesday, Mike Henderson posted about the launch of a ski resort blog. Yesterday, Josh Kenzer talked about Data Replication. Today, I’ll show a few other sites that launched in the past week or so. Each one is structured differently. My goal is to try and blog about each website that we launch. Fortunately, things get a little crazy around here, so I can’t always get to them. But I will do my best!
| Client |
Site |
Description |
| Kiley Ranch |
www.kileyranch.com |
Located in Sparks, Nevada, the 800 acres at Kiley Ranch will support a thriving community with an emphasis on economic and environmental sustainability. Neighborhoods of distinctive, well-designed single-family homes and townhomes will be walking distance from a village-style commercial district, business parks, schools, and over 100 acres of dedicated open space and a 200 acre wildlife wetland preserve. All working together to make Kiley Ranch a master planned community like no other.
|
| BeDynamic |
www.bedynamic.com |
Located in Seattle, Washington, BeDynamic® provides the travel and tourism industry with a single-source solution for capturing and managing up-to-date local content and destination information. Designed for travel providers such as hotels, airlines, car rental agencies, and others who sell travel services, our content aggregation and delivery service increases the quality, depth, timeliness and affordability of specialized information about local events and venues.
|
| Kummer Kaempfer |
www.kkbrf.com |
With roots dating back nearly a half-century, the statewide law firm of Kummer Kaempfer Bonner Renshaw & Ferrario is one of Nevada’s largest and most prominent law firms whose legal teams have a long history of creating winning strategies to help clients solve important and complex business issues. The firm is an invited member of Meritas, an international affiliation of business law firms that gives Kummer Kaempfer clients a global reach on a wide range of important business and legal issues.
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Posted in Client Announcements, Service Industry, Travel & Tourism, Web & SEO
May
7
It’s darn near impossible to build a website today without needing to integrate it with some kind of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. From Siebel to Salesforce.com to custom in-house solutions, CRMs have migrated from enterprises down to businesses of all sizes. The website and the CRM system need to share critical pieces of data in order to allow customers to maintain their own profile, while also giving internal teams the ability to provide the best customer experience available.
Because Application Programming Interfaces (API) have become so prevalent, keeping these two parties talking is doable. An API is like providing software with a phone that can receive calls to tell software to exchange data or execute commands.
The problems with APIs is they usually just sit there waiting for someone to call. Just because two separate programs have phones doesn’t mean they can call each other. One program has to learn – or be programmed – to dial the other. It also needs to know what data and commands to send over the line in order to receive back the proper response. It’s one of natures most fundamental processes.
What this means to the business is you are going to be changing code on either a sophisticated web application, or on an even more complex CRM system. In turn, this means developer costs, quality control testing and potential bugs can be introduced into one or more of these systems. Think of it as, Websites are from Mars and CRM systems are from Venus.
Enter data replication. Think of data replication as software’s match making friend. Data replication has a little black book of phone numbers and the notes on how to speak the other’s language. However, in this relationship, data replication doesn’t just setup the call and walk away. No, he sticks around logging the results, interpreting the responses and making sure no fights break out over who said what or who’s not being attentive to the other’s needs.
Sure, now every time the two pieces of software need to get together, data replication has to be there…in the middle…on a schedule. Awkward. But neither party is trying to be changed. Neither has to bend to the will of the other. No compromises. And if anything does go wrong, everyone can look at data replication to see how, when and where.
Now for the cheesy classified ad for data replication services, “Sound like a relationship you looking to create? Visit our Data Replication Engine page to learn how data replication can get your software together.”
Posted in CRM, Email, Technology, Web & SEO
May
6
Lake Tahoe Ski resorts have really stepped up their websites in recent years with social media elements like video, podcasting, and blogs. It’s no longer a novelty to have regular updates, rich media content and interactivity, it’s a requirement. Skiers and snowboarders are interacting with online content in ways they never have before, and Twelve Horses is proud to announce and show off the new Alpine Meadows Blog.
A blog can be a great tool for ski resort marketing. It’s the best option for centering the social media content that you distribute out to your various web venues. We think this one is really functional and looks super sharp. The designer, Scott Patterson, included some cool social media features like the YouTube window, profile links and twitter updates. He also created drop-down menus to keep the sidebar nice and neat, and a full resort info menu to seamlessly blend the blog with the website.
But when every resort at Tahoe has a blog as part of their online marketing strategy, the challenge lies in rising above the chatter to effectively convey the story of the mountain and the people who make it great. Alpine is doing a great job of it. We think the people who make Alpine Meadows work are awesome, and we’ve had a blast helping them create content and videos to represent their brand and interact with their visitors.
Their Flickr account has been getting great traffic from day one, and we have helped them create a great community around images from the mountain. Google and Yahoo image searches now index Flickr images, but still the traffic from Flickr searches expands by orders of magnitude the viewership of Alpine Meadows content.
The @skialpine Twitter profile is bridging the gap between home and the mountain by helping skiers and boarders stay on top of changing conditions such as avalanche closures, run and lift openings, weather and events in real-time right from mobile devices.
Their video channel is doing a great job of documenting events and operations at the mountain.
Now the SkiAlpine blog is bringing it all together in one place. Check out their blog, video channel, Twitter updates and Flickr account and look for more awesome photos and videos when the snow falls again!
-Mike
Posted in Client Announcements, Lake Tahoe, Reno-Tahoe, Travel & Tourism, Web & SEO
Apr
30
“Making social bookmarking truly social”Faced with the daunting task of researching and annotating huge documents on the web, A few years ago Dr. Wade Ren and Maggie Tsai out-surfed the capabilities of browser bookmark features and online bookmarking services. If you have a long web document with only a few widely spaced relevant paragraphs what do you do?
You print it out, or copy to a document and print then get out the old highlighter pen. Then you fax it, or scan it and send it along, and soon you have a problem. A problem that, for Ren and Tsai, turned into the opportunity to create a new social bookmarking service.
As we discussed in a previous post, and as Dr. Ren reiterated, Diigo is like del.icio.us on steroids. It takes bookmarking functionality and extends it with forum, blog and messaging features. If you take the time to annotate a page, leave sticky notes, multiple and lengthy comments, and highlight key text on the page, you can then view and forward all the relevant information w/o having to go to the page, or see other public comments and highlights and interact with other Diigo users.
With support for and compatibility with del.icio.us, ma.gnolia and Simpy; plugins or bookmarklets for every major browser; openid support; compatibility with Wordpress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Windows Live Spaces and Drupal; a Facebook App; groups, lists, email and widgets; Diigo is embracing the open everything web 2.0 spirit and making a super useful community oriented tool.
But it’s not just for fun! We use it for internal research with private bookmarks and private groups. We have a few clients participating in Diigo groups almost like a Basecamp style project management site. Combined with other free site/services like Flickr, Wordpress or other blogs, and file sharing sites like drop.io and Zoho.com this could give 37signals a run for their money.Thanks to Wade and Maggie for the visit. It’s great meeting leaders in web development who live right here in Reno!
After Earl turned off the camera we gave them each a Red Bull and asked them what’s next. Here’s what they said: A LOT OF COOL STUFF… You didn’t think I was gonna tell you?!!?! Look for just about everything you want from Diigo to come to life in future versions.
-Mike
Posted in Horse Power Podcast, Podcast, Reno-Tahoe, Social, Web & SEO
