T and S was in need of a better way to represent their company online. They had great service and excellent craftsmanship, but their existing website failed to communicate that message, and they didn’t have any social media presence.
To help them we built a new, easy to navigate, responsive WordPress website on the Genesis framework. Our goal was to convey their old school values in a modern way so prospective customers could find them. We took photos of Todd and Samai on the job site, capturing them as hard-working guys they are and enabling us to avoid the cheesy stock photography you see on most websites.
In addition to a new website, we set up profiles on key social media accounts to make it easy to reach customers where they are. Rounding out the infrastructure creation, we also created a custom video intro/outro and set up their smartphones so they could record updates and share them with the world within minutes.
With their new website and social media presence, Todd and Samai wanted to make sure it didn’t go unused and retained Workshed to manage their marketing. We work with them to create content like ‘how to‘ and informational videos about the services they offer.
Workshed recently completed an ambitious project for Seattle-based interior designer, Kathy Banak, and her custom line of Paints and Fabrics, Authentic Home. Kathy approached Workshed wanting to unify her online brand, expand her offerings and move to a CMS-based platform to ensure scalability and ease of growth.
Workshed worked closely with Authentic Home over the course of four months to establish a strategy for linking a network of web sites together visually, strategically and technically. Today, we finally get to see the results of everyone’s hard work as she officially announces her new sites.
The Authentic Home Network of sites is comprised of a content-managed Interior Design-focused site that promotes the services Authentic Home has to offer, a blog site that allows Kathy to keep her clients informed and share her expertise on Interior Design and last, but not least, a fully-featured e-commerce site that allows her to sell her custom line of interior and exterior paints, as well as custom fabric selection. The key to Authentic Home’s store is the ability for customers to see and purchase paint and fabric in moods, which are pre-matched sets of colors and patterns that match certain moods.
Workshed leveraged open source technologies for the back ends of these sites, settling on the highly flexible and extensible Concrete5 CMS framework for the interior design site, the tried and true WordPress for the blog and Magento for the e-c0mmerce site. These technologies allow us to provide Authentic Home with a search engine friendly, easily manageable and extensible framework for the growth of not only Authentic Home’s Internet presence, but also for the growth of its business.
Workshed is proud to have been a part of this project and we look forward to seeing Authentic Home settle into its new home(s) on the Internet.
We just launched a new coordinated advertising campaign for Lacamas Community Credit Union. Titled the Better Match Campaign, it’s geared towards educating consumers about their offerings in an entertaining way, and ultimately increasing their membership. The campaign consists of a web site and four TV spots currently, but will be expanded to a print campaign and have additional TV spots added in the future.
The TV spots will be showing on KPTV (Fox 12) in the mornings, then across multiple cable channels on Comcast, such as TBS, USA, Food Network, Oxygen, Animal Planet, CMT, CNN, E!, FX, TRU TV, A&E and TLC.
The web site features the commercials, engaging copy and design style as well as a viral marketing-style Breakup Letter Generator, which consumers can use to break up with their current bank by e-mailing their customized breakup letter to one or more people.
Special thanks to Furman Pictures for their cinematography and editing contributions!
Check out the spots below and if you live or work in Southwest Washington, check out LCCU, too!
Last week, we launched a particularly large project that we’ve been working on for some time for Western Bus Sales, the leading School, Commercial and Activity bus dealer in the Pacific Northwest. For this project, we partnered with Blue Dog Creative, who did the design, while we handled the information architecture, XHTML/CSS coding, PHP and CMS development, testing and hosting.
The site is almost completely CMS-driven, using our Pegboard CMS tool, which allows the WBS staff to easily keep their content and inventory up-to-date. The folks at WBS were great to work with and we wish them a prosperous future with their new web site!
Being located in a small town has afforded us some great opportunities. Many of these opportunities have nothing to do with making money, but with the relationships we’ve been able to forge with the great members of the town in which we are located. While Camas is growing and changing at an astounding rate, it hasn’t always been that way. This sleepy mill town has long been dormant in many ways, surviving as a blue-collar town with the main industry being that of the Paper Mill located on the West end of the downtown area.
In recent years, partially due to the real estate boom, the area has seen its residents expand out to a wider range of households. With this change has come a change to the downtown area, as well. Many new wonderful boutique shops, restaurants and services have begun to appear on a regular basis and a renewed pride in the downtown has taken hold.
We see a lot of examples of people working together to improve the community and make it more of a destination for families. But the ones that have had the most impact are the ones that have focused on giving the downtown region a personality and a brand. We were recently given the opportunity to help with two of these projects, which involved producing a commercial for the Downtown Camas businesses, which was shown on various Comcast channels for a number of months, to redesigning the Downtown Camas Walking Map for local businesses. Throughout this process, we were able to establish a visual identity for the town that can start to imprint upon consumers’ minds.
When this branding is used in conjunction with the town’s many events and weekly First Friday Art Walks, it helps to reinforce a consistency in both experience and style that people will come to associate with Camas. The end goal is that people begin making Camas more of a destination than a place they stumble upon while driving to or from the Gorge. While we have only begun to scratch the surface of how much we can help this town increase its brand awareness, we are looking forward to more opportunities to help Camas—and other towns that may come along—increase their branding and commerce.
T and S was in need of a better way to represent their company online. They had great service and excellent craftsmanship, but their existing website failed to communicate that message, and they didn’t have any social media presence.
