Friends of Big Sandy Bay
Friends of Big Sandy Bay is a not-for-profit group dedicated to the preservation and rehabilitation of the Big Sandy Bay nature area on Wolfe Island. The bay touches the eastern edge of Lake Ontario and is one of a few remaining examples of Great Lakes coastal dune ecology on Lake Ontario.
The web site has two primary purposes. First, it hopes to educate people about the unique value of the special ecology of the area and maintain public support for its preservation. Second, it is intended to assist in communciation between members of the Friends of Big Sandy Bay.
Entirely organized and run by volunteers, Friends of Big Sandy Bay needed a site that is not only attractive and organized to suit their communication needs, but one that they could maintain and expand with a minimum of effort and cost. To that end we configured a blogging software application, MoveableType, one of several leading applications available, and prepared custom templates and authoring tools to suit their needs. We also provide ongoing training to their volunteer editors, with perhaps the most repeated initial phrase being, “If you can use Hotmail, you can publish stories to this site.”
Wolfe Island Homes
One of our earliest sites, it still has lessons for effective integration of a web site into a business’ overall marketing strategy.
Wolfe Island Homes is a small real estate business that has built six rental homes on Wolfe Island, Ontario, during the last three years. The site’s objective is to enhance and extend the owner’s newspaper advertising. Rather than spending large sums of money on traditional advertising, his ads are relatively modest and point potential renters to the web site. When a prospect calls the developer he knows they have seen the homes on the site and already have had many of their questions about the properties answered.
The result, for this client, is a shorter sales cycle and the pre-qualification of potential renters before they make contact with him. The objective is to initiate a digital dialogue with potential renters that results in highly qualified leads calling the developer. So far this strategy has proved successful.
Given the small scale of this business we also made room on the site to promote the developer’s companion storage facility without detracting from his main purpose. This also one of a small number of sites that we host for our client; generally, we encourage organizations to arrange their own hosting and retain control of the publishing process.
Wolfe Island Homes
Net Direct Systems
Located in Apex, North Carolina, Net Direct Systems (NDS) is a provider of enterprise IT systems and networks designed for the Commercial and Telecommunications markets.
They were in need of a site that could respond to the wide range of information needs of their clients while also meeting federal accessibility requirements. The site also had to communicate the key values of their corporate communciations strategy.
An ongoing issue for sites with a large amount of content and the need to revise, update and add to that content regularly is the cost and effort required to maintain the site’s content. IDW combined with Tookish Digital Communications to build a site employing a leading content management system combining it with custom templates, style sheets and PHP code. Training of NDS staff in the use of the editorial system was done using a combination of telephone and Internet real-time communication tools.
A last minute aspect of the project was a decision to spin-off a separately identified section of the site. Here’s one place where web standards methodogies pay-off. With only a few days to the site launch we created a new Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), built some additional database tables and code, and delivered the additional section within days of the launch of the main part of the site. The flexibility and modularity of XHTML and CSS had a significant role to play in the successful launch of NDS’s web site.
