Clients

In case you haven't noticed—and judging by the attendance, you haven't*—we made a few changes the other day over at our portfolio. We're not talking major renovations; I simply added three items and removed two. However, the experience left me with a touch of melancholy.

The two items I cut from the list—the Boerne CVB and the Cibolo Nature Center—were jobs performed for local clients with whom we've had long-standing relationships. Those relationships aren't in jeopardy, incidentally. For one, we simply wanted to show off some of our recent work; additionally, one of those websites was built on a platform we no longer use or emphasize.

For the past several months we have had the privilege of working with the Little Black Dress Society, an organization dedicated to ending violence against women. Founder Amanda Graybill has made it her life’s mission to provide resources, support, and assistance to abused women and their families.

This week, we had the privilege of taking a tour of Rancho Cortez, a real Texas dude ranch. Our tour guide and owner, Mary Cortez, started the afternoon with a tasty Tex-Mex lunch, and we had time to visit, meander around, and have a look for ourselves before the "official" tour started.

There is something special about being outdoors and away from the city sights and sounds—oh, and did I mention ... no cell service. The ranch is a great place to get away, and I will be returning with my family for an evening under the stars real soon. Thankfully, getting there will much easier than it was earlier this week.

Though we usually have our noses to the grindstone in the Digett team room, we can't help but take time to celebrate our recent accomplishments. Join us in welcoming three new Digett sites to the World Wide Web: Action Restoration, Silver Sage Corral Senior Activity Center, and the San Marcos, Texas, Convention and Visitor Bureau. 

Liquid Frameworks, of the newly Digett-created liquidframeworks.com, came to Digett to redesign their former website with two main goals in mind:

1. They wanted their new site to be as impressive visually as their work is technically.
2. Their new site also needed to provide prospective clients a more complete picture of all their products, approaches, and services to present Liquid Frameworks as a professional, highly evolved, multi-faceted solutions provider for businesses.

Kathryn recently wrote a gushing piece about the creative freedom we've enjoyed in promoting Boerne Wild West Day, and I'm not one to necessarily argue with her assessment. Being given a blank slate can be liberating.

Car dealerships have to deal with a number of popular misconceptions, many of them involving their service departments. Jeff Asher, the Parts and Service Director of Jennings Anderson Ford (a Digett client), noted this recently during a discussion about ways to improve the performance of email campaigns announcing service specials. As he said, "We are always faced with the 'stigma' that the dealership is too expensive or they take too long."

You're preaching to the choir, buddy—we deal with misunderstandings more often than we care to admit.

Almost one year ago, I sat down to write my second-ever blog post for Digett. The topic? The fact that a website we designed for McMillin Homes won a 2008 Summit Award from the Greater San Antonio Builders Association. Well, you'll never guess what happened: It won again in 2009.

Two wins in two years brings pretty sweet satisfaction, we'll warrant, and we'd love to think of ourselves as the Phil Jackson of web marketing (just with respect to his record, folks). Still, I have to reaffirm what I stated last year: It's more satisfying to please our clients.

WeatherfordLabs.com came to Digett via The Phillips Agency (TPA), an advertising and marketing firm out of Houston, TX, that has been working with Weatherford Laboratories on branding efforts for some time. TPA requested our involvement for our experience building content-managed websites. They provided our team with a beautiful design layout, and that's where our great collaborative effort began.

There's a lot of information to consider when choosing a new home and a home builder. With the new McMillinHomes.com, we wanted that information to be easily accessible and organized for the user and easily updatable, for accuracy, for the client. Then we wrapped it all in a look and feel that speaks both to the trustworthiness and modernity of the organization.

McMillin Homes builds custom homes in several cities in central and southern California and in San Antonio, Texas. Digett created a website for the San Antonio division back in 2005, but this time around, McMillin wanted to unify their web presence and include all their cities and corporate information in a single website.

The increased complexity of a site that encompasses 10 or more cities, combined with the amount of information to include, posed a few challenges that had to be addressed: