Our Key Services

Our core belief is that design must serve a communications objective. Our first step with a client is to help determine that communication objectives and then craft a strategy to create the proper communications plan to serve those objectives.

Website Design and Development

Our websites are built to engage and inform your visitors.

We help organizations convey important news and information to members, key stakeholders and the general public.  We build websites that relay information quickly, cleanly and effectively. We want the opportunity to bring these attributes to your website.

We start by determining communications objective for your site. From that springboard we develop content architecture and segmentation of information. Only then do we throw it to the designers, which ensures that form follows function.

Finally, our design is always clean and well organized, but fast. We optimize our graphics so they're as efficient as possible, which is especially important with mobile clients. We partner with a number of Canadian hosting companies, so that we can ensure that no matter what size your site, you'll have the most efficient service possible.

Responsive Web Design

Responsive Web Design fits your site to every device

Up to one in four of your site visitors are using mobile devices, and that number is growing fast.  Your visitors might be viewing your site on anything from an iPhone to a large screen display, or all manner of tablets and phones with different screen sizes. That's why we've embraced Responsive Web Design.

Using these techniques, we build a site so it will resize and restructure depending on the size of the device that's viewing it. This means that all the work is up front - once the site is launched, you won't have to worry about it again.  You also don’t need to go to the additional expense of designing and building a different app for every smartphone technology.

Depending on the size of the device, your site will display optimally. Doing this well is complex, but we've got the right mix of experience, design and architecture skills, and technical know-how to make it work seamlessly for you.

E-Mail Campaigns

E-Mail Campaigns turn a passive website into a communications super-star

Websites are passive by nature. To engage your members and drive traffic to your site, you should be using social media and e-mail campaigns.

We've developed a deep understanding on how to set up e-mail campaigns for your organization. We'll create a plan for you that will give you guidance on what kind of information to send your members, and also how often to send it for optimum readership. And we'll set you up with one of the many excellent online services so that you can manage your communications internally. 

 

 

Communication Plans

To get your message out, you need a plan.

It may be a simple as a brief discussion with someone from your organization, or it may involve multiple interviews with key employees and stakeholders, members, officers and your communications team.

We'll audit all of your current communications, and then make customized recommendations based on a combination of our experience in the field, and what you've told us you need.  We will then give you a clear document that will guide development of your site, but can also be useful in other organizational activities.

Social Media Strategy

Using Social Media is key to engaging your audiences

Social media engages your members, informs the public, puts pressure on government, and lots more.

It's critical that your social media strategy be integrated into the core of your communications plan, so that your organization is using it in a planned way. We've got a ton of experience in using online tools to communicate and build a strong and vibrant community. 

Content Management Systems

We build beautiful websites that are easy for you to manage.

We have made it our business to stay on top of the developing technologies of Content Management Systems (CMS) which is the technology which allows clients to update and change information on their web sites.  In the early days we built our own CMS because nothing out there was good enough.

We've now embraced a CMS called Drupal.  An open source prjoject, we love Drupal because we can offer endless design and development flexibility, while working with a solid framework.

You'll love it because it will help you to:

  • Post, edit and delete content with minimal training
  • Manage photo galleries, calendar events, multiple news feeds, blogs and other content from a single place
  • Administer your site with fine-grained options for user roles and permissions
  • Create a members section where you can talk to your membership in private
  • Build and extend your site, with a range of modules that can be added as your needs change
  • Collaborate with your community through responsible social publishing which allows you to define permissions to create, view and publish content.

Be confident that your modules are being constantly maintained by the international Drupal community, ensuring continued functionality and security. Drupal has a dedicated team of security experts who deal with and responsibly release vulnerability disclosures. 

Open source

Unlike proprietary software, which is closed and imposes restrictions, Drupal is "open source" which means that the project is built collaboratively and is distributed free of charge.

In the long term this means that:

  • You don't have ongoing licensing fees
  • You can host your site in a great number of locations
  • You can take your code elsewhere if you're not happy with us!

Branding & Identity

We can help with more than just website design.

Almost every organization we’ve done web work for had a multitude of logos with different colours, typefaces and often different designs. We can bring order to that chaos by organizing those elements and producing a simple graphic standards document which sets out the rules.

We can also ensure you have logo materials in the correct formats for use in print or online.  At a more advanced level we can come up with several options to either improve your current look, or come up with a whole new one.

Video Training

A picture is worth a thousand how-to manuals

Our objective to is equip you to update as much of your site as possible, as easily as possible.

We configure the CMS to make this easy, but when you've got questions there's nothing better than our training videos.

We've put together a library of screencasts with commentary, showing you how to do the most common updates you'll need to perform.

The video training library is available to clients who subscribe to our maintenance packages. Contact us for more details.

Website Hosting

Your host should be reliable, cautious and Canadian, but not cheap

We take hosting very seriously. We've been in the business for enough years to know that with cheap hosting, you always end up losing in the long run. Even quality hosting is cheap when you look at the big picture, so that's what we reccomend.

We've partnered with a several hosting companies. This enables us to confidently offer the proper hosting package for your needs. 

All of our providers have the following in common: 

  • Based in Canada, with servers available in BC.
  • A solid track record of uptime and reliability.
  • Multiple levels of automatic backups.
  • High availability of support, in most cases the support staff will know us by name.
  • Modern and secure infrastructures.
  • Good value for the money.

We have clients who have small, low-traffic sites and need basic hosting packages, as well as clients who get massive amounts of traffic, or who need to run custom applications on their servers.