Just launched — Face­book App Con­test for West­shore Town Cen­tre! Designed by Cre­at­ing Excel­lence and pro­grammed by Blender.  This con­test exists in the con­text of Face­book and runs in con­cert with West­shore’s in mall contest.

Note­wor­thy fea­tures include: mobile friendly, Like gate, Face­book login, Face­book shar­ing, Tweet­ing, Pinning.

This project brings together sev­eral technologies:

• Face­book SDKs to inte­grate into it’s social media network
• Pin­ter­est + Twit­ter sharing
• Javascript + jQuery for interactivity
• PHP for server side coding
• MySQL for stor­ing con­test entries

Face­book appli­ca­tions are great ways to engage peo­ple with your brand or busi­ness.  Vis­i­tors inter­act with you and can eas­ily share out to their friends.

Face­book App Con­test for West­shore Town Centre

Just launched: Van­cou­ver trade­mark agents CoastalIP.com.  This excit­ing project focused on a web­site design that was search engine (SEO) friendly and user main­tained with a con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem (CMS).  The project lead was Cre­at­ing Excel­lence who gets credit for the lay­out and content.

Blender took their design and cre­ated Word­Press based web­site, our cho­sen CMS plat­form.  Care­ful atten­tion was taken to make the tem­plate adapt­able so the web­site can grow.  New pages can eas­ily be added, posts to the blog, client logos to the site footer.

The site is also designed for a tar­geted SEO cam­paign.  Spe­cific key phrases were researched and the site ensures these fea­ture promi­nently for google and other search engines to index.

CoastalIP.com is the lastest in a series of web­sites Blender has launched with Cre­at­ing Excel­lence, and we have another in pro­duc­tion.  Look­ing for­ward to many more!

Tech­nolo­gies used: Word­Press CMS, jQuery Javascript Library, HTML 5

Visit Trade­mark Agents  — coastalip.com

Site cred­its:
Lay­out,  Design, and Mar­ket­ing — creatingexcellence.ca
Build and Pro­gram­ming — Blender
Pho­tog­ra­phy — photosbykathryn.com 

Shortly after hav­ing Blender give his web­site facelift and back-end over­haul long­time client Gary Mitchell learned his book was being pub­lished.  He decided a com­plete re-design was in order to focus in this new direction.

As part of the pre­vi­ous update Blender had con­verted Gary’s web­site to Word­Press based con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem (CMS). This meant we could now change the entire appear­ance of his web­site with­out touch­ing the con­tents.  Gary would edit and update his con­tent while Blender restyled the appearance.

Tech­nolo­gies: Word­Press, PHP, CSS, Javascript, jQuery

visit OnTracCoach.com

Long­time client Gary Mitchell first hired Blender in 2006.  He recently wanted to update and re-brand the web­site for his core busi­ness GEM Com­mu­ni­ca­tions.  His exist­ing web­site was dated,  per­formed poorly from a Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO) stand­point, and used tech­nolo­gies such as Flash which are no longer suit­able for gen­eral web­site design. Gary wanted a mod­ern web­site that would give him all the advan­tages the inter­net offers.

Our redesign stayed true to the appear­ance of the old, but com­pletely replaced the foun­da­tion and back end.  Blender rec­om­mended using the Word­Press Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem (CMS) so that Gary could main­tain the con­tent of On Trac on his own ensur­ing his web­site was always up to date.  Word­Press offers well struc­tured web pages where search engines are con­cerned and scales well to any size website.

Another focus was an expan­sion into social media includ­ing LinkedIn, Face­book, and Twit­ter.  On Trac would have a pres­ence on all three with the web­site act­ing as a hub from which con­tent would be shared out.

The suc­cess of the re-design will be tracked using inte­grated Google Ana­lyt­ics for traf­fic mon­i­tor­ing.  Vis­i­tors can give feed­back through web­site feed­back forms, a blog post com­ment sys­tem, and  through social media integration.

Tech­nolo­gies: Word­Press, PHP, CSS, Javascript, jQuery

Visit On Trac Coaching

Face­book is the most pop­u­lar social net­work with 750 mil­lion active users, roughly 10% of the world’s pop­u­la­tion.  Like all social net­works it con­nects users together, and if you are a busi­ness it con­nects you to your clients and more impor­tantly to their friends.

Crys­tal Munro, mar­ket­ing con­sul­tant, hired Blender to build a Face­book appli­ca­tion to encour­age vis­i­tors to “Like” Fix Auto’s Face­book page.  Together we cre­ated a cheeky plea for sup­port that uses a fun ani­mated car crash to get a vis­i­tors atten­tion.  Once liked a new page is dis­played that will con­tain spe­cial offers as a reward.

You can see the results on my Face­book page, but you will need to “Like” me to see the result­ing reward page…

visit Blender on Facebook

Blender recently launched Mas­sage Ther­apy on Dun­bar’s first web­site.  This brand new busi­ness just opened and need a web­site to help intro­duce them­selves to the Dun­bar neigh­bour­hood.  Owner Vicki Bell was referred to Blender by long time client Shel­ley Hilliard of Hilliard Design — thanks Shelley!

Vicki was on a tight bud­get so we focused on sim­ple straight for­ward func­tion­al­ity.  Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO) was a pri­or­ity, as was cross-plat­form com­pat­i­bil­ity.  Fea­tured tech­nol­ogy was jQuery used in the tran­si­tions dur­ing page loads.

The Mas­sage Ther­apy on Dun­bar web­site is fea­tured in my port­fo­lio, and you can visit it online at massagetherapyondunbar.com.