As the year comes to a close, I reflect and realize what a very productive and positive year it has been for our web development side of Dot Command Center. Early in the year, we moved into our office building, where we have more room to strategize and meet with our clients one on one. I feel this was a key component as we brought on staff and were posed with many challenging projects this year. Here is a brief overview of a few featured projects:
Pinnacle Financial Strategies
First quarter 2011, we launched the new Pinnacle Financial Strategies corporate website at http://www.pinnstrat.com. Pinnacle is one of my favorite clients in that I get to be "the techie", and learn from my marketing gurus, Kelly Anderson and Penny Vane. The three of us have been working together for about 3 to 4 years, and certainly feel it is one of the most efficient teams I've been a part of. In Q1-Q2, we took on one of our more challenging projects with Pinnacle, to create a consumer educational tool with over 120 pages of content, but presenting it in an interactive, friendly way, and co-branded and customized for each of their clients. What we came up with was a jquery animation content system placing graphical elements on an island map and navigating a boat zooming in and out around an island, while still allowing them to track users, course completion, and log statistics per client. This project was especially challenging because the amount of content and browser compatibility with absolute positioning used to place over 300 layers of animation in a forward AND backward step animation. I will reveal my geekiness in that I enjoy writing code that writes code, and this system is the epitome of that by using server side code to generate client side code. My special thanks to Mike Halprin on this project, who stepped in midway, and learned jquery in a matter of hours to help write the 150 steps through the course.
Discovery! Austin
This year we continued to improve the training class registration system that we built for Discovery at http://www.discovery-austin.org. One of the reasons that we decided to build internal and move them off of a third party system had to do with the fact they expected to double the number of registrations in the next year, and they were getting charged per attempted registration. As predicted, their numbers doubled this year, and they saved thousands of dollars. In addition to the money they saved, they also saved alot of time by improving the system. We added more custom reports that help their class preparation each month, as well as fulling integrated early bird discounts, and export to their accounting system. We even utilized their class registration system to take donations and RSVP their holiday celebration at the end of the year. Special thanks to Linda Williamson at Discovery! who always makes my job fun by communicating their needs so efficiently.
Pediatric Web
Last, but not least, is Pediatric Web at http://www.pediatricweb.com. We have been working with "PedWeb" for 10 years now, and this year we have seen the most change and growth. They currently have over 200 websites using their content feed, and over 75 custom designed pediatric practice websites. This year, we reached a critical mass, and needed to upgrade their content management system. After some research, we decided to move their platform to the Kentico CMS. This gave us an easier interface for our web designers, and unbelievable flexibility for workflow, permissions, and custom functionality. The result is a custom dashboard that guides their clients through the entire design and deployment process of their new website. It also includes an administrative dashboard to walk their staff through the process as well and constantly be in communication with the practices on where they are on the project. My gratitude goes out to all of the PedWeb staff for their determination and persistence to bring this project to fruition. I love the Kentico platform, and hope to bring other clients into this environment when appropriate.
In addition:
We are proud to have brought up or maintained the following sites this year: COPC (www.copc.com), Moore Leadership (www.mooreleadership.com), Longhorn Tennis Camp (longhornstenniscamp.com), Project Pay It Forward (www.project-payitforward.org), Capitol Art Society (www.capitolartsociety.com), CREW Austin (www.crewaustin.com), CCIM (www.ccimtexas.com), FACT (www.supportfact.org), City of Lockhart (www.lockhart-tx.org), Hardin House (www.hardinhouse.com), Abundant Life Foundation (www.abundantlifefoundation.net), Simmons Vedder (www.simmonsvedder.com), Majesty Outdoors (www.majestyoutdoors.com)
I'm looking forward to what 2012 will have to offer. Happy New Year everyone!
V