Websites Under Your Control Blog

Snowball Express is dedicated to helping the children of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice while serving in the U.S. Armed Forces since 9/11.

On December 16th through December 20th of this year, Snowball Express will host 2000 children and surviving spouses in Southern California, from all across America, for an all-expense paid holiday gathering none of them will ever forget.

The Snowball Express website not only needs to tell their story and communicate with those involved. It also provides the mechanism for families to register, for donors to donate, and for the non-profit organization to thank its sponsors. 

We were glad to donate our efforts for this project.

When the water department of a nearby town wanted to take online payments, they contacted several web companies, and found that the custom programming those firms said were needed would be cost-prohibitive.

When they contacted us, we described how our Online Business Partner™ technology would not only allow for secure online payments, but would also allow them to make easy site updates as needed, and post new jobs and other announcements (that would automatically drop off the site when they were no longer relevant).

In addition, because of the efficiencies provided by our technology, we could redesign their site with a new attractive look at the same time we redeveloped it using our Online Business Partner technology, all for about 10% of the costs the other firms had quoted.

The Frisco Chamber of Commerce decided to kick off the national Chamber of Commerce week with the unveiling of its new website, which uses our Online Business Partner™ technology.

Chamber President John Land had us develop a custom design for the new website and build the initial menus and pages. Then his staff took over, and added additional pages and created their own material right in the website, thus letting them manage their costs as well as their site content.

Some of the information displayed on the Chamber of Commerce website resides in a different system, and the Chamber did not want to convert all of that information at this time. To allow for a fast and smooth transition, the data in the other system is displayed on the Chamber's new site through "iframes" or windows within a web page that display the content of a different web page.

While this reduces the level of control available for managing the presentation of the data from the other system, it allowed the Chamber to launch their new website without any time or attention whatever paid at this time to the format and management of the date stored on the other system.

Even though the Chamber did not make any announcement to its members, several hundred people per day discovered it on their own, starting with the publication of the site late on October 20th.

(The graphs here are taken from the standard graphs provided to every owner of a site using our Online Business Partner™ technology.)

By the way... the visitors in the first week were not just from Frisco, not just from Texas, and not just from this side of the globe!

It looks like there were visitors from nearly every state in the US, from Mexico and Canada, and quite a few from all over Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia as well.

In fact, with this much global traffic in the first few days, we would not be surprised to see visits from pretty much the rest of the world when we look back after a month or two!

(We know Frisco is a great place. But how do all these other folks know it? And why haven't they already moved here, now that they do?)

Our brokerage client wanted to allow his customers to search online for the basics of the listings he had for sale, but his clients did not want their addresses or details made public.

We set up a site with a searchable directory so that site visitors could find listings that matched their interests. The site visitors then request access via an online registration form.

Our client's office staff receives such requests, and with about three mouse clicks, can enable that specific visitor to have access to a specific listing for a specified duration (or forever). In addition, if a request is not acted upon within a specified period of time, the office manager gets notified so the visitor's request never falls through the cracks.

Our client wants to be able to respond instantly to certain types of inquiries. Our Online Business Partner™ sends a text message to his cell phone immediately when those inquiries are sent, so he can have a deal already locked up before his competitors get around to reading their email.

The website for Strategic Glass describes the commercial glass contracting and consulting firm to their target market of contractors and property management companies, as well as local, state, and federal government facilities.

The company asked us to create a consistent and attractive header for all pages, and they would then develop and insert the text.

They also asked us to create a "slide show" to display automatically on the home page and on the projects page, to illustrate some of their recent projects.

The owner of Logan Teal Salon wanted the benefits of client-editable content, email marketing, and more.

She already had a website that we had designed in the past, and did not want to change much, so she asked us to merely re-implement her website using our Online Business Partner™ technology.

For less than the cost of a couple of small website changes, we were able to convert her site and show her how to make updates whenever she wishes, with no special software needed.

Creative people demand creativity in their websites, so when Next Step Dance opened their doors in Frisco, they had us design a look for their logo, their advertising, and their website.

Because we wanted to illustrate the wide range of professional-level dance training and performances at Next Step, we display the images on the home page in a slide show, changing every few seconds, and we display randomly selected images from their performances on each of the inner pages.

Carolini's Treasures creates and sells custom gifts, especially gift baskets of all sorts.

We designed the logo and look of the site, and built the site with the first few products. To illustrate the variety of gift baskets, we placed a slide show on the home page.

Carolini's Treasures also sells personalized children's books, so we customized the order form to obtain the necessary personalization for these items.

Once the initial site was set up, we met with the business owner to show her the work so far, and the steps for adding more material and products. Seeing how easy it was, the business owner decided she could add her additional website content and products herself, saving her over 60% from the original budget.

To accompany the opening of a new business, McKinney Gym Equipment had us design and set up a new website to display and sell his products.

Taking a very active role in the design and content of his website, the business owner had us develop a custom look to his online catalogs and product display.

Carrying Websites Under Your Control^® one step further, the business owner read through our online technical documentation, and did his own customization of the shopping cart layout and invoice layout.

The Frisco Bar Association's website includes a list of all its members, as well as a facility for visitors to the website to find members of the Frisco Bar Association who specialize in specific areas of the law.

To allow Bar Association members to keep their information up to date, we developed an option to allow each member to view and edit their own directory information by logging in to the secure "members only" area.