Town of Coronation Website - New Project!
Written by Erin Bourne Friday, 24 October 2008 12:10
Coronation is an agriculture and oilfield town located in Paintearth County in east central Alberta. They've asked us to update the look of their site and give them a content management system so that they can easily keep their residents in the know with blogs, calendars, meeting minutes and agendas, photo galleries and more. We're going to try to make a site that gives the gossip at the coffee shop a run for its money!Crowsnest Pass: New Project!
Written by Nicole Braseth Friday, 24 October 2008 10:12
The Crowsnest Pass is an area filled with an abundance of outdoor adventure and historical resources in the southwestern corner of Alberta. The Crowsnest Pass Economic Development Board contacted us to update the crowsnestpass.com website. By filling out the website planner on our site, we got to know all sorts of project specs before we even quoted on the project, and therefore had a better idea of what the client is expecting from us (it's becoming a theme in our blog and case studies, but communication and planning before doing the work is SO important!)
They have a number of goals in updating the site: making it more user-friendly, attracting visitors to the site that will actually spend some time there (a lower click-through rate), rebrand the municipal site as a tourism site while also dividing the site into three sections: for residents, visitors and businesses. Additionally, they'll want to frequently update the content themselves (hello, content management system!).
Welcome aboard, Crowsnest Pass!
GROWTH Alberta Web Content
Written by Steve Fisher Thursday, 23 October 2008 13:08
GROWTH Alberta has selected Idea Market Design to work on two new web content projects for their website. We're excited working with the group at GROWTH Alberta to enhance their web presence. Far too often content for the web is treated either as an after thought or just something that can be cut and pasted from an offline document. Both of these statements are false. Content on the web is extremely important and should be written specifically for online use. For the vast majority of users the internet is where they go first to get information and once they find what they are looking for they generally scan through the information looking for key words, concepts and headings. Basically, if your content isn't written for the web it will not be effective.
Richard Pochylko - Red Deer Realty Guy: New Project!
Written by Nicole Braseth Thursday, 09 October 2008 13:49
Richard approached us with some lofty goals: he wants his website to register in the top 5 results in search engines when people look for homes for sale in Red Deer.
Lofty, yes. Unattainable? Certainly not. We'll work on a facelift for the site (bye-bye splash page), and obviously: search engine optimization. Part of that will include re-writing content from Richard's marketing materials to be better suited for the web. We love that Richard understands that this is an important step in SEO, and how the content is written will affect how Google (and the other powers that be) rates his website, not to mention how people will interact with the text (they don't read, they scan).
As always, I'll update when the site goes live and later when the search results speak for themselves.
Office House - Week 1
Written by Nicole Braseth Wednesday, 08 October 2008 09:34
The paint is dry... the giant sunflower felled (sort of ... it's hanging out in the eaves now), and lots of discoveries made about the office-house. Like how the baseboards did not hold up after being removed for painting and will unfortunately have to be replaced.. and how the kitchen cabinets just aren't worth saving. But that's okay!
Because it's coming along. As you'll see in the photos below, we've chosen three main colors to decorate the walls... Bermuda Blue, Orange Sky and Escarpment (the mid-grey). The colours were chosen with the idea in mind that we didn't want to stray from our branding too far (we want our clients to walk in and be like "Oh of course these are the colours Idea Market chose!"), but we didn't want the exact same thing (this whole office-house thing IS a departure after all).
Next up is the floors.. the carpet is leaving us (there's hardwood underneath, ready to be sanded and stained a dark brown) thankfully, and I believe the kitchen is being tackled: removing the cabinets and somehow putting in a new kitchen sink, so kindly gifted to us by our Realtor, Richard (the only Realtor that gives you 100% AND the kitchen sink).
I'm going to recruit Erin to start creating a divider panel to go in the living room area, creating a separation between work spaces without being shut off from each other. How do we do this? By creating it out of the wooden windows we found in the back shed-like thing in the yard! Something really important to our house transformation is that we really want to focus on reusing and repurposing found materials (stay tuned for our vintage fridge makeover!). In addition to being a greener option, we think it'll add personality to our office space and satisfy my DIY cravings.
{gallery}Week1{/gallery}Red Deer's Vital Signs 08: Project Completed
Written by Nicole Braseth Tuesday, 07 October 2008 12:37
Today, October 7, marks the launch of Vital Signs reports across Canada from Community Foundations in Montreal to Waterloo to Vancouver to Red Deer. The Vital Signs report allows each participating community to produce a report compiled from information that is both quantitative (statistics and research from local and national sources) and qualitative (Vital Signs graders respond with their own opinions in addition to "grading" the topics of interest), and can be used throughout the community as a "report card" to determine what areas the community needs to improve on, and what we can pat ourselves on the back for.
You can download the pdf version of the report here. Or check out the expanded report on the Vitals Signs homepage.
Fierce Competition: ALTO's Part Two.
Written by Nicole Braseth Tuesday, 07 October 2008 09:49
I meant to mention this earlier (like when we found out..), but turns out that Central Alberta Tourism (with the Alberta Sweet 16) is not our only client up for an ALTO award.. so is the Wetaskiwin Air Show! (We designed their souvenir book) And to top it off, they're a finalist in the same category (Marketing Partnership) as the Alberta Sweet 16 is! So as long as the Calgary Stampede doesn't take the award, Idea Market can go home knowing we contributed to the winning campaign!
Congratulations to the team at the City of Wetaskiwin and the Reynolds-Alberta Museum for becoming finalists, and we'll see you in Banff!
Home Office, Sweet Home Office
Written by Nicole Braseth Friday, 03 October 2008 10:52
As of Wednesday, October 1st, Idea Market has a new team member: our future office-house. Carson and Steve bought us a house! No more sweaters in July! A kitchen of our own! A place to keep our office mule! (more on that later, we're still in the "Convincing Steve" phase) It's everything we dreamed of... except for that mysterious stain in the corner...
We'll be picking paint colours and doing a few renos before the move-in, and we have a bunch of awesome DIY/re-purposing plans (don't you dare throw that little vintage furnace thingy out, Carson!) to exercise our creative muscles and give our new space some Idea Market character. So, in true reno fashion, here are the "Before" pictures (and yes, the pandas will be going)...
{gallery}household{/gallery}
Page 7 of 18