The Nevada Business Journal just released their list of “Nevada’s Best Companies” to work for, and little old Twelve Horses managed to skate on to the list. We are indeed pleased and proud to be recognized alongside the other great companies that were selected.

I think each employee has their own set of reasons for why they enjoy working at Twelve Horses. For some it would be the flexible work hours and ability to telecommute. Others would cite their appreciation for the exposure they get to new technologies and strategies for online marketing. Many take advantage of Twelve Horses wide array of community involvement, while some like to conduct business meetings over powder turns at Lake Tahoe.

Our individual values and the attributes we look for in an employer can differ, but the general consensus is that we all value an environment where we can voice unconventional ideas, experience new challenges, grow as individuals, and be given the opportunity and resources to make the world around us a better place. Twelve Horses gives us this special mix, and because of it we give back to the company, the individuals we work with, and the community around us. Here is an excerpt from the article:

As a superb example of today’s innovative technology companies, Twelve Horses has become a recognized leader in the fast-paced Web business field since its founding in 1995 in Reno by CEO David LaPlante. In the spirit of the mythical creatures for which the business is named, the company empowers its clients through interactive communication solutions. With a roster of 45 employees, Twelve Horses specializes in relationship marketing and messaging from its headquarters in Reno and offices in Salt Lake City, Atlanta, Phoenix and Tampa. Clients are scattered around the country and include small, medium-sized and Fortune 500 companies. Although she enjoys the company’s generous benefits, Leilani Schweitzer, social marketing manager, said she especially appreciates the overall corporate culture and flex scheduling. As a single mom, Schweitzer does a lot of work virtually. “There’s beauty in being able to work in my pajamas,” she said. Schweitzer also said she thrives on the creative environment that sets employees up to succeed, rather than fail. “It’s the best group I’ve ever been around because they’re all very smart and positive,” she explained. As she continues to grow along with other high-energy, creative employees, she looks forward to a long relationship with the company. “So much of our lives is spent working so it’s important to be in the best place,” she said.

tags: Reno, Nevada, Lake Tahoe, online marketing, “best companies to work for”

One of Twelve Horses latest launches is the newly designed and developed Reno-Tahoe, America’s Adventure Place website located at visitrenotahoe.com. The Reno-Sparks Convention & Visitors Authority (RSCVA) looked to us to effectively communicate the excitement and value of the destination, as well as give them the necessary web tools to feature and promote the region going forward. Take a gander and let us know what you think of the look and feel.

Branding & Strategy

Before even beginning to architect the site or design comps we held several branding sessions to really uncover what the America’s Adventure place brand is and what the organization wants to project. In other words, what really differentiates the Reno-Tahoe destination from another location, and why would visitors want to go there? We identified the items of most importance, and the images and structure of the site reflect this.

Stakeholders also provided valuable input and feedback, which dictated certain elements of the site such as the Play-Stay-Dining-Events box directly below the main flash promo area.

You should also notice the emphasis on action, outdoor adventure, weather, which is prominent because of the large number of beautiful sunny days, and water because, unlike Vegas, Reno has a river that runs through it and is in close proximity to mountain snow and Lake Tahoe.

In general the homepage is designed to incorporate images, videos and feeds (such as the blog) to bring dynamic content to the forefront so it is never static. What’s new, what’s happening?  - there is always something exciting going on.

Website Design & Development

Building out this site required careful consideration to the organization of content (there were 6500 pages on the old site and currently 1500 on the new). Equally important was addressing the needs of marketing, convention and tourism sales, public relations, as well as the stakeholders that have a vested interest in the organization’s ability to promote convention and tourism business for Washoe County.

If you look at many other convention and visitor bureaus (CVBs) there is often a habit of creating specific portals for web visitors to enter the site. This is the way they deal with the challenging issue of organizing large amounts of content. For example:

The problem with this is it impacts the search engine optimization of the website as it relates to the ranking of the homepage, and one also runs the risk of not exposing say, a meeting planner to the information you would qualify for visitors/guests. We really tried hard to clearly present all of the information directly from the homepage.

Speaking of SEO and usability, before we launched the website the entire old site was mapped in order to maintain rankings while the search engines indexed the new site. This way, instead of receiving a 404 each page was referred to the proper page on the new website.

Web Development on the Backend

The RSCVA makes use of our Content Management System or CMS to edit and change all aspects of the website. It includes some cool custom applications such as:

• Stakeholder Application
• Individual stakeholders such as local hotels and casinos can edit their specific pages via their own login. They can change content, upload media and photos, and manipulate RSS feeds. These feeds are then displayed on the main calendar and events pages.
• Newsletter Application
• Instead of having to login in to a separate platform to design and deliver their email marketing campaigns, they can do it all through the CMS. All actions directly integrate with MessageMaker, so they can follow up on delivery rates and other pertinent statistics.
• Press Release Application
• The press release application gives public relations has the ability to construct press releases in the WYSIWYG editor and upload them to the website. They can also set specific permissions and date of release.
• Form Generator
• The form generator gives non-technical staff or webmasters the ability to build out promotions or giveaways to collect valuable customer information. The forms integrate with MessageMaker, which allows them to export lists to CSV or segment customers based on the specific promotions or items of interest.
• Search Engine Optimization Application
• The SEO application gives the RSCVA the ability to manage redirects, add analytics code, change meta data and much more.

Also included in the CMS are other useful items such as Workflow and Permissions. This gives staff the ability to send updates for approval and share the workload in order to keep content fresh and current. This extends across the board to all departments including:

• Finance
• Convention Sales
• Public Relations
• Tourism

Data Replication Engine

Behind it all is Twelve Horses’ Data Replication Engine (DRE). The RSCVA uses the DRE to take contacts from their website and push them into MessageMaker. It keeps the database current, and automatically manages action like, before email newsletter deliveries it does a check for all unsubscribes to be sure they never send an email to someone that does not want to receive it.

There is much more to it, but hopefully this gives you a good idea of what went into the website. Certainly a great level of consideration and technology has been applied to the construction of this website.

tags: website design, web site development, search engine optimization, seo, data replication engine, content managment system, reno, tahoe, rscva, ” reno sparks convention & visitors authority”

The Reno Tahoe Chapter of the AMA hosted their annual ACE Awards event last Thursday at a black tie soirée at Harrah’s. We had a fine time with all the fine dining, festivities, and the cheep beer we snuck inside our chrome courier bags. Events like this are a great time to hang out with all the fun and talented people in Reno-Tahoe and a for the Twelve Horses team to celebrate what we do best: results driven online marketing campaigns.

Top honors went to our work with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for the Heavenly Mountain Resort Website. The judging, which was done by the Tampa Bay Chapter this year, focuses heavily on the results of the campaign. Through a combination of keyword analysis, optimization of code and navigations structure, pay-per-click advertising, link building, blogging, and social marketing we have elevated them in the organic search results for many different branded and non-branded keywords. The results have been impressive and the amount of qualified traffic has steadily increased.

An Award of Excellence went to the Las Vegas Monorail Ticketing System, a fully custom built interface that lets the Las Vegas Monorail sell, redeem and service tickets online and through channel partners. This carefully thought out system has boosted sales for the Las Vegas Monorail and exposed them to new revenue opportunities all while being easy to administer, maintain and modify. This entry was by far the most technical, but online marketers need to be able to strategize and scope the design and development of an online application such as this in order to achieve the best results for their company.

We grabbed another award for Heavenly who walked away with an Award of Excellence for their Flash Promotion Widget. Wanting to increase online bookings by featuring different promotions and services on their homepage, but faced with the challenge of limited real estate on the homepage of their website, they needed a new approach. The answer was a fully customizable flash-driven widget that would overlay on the homepage and drive customers to their commerce site, The widget could also be taken on and off the homepage and moved to other areas as needed. Now Heavenly can prominently push packages and last minute deals on the homepage without sacrificing other promotions or compromising the design of the website.

Finally, we took home a Certificate of Excellence for our Bobofest Social Media Marketing campaign for the Reno-Sparks Convention and Visitor’s Authority (RSCVA). The RSCVA is always seeking to enhance the “America’s Adventure Place” message and they wanted to have a greater new media impact online. To that end we coordinated with their traditional Public Relations and Marketing campaigns to take images, video and content surrounding an exciting basejumping stunt that happened in downtown Reno, and spread it far and wide on the web. It garnered a lot of results for them and even today it is relevant and generating lots of views and traffic..

Thanks to the AMA for the recognition, and congrats to all the other talented local marketers honored by the AMA. Super special congratulations to our good friend Dave Archer, who, not only looked super slick in his tuxedo, but also ran off with the Marketer of the Year Award for his work with the Nevada’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology!

-Mike

Twelve Horses rarely, if ever, will produce a website that doesn’t have a content management system (CMS). Our CMS - which we call WebGen - allows our clients to update the content on their own website independent of calling us. It’s one of our core beliefs here at Twelve Horses, that a website is living breathing entity. As such, the content on the site should be added to and updated frequently and we want this to be as easy and quick as possible.

In my tenure at Twelve Horses - just over 6 years - we’ve always had an in-house CMS that we implemented. We’ve constantly been evolving it, adding features and making it better. Today, we are pleased to announce the release of version 1.4.1. While it appears to be a dot release, it’s quite significant for us.

We’ve added 12 new features, enhanced 10 existing features and fixed numerous bugs. Of the new features, the two most impressive are a comprehensive permissions-based system and multi-site management system.

Our larger clients have a need to allow certain people within their organization to edit separate parts of their sites. These clients still need to have control over the content to make sure the brand and style is maintained. Our new permission system provides for permissions around adding, editing, publishing, approving, uploading and just about any element of the website you can imagine. And while we’ve had permissions in the past, this is the first time it’s been implemented in WebGen and to the extent it’s capable now.

Multi-site management allows clients to manage two or more separate sites through the same interface. This means sites that are hosted on separate domains can maintain consistency, share content and provide one seamless interface for updates.

As you can see, we take our CMS very seriously. We are well down the road map for the 1.5 and 2.0 releases. If you are a current customer, we will be contacting you shortly about the upgrade. If you are not yet a customer, contact us about doing a demo today.

The 12^th Annual Webby Awards recently nominated one of our client web sites, Monterey – alive is the air for the Best Tourism website of 2008. It is now up to the Academy to choose between the 5 finalists to determine who will win the coveted Webby Award. Fingers crossed!

In addition to the Webby Award, there is also the Webby “People’s Voice Awards,” and from now through May 1st people can cast their own votes for Monterey – alive is the air by going here - http://pv.webbyawards.com

It is very quick and easy to vote. At the top right you will see, “Select Nominees.” Head down to the ‘M’s and select “Monterey.” From there you will be taken to the individual category page. Select the radio button for Monterey and click, “Cast My Vote.”  (Note: Before you can vote you do have to go through a quick registration process, but it is only to prevent robots and spammers from corrupting the process.)

Not only would Twelve Horses and Monterey appreciate your vote, but so would those that have worked hard on the strategy, design, and development of the Monterey website. It is these talented and hard-working individuals who rarely get a chance to be recognized, and the Webby Awards is just that opportunity.

Please cast your vote now -  http://pv.webbyawards.com - Thank you!

Quite a number of our clients use blogs for business to establish an online presence and publish informative and searchable content to the web. Of those blogs/websites, we always use Wordpress because of the flexibility for custom design and access to a seemingly endless array of community applications.  As powerful as Wordpress is, it is not always the easiest application to use for non-technical business owners and employees who want to provide more than just text and links. However, there is a solution.

Windows Live Writer is a free, downloadable desktop application that runs on your Windows PC and allows you to publish pictures, videos, and other rich content to your blog/website. There are also a number of useful free extensions available that you should check out if this is of interest to you.

As an example, I will use it to show you some recent blogs/websites that we have launched in the past week or so.

Here is an example of how you can use Windows Live Writer to create a table, format, insert pictures and links. No html knowledge required.

Business	Location	Business Type	Website
Red Rover	Corvalis, Oregon	Software
Eagle Gate	Salt Lake City, Utah	Education
SouthernLINC	Atlanta, Georgia	Telecom
Big Valley Honda	Reno, Nevada	Retail
The Godfather	Las Vegas, Nevada	Entrepreneur
International Bank	Concord, New Hampshire	Finance

You can also use it to insert videos or maps. I’ll just stick to the same example as above and show the locations of these particular clients.

View Larger Map

You can also input tags that specifically relate to your blog post, which help with search engine optimization.

tags: blogging tools windows live writer

When you are ready to publish your post, simply click Publish, and it will also do a quick spell check for you. If you are not ready to publish yet, simply Save Draft for later, or set the publish date and it will post automatically. There are several other handy little features for you to explore and find on your own.

To get started, simply go to the Windows Live Writer page to download it. Once you have installed the application, go to “Weblog” in the upper navigation and select “Add Weblog Account.” There you will be asked to give the url of your blog, as well as your username and password. That’s it! You can even add other blogs if you like. It will detect the styles, plugins, categories, and recent posts for each one.

A key component of a successful blogging strategy is doing it fairly frequently The more empowered you and your colleagues are to publish content to the web the more likely you are to do it. I hope this helps.

Information is only as powerful as it is accessible.

We just recently launched two different websites focused around a life-threatening disease called, hydrocephalus. Why you may ask? One really important reason is because there is no cure…yet. Of equal importance is the fact that symptoms of the disease can manifest in many different ways. Many doctors, family members, and individuals battling the disease are uninformed and ill-prepared to handle the symptoms, let alone recognize them when they first manifest. Part of the remedy is to put information out that is accessible to anyone, anywhere, at any time.

As stated on the website, “Hydrocephalus is a chronic neurological condition characterized by an increased volume of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) within spaces inside the brain.” In layman terms, it is water on the brain, which causes swelling, brain damage, and even death. It is more common than you may know. In fact, more than 1 million people in the U.S. alone have been diagnosed with hydrocephalus, and it is believed to occur in 1.5 of every 1,000 births.

The Hydrocephalus Association website is in its first phase of development. Aside from the access to information you readily see at first glance, the other features of the site facilitate Member Signup and Donations, both of which integrate with Salesforce to manage the data and the relationships with those involved with the organization. Because the organization relies heavily on its active community, there also handy little features like the Flickr Uploader application, which gives people the ability to upload their photos and add search-friendly descriptions. There is more to come.

I briefly mentioned the importance of community as it relates to hydrocephalus. Many of you who participate in social networks and blogs understand the power of online interaction and communities; but for many it is still relatively new ground. The purpose of GabrielsLife.org is to create and foster community participation in order to generate greater awareness around the disease, as well as empower people with helpful information. The site gives people tools to communicate not only with one another, but also the world at large.

Gabriel’sLife.org is a custom build using Wordpress. On top of that it allows users to create their own Wordpress blogs as part of the network. There is also a forum, and the ability for people to search for others and connect to share information privately if they so choose. Finally, visitors are encouraged to submit their own stories, which are featured on the homepage. These tools are designed to tap into the collective knowledge base of those who have faced the complexities of the disease so that others are better prepared to handle their own. While still in its infancy, the site appears to be serving that purpose.

My main hope for this blog post is that you will see it and read it and tell someone about it. You will meet someone that has or knows someone else with hydrocephalus, and they will go and start to use these sites and tell someone else. And so on, and so on, and so on….

On the heels of three other recent website launches, we are pleased to have taken the Monterey County Convention & Visitors Bureau website live. Take note of the flash features like the promo area, the multimedia gallery, and my special favorite, the Insider Tip, which you will find on any of the sub pages under the main Flash promo area. It is just a subtle little addition that gives some personalized information related to the areas you are interested in and want to visit.

Visitors can take advantage of some other very useful features like being able to create a profile, build out their own itinerary, and conduct searches based on locations, categories, and events. Stakeholders have their own user interface that allows them to create and edit their own pages; and Monterey controls it all with their own content management system.

The site also features an interactive map, the ability to book online, and the option to sign up for newsletters. I should also mention that the site is tag-based, which organizes content in a very clean and searchable fashion.

There is a lot going on behind the scenes that makes this site work well. Kudos to our web designers and web developers for bringing it all together in a user-friendly and functional manner. Next step - a little dash of search engine optimization to help Monterey attract new visitors and meeting planners to an unquestionably beautiful area of California.

Hi,

I’m Mike Henderson, a new Content Developer here at Twelve Horses. I just started about 3 weeks ago (just in time for the Holiday Party…) and already I am pretty impressed with all the cool projects we have going. I’m going to be working with clients on creating and developing website content including, copywriting, blogging, photography, video and social media. I’ll also be doing some of that stuff right here on Horse Power!

Last week was a busy week at the Twelve Horses Reno office. I helped the team Q/C and launch new websites for three Reno, NV based companies! Not that that excuses us for not updating the blog… Still, I think they look pretty nice and show off some cool new ideas.

The Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada’s (EDAWN) new website is now open for business. This one was interesting because it required organizing a large amount of content in a user-friendly manner. Notable features include an event management system that ties into Salesforce.com, which very efficiently organizes customer data. The member center provides access to a lot of helpful information. The website also makes use of the RSS puller application, which is a very handy feature within our Content Management System (CMS).

Griffin Transport features a sharp design and a cool Flash locator map with roll-over hotspots to show the global office locations.

Nevada’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology (NCET), for which Twelve Horses is a sponsor, launched a new web site design featuring many social media features to better interact with Nevada’s entrepreneurs and students. Overall, a good example of what you can do with Wordpress.

So that’s what we’re up to. Let us know what you think!

-Mike

Headquartered in Reno, Nevada, and less than 30 minutes from the nearest ski resort means quite a few of us here at Twelve Horses like to ski and snowboard. In fact, two of Twelve Horses founders, David LaPlante and Martin Gastanaga, were professional ski racers back in the day before they got a wild hair and decided to start a web design and development company.

Obviously, their passions have an influence on the office culture, as well as the type of clients we have. As an indication, Heavenly Mountain Resort, Mountain Sports International, and Reno-Tahoe, America’s Adventure Place are just a few clients we have that are involved in promoting snow sports.

It is the latter client, along with a merry band of high altitude hucksters and several other sponsors, that somehow managed to convince the city of Reno to:

The video speaks for itself. You can also watch more on this YouTube channel. Can you say, Cool!?

Also, here are some awesome Ski Base Jump photos of Shane McConkey doing his thing courtesy of the RSCVA.