Design & Develop - a website design & development agency

June24th

Free Hosting. Public Humiliation. SpongeBob SquarePants Jersey. Act Now!

Posted in: Company News, It's Alive!
As some of you know, one of our clients and friends is an online charity called Losing our Parents.

Losing Our Parents is an Internet-based community offering free peer support & education for individuals who live with the stress, upset, and rollercoaster of emotions surrounding your parent’s death or declining health.

As a group, we’re very interested in supporting the community that makes the last few days or weeks of a life more comfortable and dignified.

This Sunday Team Losing Our Parents and hundred of other riders are breaking out the spandex and hitting the road to raise money and awareness for hospice palliative care in Ontario. 100% of donations go directly to palliative care (the event iteself is run from the registration fees).

Many of our wonderful, generous clients have sent Paul and I donations to support the cause. Enough that I had to honour my agreement with Mr. Fitness to increase the ride from 20 km to 50 km yesterday afternoon!

Here’s my pitch: Help us both hit $500 and we’ll bike ONE HUNDRED KILOMETERS on Sunday.

Have I mentioned that (a) I’m rather afraid of bicycles and (b) I’ll be sporting a more than slightly ridiculous SpongeBob SquarePants jersey and taking photos?

What’s in it for me, Opal?

Well, if you’re hosted with us, and make donation(s) to The Healing Cycle total more than your annual hosting fees, I will GIVE YOU FREE HOSTING NEXT YEAR. This means that for $130 (basic hosting account, loaded with more than 80% of our customers require!) you get:
1. a nice tax-receipt instead of one of our pretty invoices
2. free hosting for 2012
3. the glee of watching your web team fall over in heaps after actually leaving their desks
If you’re not hosted with us, and are interested in moving, I’ll offer you the same deal (limited to the first 10 newbies, because I want to be sure you get the attention you deserve), but I’ll throw in the rest of 2011 too! That’s 1.5 years of hosting for a $130 tax-deductable donation!

Sponsor us now!
- Click here to sponsor Paul
- Click here to sponsor Opal
- Click here to sponsor anyone on Team Losing Our Parents (if you want the hosting deal and don’t sponsor Paul and I directly, you’ll need to email me your official payment receipt)
Expiry

To bump our rides to 100km, you have until 5pm on Saturday to make your donations.

The offer as a whole expires at Midnight on Sunday after the ride is over.
May10th

So Canadian we bleed maple syrup

Posted in: Branding, Humour, It's Alive!, Logo Design

Being a Canadian company in an international marketplace is both an asset and a challenge: our natural tendency to play nicely in the global sandbox tends to kick in at exactly the wrong moment, sometimes causing our non-Canadian counterparts to wonder what our problem is and where we went!

While I’ve been struggling lately with turning off the passive-Canadian and getting to the meat of the subject, PPC expert Maple North was ready to accept and display some of that classic Canadiana to start their branding and identity work.

Let me introduce Big Tim:

Big Tim plays on the Canadian woodsman theme, and in the near future will reveal his full backstory to build a history and context for a small Canadian company that’s making a difference in the PPC, SEO, and online marketing market place.

What I love about this particular brand is the playfulness that the client has introduced to an idea of what it means to be stereotypically Canadian. We’ll turn that on its ear, of course, but it’s a fun, comfortable visual to introduce the concept.

Meanwhile, if you’re ready to cut the deadwood out of your online marketing campaign and get serious about generating traffic and leads, go talk to Maple North.
March17th

This, That, and the rush website

Posted in: Content Management, It's Alive!, Website Design

Dynamic ad insertion and metadata management solution provider This Technology made the leap into the open source world on February 14 this year with SpotLink.

Now, while something as unique and sexy as facilitating video-on-demand advertising would lead most people to assume a slick marketing engine behind it all, This Technology is about as anti-marketing as they can be. Their original website was a do-it-yourself roll out of a simple WordPress template.

(PRO TIP: Need to get your website started quickly and missing the budget line item? DIY WordPress website! You can add the unique look and functionality later.)

Our job was to design and develop a new WordPress template that looks clean and professional, focuses on the audience and products, and stays true to This Tech’s no-BS approach to business.

The catch?

Them: “I need it live on Monday”

Us: “I think I’m running a fever…”

Though not the smoothest website development cycle I’ve experienced – nothing like the ‘flu to scramble a brain and make things more complicated than necessary! – the end result achieves the goals quite handily.

Website: http://thistech.com
March4th

When Opportunity Strikes: the Department of Smoked Salmon

Posted in: Design, Humour, It's Alive!, Website Design

On January 25, 2011, President Barack Obama gave his State of the Union address. Usually this would have little or no impact on our work day, however, a particular segment of his speech stood out to one of our clients and spurred a flurry of projects.

What did the American President say that was so exciting?

We live and do business in the Information Age, but the last major reorganization of the government happened in the age of black-and-white TV. There are 12 different agencies that deal with exports. There are at least five different agencies that deal with housing policy. Then there’s my favorite example: The Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they’re in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them when they’re in saltwater. (Laughter.) I hear it gets even more complicated once they’re smoked. (Laughter and applause.)

I know that it’s hard to picture me getting excited about salmon, but when it comes to smoked salmon, Bradley Smoker happens to be a lot of fun. When Adam from Maple North pitched the idea of the Department of Smoked Salmon and his rough drafts at us the day after the State of the Union, the three of us started on what might go down in the books as the project of the year.

We created a landing page, press release, banner ads, official seals & buttons and launched the Department of Smoked Salmon less than 8 hours later.

I won’t lie, the tagline “Don’t let bureaucracy blow smoke on your salmon!” might still be making me laugh over a month later. See, proof that work can (and should!) be fun.

Meanwhile, the badges and buttons have become a Bradley Smoker forum favourite. You can spot them in board signatures!
February23rd

Live: Odd Couple Mini-Site, Posters, and Tickets

Posted in: It's Alive!, Print Design, Website Design

As a general business philosophy, a client that comes back for more work is a happy client. Which means that TenBareToes Entertainment must be one of the happiest clients we have!

The fledgling theatre group is gearing up for its second production, The Odd Couple, and needed the advertising, website, and assets designed and in production when auditions began.

When talking about The Odd Couple, the theme of opposites and opposition generally comes into play. The artwork for the production touches on these themes with the positions of the main characters, the reversed colours, font choices, and the props.

The artwork also had to remain generic enough to fit the yet-to-be selected cast.

Tickets were a new item for TenBareToes – and a necessity. The company’s first production The Taming of the Shrew used e-tickets, which we all thought would be widely accepted by the technology-loving audience in KW.

Boy, were we wrong!

Though the e-tickets saved paper and expense, the theatre crowd loves hanging the tickets on the calendar or fridge in hot anticipation of the production; EIGHTY PERCENT of the audience mentioned that they wanted the paper tickets back.

The tickets are a simple solution, using a business card size and leaving the show details area blank. TenBareToes will print stickers for each production or use a stamp to fill in the details, allowing us to order a larger batch for cost-effective tickets.

Speaking of tickets … don’t forget to order your tickets for TenBareToes’ production of The Odd Couple before it sells out!

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