Clients

When you work in the internet business, it's critical to stay on top of current design trends and development best practices.

In the same way writers improve their writing abilities by reading other great authors, graphic designers and programmers can seriously expand their repertoire by surfing the web for inspiration, reading design blogs, and keeping a watchful eye out for methods that might help get the job done better and faster.

With so many tools available online, you might think "those internet people have it easy." Sure, there's plenty of resources online to help us get better and keep our sites looking fresh and hip, but there's really nothing more vital to a web professional than people skills (a.k.a., the ability to relate to a client in such a way that their needs are fully understood and fulfilled).

Our good friends over at Glass Chalk have a unique product. Their WHATUP™ banner kit and markers allow anyone to create their own banners and signs that don't (a) look like a grade school art project gone wrong or, conversely, (b) require the assistance of an expensive professional. They're great for schools, businesses, and families.

In 2004, we built a site for Coyle Engineering, one of Texas' premier civil engineering firms. At the time, the site was cutting-edge. A sleek, well-architected design, coupled with the client's ability to manage their own content, made the site a powerful marketing tool for the thriving company.

We're big proponents of emerging technologies here, especially those that help shake up a medium—like television—that has been done largely the same way for decades. But as much as things change, the more they stay the same. After all, when was the last time you saw something truly different on TV?

Digett recently launched a new website for the Boerne Public Library Foundation. The mission of the Boerne Public Library Foundation is "to provide the library with funding for major capital expenditure projects and to promote and advocate for literature, culture and the arts through ongoing programming."

Every once in a while, we get pointed questions from prospective clients about the return on investment of major online marketing efforts. That's not a bad thing; indeed, we would encourage anyone looking to invest in any marketing effort to take efforts to objectively analyze and quantify ROI. Notice, however, that I said "objectively." Ah, there's the rub.

It's an unfortunate, yet undeniable, fact that college tuition costs have been steadily increasing. Especially in today's economic landscape, colleges and universities, much like other businesses, are going to face even more obstacles with recruiting and retaining interest in their offerings due to those rising costs and the tightening of wallets.

John Eakin knows aircraft. For four decades, he's been flying, fixing, and researching a variety of flying machines, so he understands what puts them in the air. Still, it's an unfortunate fact of life that they occasionally come down, and John often found himself charged with researching service and crash histories in order to shed light on a particular problem. Though the data was readily available, however, it was rarely user-friendly.

In one of our first meetings during which we discussed potential designs for their website, Flying Circle Bags (FCB) divulged that they've gone through at least three pretty radically different logos in their nearly 18 years. As FCB owner Jimmy Chittim likes to say, there's no bad time to change a logo. That's an attitude we love to see, because there truly isn't ever a bad time to re-evaluate the effectiveness of any of your marketing tools.

TRC Consultants has enjoyed favorable market share for a number of years with its powerful PHDWin suite of software for the petroleum industry. As part of a recent international expansion, TRC translated PHDWin into Russian and renamed the regional product offering PHD Precise.