Steele Agency » website design

RiverCityBankOnline 2.0 Unveiled

jfsteele — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:39:42 +0000

If you have visited River City Bank in the last few weeks, then you have noticed they recently under went a major face-lift to offer a more engaging and user-friendly web experience. What you may not know is that we have worked closely with River City Bank for the last two years with their email marketing efforts. We were ecstatic that they chose us to makeover their website.

RCB's old website

Over the course of the last few months, we’ve pulled our collective brain power and skills together to bring River City customers an effortless and more inviting website, including:

News Portal/ Email Alerts

The major addition to their site was a news portal, appropriately titled Bank Notes, that River City Bank can now use to inform and update customers on the latest banking and financial information to glean tips and insights from River City Bank’s distinguished experts. Since many customers are logging into their e-banking daily or weekly, a regularly updated news section is perfect to offer relevant information that changes over time.

Corresponding with the news portal, we retooled River City Bank’s email newsletter to highlight the articles available in Bank Notes. Along with the now quarterly email newsletter, customers can sign up for specific email news alerts including: Business Briefs, Economic Outlook, Financial Planning, Trust & Estate Planning, Saving Smartly, and Identity Theft Protection.

River City Ramblers

Another integral part of the website that has been developed more thoroughly is the River City Ramblers page. For those that don’t know, River City Bank has a senior world travel club that any River City Bank member over 50 can join. Along with an up-to-date calendar of yearly events and most recent newsletter, we developed a custom Google map detailing every stop the Ramblers have made along the way and where they are heading soon. We also couldn’t make a custom map without including a unique Rambler Flag map marker to make it extremely easy to see their travels. This section will grow over time to include memoirs, photo galleries, and planning tools for members.

Homepage

The biggest change and developed area of the website is the homepage. Here are the best and most useful new features:

Easy to find log-in for account holders and bank customers.
A Calendar of Events that automatically pulls upcoming dates for bank holidays, future events, and River City Rambler travel days.
Custom icons to bring attention to River City Ramblers, Switch to River City, and Join Our Mailing List
“Did you know?” information box. River City Bank has so many amazing features (like refunded ATM fees and same day deposits, to start) that it only seemed natural to help inform customers and visitors. So, every time you visit the homepage, you’ll learn something new about what makes River City Bank different.
All the most recent articles from Bank Notes feed directly onto the homepage under their respective categories.

Artwork

Another unique feature River City Bank offers is their impressive space and interesting ad campaigns which we couldn’t help but to incorporate into the site.

To help draw attention to River City Bank’s inspiring architecture, the talents of the lovely Sabrina Wilson of Blue Dawn Photography were employed. She was able to integrate the visual impact of the physical location with their new online presence.

We also decided to pull inspiration from a SMART checking ad campaign and use customized piggy banks as a continuous theme throughout the site to celebrate all of the diverse ways to save, invest, and spend with River City Bank products.

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So if you’re a River CIty Bank customer or not, we invite you to explore their site and look and all the unique features that we had a hand in enhancing. And who knows, River City Bank might just be the place for you (and we think it might!)

Check out newly redesigned BlueRidgeAHEC.org

jfsteele — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 12:21:02 +0000

We are so excited about the release of the newly redesigned BlueRidgeAHEC.org! This project brought complex opportunities to not only improve the web image for our client, but also improve their operations as they work with thousands of medical students from around the state and partner with Floyd Medical Center, Redmond Regional, Wellstar, and other medical sites.

Blue Ridge Area Heath Education Center (AHEC) is a non-profit organization that serves a variety of functions and is run through federal and state grants as well as private contributions. In order to continue growing their resources, they must constantly collect and report data on the people and organizations they serve. We saw immediately a deep need for online forms and databases that would allow routine processes to be performed by their users and seamlessly integrated into the internal database saving time and preventing error.

A glimpse of their old website

The client estimated that developing this system saved them approximately 80 hours of labor each semester, or about 160 hours a year, and while we love building really cool things that look great, this fact filled us with more satisfaction than anything else.

The Blue Ridge AHEC site contained many database-driven elements including:

multi-level access and data entry/maintenance roles,
user communication and reporting tools
real time database interaction by non-technical users
multiple security and referential validation systems
online forms importable to client local database
file storage and retrieval
online quizzes with performance review and results storage and sorting functions
embedded multimedia included videos and slideshows manageable by non-technical staff
search functions by keyword, category, and other fields as needed.

OwensSport.com: Now Live

admin — Fri, 21 May 2010 13:18:27 +0000

We’re pleased to announce that owenssport.com is now live. The site is home to Owens Hardware and Sporting Goods Company, Inc., a family-owned and managed business in downtown Rome, GA since 1923.

In 1984, Owens Sporting Goods became “The Team Specialist,” offering customized sports uniforms, apparel, footwear, and equipment for baseball, football, lacrosse, basketball, soccer, wrestling, volleyball, and softball teams. They have also become one of the Southeast’s Elite Nike Team Dealers. They also provide in-house designing, screen printing, and embroidery, proving that Owens Sporting Goods can truely outfit any team from head to toe!

The sight features a simple setup that will grow over time. For now, the site includes a exciting image viewer that helps capture the excitement of sporting events and games. It also features a dynamic calendar of events highlighting deadlines, holidays, and general information. There is also a blog area that will feature a host of guest writing coaches to connect with other coaches all across the Southeast.

Newly redesigned site now live

admin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:01:11 +0000

The New Brinson-Askew.com website

We are overjoyed to announce that the newly redesigned, Brinson-Askew.com has officially gone live.

The law firm of Brinson, Askew, Berry, Seigler, Richardson & Davis, LLP was founded in 1975 in Rome, GA. The Firm provides representation to regional and national business and individual clients based throughout North Georgia and the metropolitan Atlanta area, so it was important they they project a professional image and a site that can be found easily through search.

The Firm’s nineteen attorneys practice in all levels of State and Federal Court, with experience before the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia located in Rome and both personal and firm accomplishments that went overlooked on their old website due to navigation issues.

This three-month journey resulted in a website transformation featuring an updated look and feel that is highly navigable and user-friendly. This multi-user, scalable, content management system highlights Attorney and Firm accomplishments, works with an extended web presence to reach greater traffic and increases findability through the use of optimized content and appropriate metadata. We coordinated new and contemporary photos for the professional staff with the help of the lovely Sabrina Wilson of Blue Dawn Photography.

The old Brinson-Askew website

The site now features a highly functional news area that any of the attorneys can update with ease. We connected the news article categories with the Practice Area pages, so that when visitors are searching through the practice area portion, they can also find relevant news from the firm’s work in that area. This allows the newsworthy information to be found in many useful ways on their site.

With our extended connections, we were able to locate a writer with legal experience to update fifteen practice area pages that had lived without content for many years, saving our client time and optimizing content for search friendliness.

We built a custom blog area for the Worker’s Compensation Employee practice area. This is consumer-driven area of law, and the firm now has a more direct way to reach out to those who need information, education, and a trusted attorney to represent them well.

We consulted with interested attorneys on LinkedIn profile optimization so that each attorney is able to can be more easily found through search engines. We also built a contact form that can ensure we convert that increased web traffic into viable leads.

So visit their site, take a look around, and who knows… you might just find the lawyer you need today.

What is PHP?

Richard Royal — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:27:17 +0000

We talk a lot about Web 2.0 technologies with our clients, but we rarely speak to the specific and complex technical aspects of our work. Of course, most people care and want to know that their information is secure and professionally presented, but not often enough do we get to experience the joy of explaining in painstaking detail the exact nature of computer protocol and web design.

PHP is a hypertext preprocessor, meaning that its function is to produce something functional; in this case HTML, the markup language that web browsers understand. This allows dynamic information to be reached or calculated and then translated into something a browser understands in real time. Without this capability, websites would be very static, non-interactive, and incapable of providing unique experiences for each viewer. Imagine a world without web-based client logins, bill-pay, or online forums like Facebook and Twitter.

Order Of Events

PHP is a scripting language that is hosted on a server and is executed by the server stack when a website is accessed.

PHP can grab information stored in databases, talk to other computers and programs, and execute its own internal mathematical and logical functions in real time and produce the HTML website you see on your screen. In fact, this page you’re viewing now was highly preprocessed using PHP the moment you visited the page!

PHPrimer

A standard static webpage has the form:

On a web server, a preprocessed web page looks more like:

where $data may refer to information from a database or even a function that adds numbers together. Static HTML is incapable of this functionality. Most importantly, a user’s web browser only sees the result of the executed function. For example, if $data was a function that calculated the number of city residents that ordered a particular meal from a certain restaurant, then the browser would only see:

A simple diagram and a simple example, but a powerful tool in the web arsenal.

New Jowers Sklar site now live

admin — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 19:59:18 +0000

Newly redesigned website, JowersSklar.com went live Friday, December 18th. Jowers-Sklar Insurance now has an expansive site that maintains the vast catalog of insurance available through the company. Whether an insurance need is for business or personal (or daycare or rental equipment) JSI has it!

JSI has been around since the seventies, founded by Samuel Dewey Jowers, Jr. The company as it is known today came together in 2003 when Marc Sklar (Dewey Jowers’ son-in-law) became part owner. Though their name has changed over the years, they are still located in the same location since its inception, 706 E 2nd Avenue, and still brag on high levels of customer service.

The site has many exciting features, including online quote requests, claims, and download-friendly applications, but there’s one in particular that we’d like to highlight. We pride ourselves on not just building great websites, but building them in way that the client can continue to build it long after we finish.

Though there is already a large list of the types of insurance offered on the site, JSI has the ability to add additional products and pages with ease. We even created some custom code to make it even easier. On every page, customers can click to know more about that particular type of insurance by clicking on an info tab on the side of the page. These change automatically from page to page depending on what product is being discussed, but we have gone a step further. This area is also designed to automatically change when a new type of insurance page is created. This “meta-programming” ensures that the site stays consistent, but allows our clients to grow and expand without having to worry about the finer details.

The area highlighted in green is the area that will always change, even when the business owners update the site themselves.

Cornerstone Concrete Website Goes Live!

admin — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:33:13 +0000

Cornerstone Concrete Development LLC debuts their dynamic, new web presence where interested clients can view a full gallery of design work ranging from indoor acid staining to outdoor stamp overlay to commercial customization and everything in between.

Cornerstone is known for transforming the ordinary, and in addition to the new website, visitors can also find Cornerstone Concrete on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flikr for project videos, updates, pictures, and more. Every page of the new website is capable of client updates and changes on the fly and visitor comments are automatically cycled to the home page as they are accepted.

Visit CornerCrete.Com today to see if they can meet your decorative concrete needs!

Steele Agency Welcomes Rome Boulevard!

admin — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 00:20:29 +0000

The Agency announces its newest client, Northwest Georgia, LLC., the developers of The Boulevard. Breaking ground in April of this year, this mixed use development will boast retail, restaurant, theater, and all the makings of a Live, Work, Play Community. Stay tuned for the unveiling of the website and announcements of new tenants.