Websites Under Your Control Blog

We were honored to receive the following notice today, and thank our great clients who made us successful in 2008!

FRISCO CHAMBER RELEASES LISTS OF BUSINESS AWARDS FINALISTS Winners to be Announced at Annual Banquet January 31st FRISCO, TEXAS, Jan. 20, 2009 - Candidates vying to be named "Best of the Best" at the Frisco Chamber of Commerce Annual Celebration have been narrowed down to a select list of finalists.   The Frisco Chamber of Commerce has released the finalists for the Business Awards portion of the Annual Celebration to be held on Saturday, January 31st, at the Frisco Convention Center.   "Trying to narrow the nominations to five in each business category proved to be a daunting task," said Scott Sonju, with the Frisco RoughRiders and Chair of the Nominating Committee.  "In fact, we ended up with six or seven in several cases because the applications were too compelling.  The Awards Committee's task will be to narrow the list to just one.   Frankly, I'm not looking forward to that!   What a credit to the Frisco business community."   The Annual Celebration, with an anticipated attendance in excess of 600, has a "Top Gun" theme this year and will include numerous Business Awards, as well as several Citizen Awards.   Winners in each of the categories will be announced at the event which is being chaired by former Frisco mayor Mike Simpson.  Business Awards to be presented will include, among others, Small/Medium and Large Business of the Year, Developer/Development of the Year, Entrepreneur of the Year, and Community Partner.      For additional information on table reservations/sponsors for the Annual Celebration, individual tickets, or the opportunity to contribute to the Silent Auction, please call 972-335-9522 and speak with Jackie Hong and/or visit  www.friscochamber.com.  The full list of finalists in each category are as follows:

Developer/Development of the Year   *Frisco Square *Harty Land Company *The Shops at Starwood/Hermansen Land Company *Bill Darling - Darling Homes *Jim Newman/Newman Village   Small Business of the Year   *Frisco Automotive & Transmission *Eagle Gymnastics Academy *Frisco Websites *Voyager Insurance-John Harvey *It's a Grind *Farstar *eLink   Medium Business of the Year   *Sound Perfection Incorporated *Land Rover Frisco-Randy Brown *Acute Kids Urgent Care *JamesHardie Products *HRchitect *Lawton Commercial Services Large Business of the Year   *Centennial Medical Center *Embassy Suites *The Westin Stonebriar Resort *Mario Sinacola & Sons *Park Place Lexus - Plano *American Unit   Community Partner of the Year *Centennial Medical Center *Frisco Square *EDS Credit Union *Sweeney Media Group *Mario Sinacola & Sons *Bill Darling-Darling Homes   Entrepreneur of the Year *Tamme Harty- Sound Perfection Incorporated *Frisco Website-Bill Sholar & Kim Green *Jim Newman - Real Estate *Kevin Lofgren-Farstar *John Clements/Allstate

Sponsors for this year's event include AmerisourceBergen and Frisco Family Services Center, Centennial Medical Center, FC-Dallas/Pizza Hut Park, and Mario Sinacola & Sons.  The finalists were selected from companies that were nominated and submitted to the Frisco Chamber of Commerce.   Upon receipt, all entries were then reviewed by the Nominating Committee, chaired by last year's Event Chair, Scott Sonju with the Frisco RoughRiders.   This same Committee will meet between now and the 31st to finalize their choice and narrow the list of finalists down to one winning entry in each of the categories.    "The list of finalists is a very strong list and that is a reflection of all the entries submitted to the Chamber.   Regardless of whom the winner will be at the event, Frisco should be extremely proud to have such quality and involved companies as a part of our community," said Tony Felker, President of the Frisco Chamber of Commerce.

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?)

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.