Latest Project: Mutual Fund Website Design for Bandon

Latest Project: Mutual Fund Website Design for Bandon

UPDATE:

Bandon Capital Management was acquired by Logan Circle Partners in late 2014. The beautiful website we spent months building was unceremoniously retired as part of the transaction.

Mutual Fund website design made easy

Mutual Fund Website Design for BandonPublicly communicating anything in the investment world is difficult to do (but we know how to do it, more here), and creating a website that is both informative  and visually stimulating the primary objective for our client.  Bandon Capital Management is a pioneer in the investment (absolute return long – short bonds if you are wondering) world and they’ve taken that same approach to their website design. Eschewing stock photos and cliche images of old men in suits, they opted for a design that was fresh, modern, and full of custom graphics and images.

A few details

In addition to good design, they had a few other requirements to make their website compliant with FINRA.  One of those was the ability to make certain content only accessible to financial professionals, but still be easy to use and maintain.  To accomplish this we customized a lightweight membership plugin to keep it simple, yet still do the job. The other was a separate section for BandonFunds.com that used the same data base, but didn’t run afoul of the regulators (how we accomplished that was a challenge!)

Another interesting add on was a quiz to test visitors knowledge of Long – Short debt.  It’s a fun and clever way to help educate people on what they do without being boring. A nice little add on is the ability to share results with your friends (or not if you didn’t do so well).  Take the Long – Short Challenge.

Great clients make great projects

All in all it was a great project to work on.  The team at Bandon is very knowledgeable, yet they allowed us to use our expertise to help communicate their message.   We look forward to continuing our relationship as we move into an ongoing marketing role where we’ll help create content and continue to broadcast their message with the goal of attracting more investors in the fund.  (If you are worried about the possibility of rising interest rates, give them a call or tell your broker to look at BANIX)

What do you think?

Day 21: Learn to code

Day 21: Learn to code

Computer code touches nearly every aspect of our modern lives.  Even if you don’t plan on making a living by writing it, it’s probably a good idea to at least have a basic understanding of what’s going on.  Heck, you might even enjoy it.

One [free] resource I’ve used is Code Academy.  They do a great job of breaking the lessons down into easily digestible chunks with exercises to help you understand what’s going on.

Code Academy Logo

Give it a try and let us know what you think.  You never know, maybe you have a talent for the binary?

 

Day 15: Your Website is Hurting Your Business

Day 15: Your Website is Hurting Your Business

Is your website costing you sales?

5 slides, 3 questions, 1 answer.
Now a presentation on SlideShare:

Your website is hurting your business

Update Your WordPress Website

Update Your WordPress Website

Secure WordPress WebsiteAn out of date version of WordPress is one of the primary ways malicious hackers gain access to websites.  Updating your site to the latest release is essential, but depending on how your website was built, upgrading to a newer version can come with it’s own set of risks.
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Custom WordPress Themes Are a Bad Idea

Custom WordPress Themes Are a Bad Idea

Custom WordPress Themes Are a Bad Idea…

WordPress Websites For Business by Workshed

Just because you can do something, that doesn’t necessarily mean you should. There are many things in life we can make from scratch, but don’t simply because it’s not necessary or practical. For example, if I wanted to bake a loaf of bread, I could plant wheat, harvest it a few months later, thresh it, mill it, and mix it with the other ingredients I had to grow.  Or, I could just buy freshly milled flour and other quality ingredients from a reputable company and get 99% of the benefit for a fraction of the cost.  The same is true of building websites.  Sure, we could code every line of HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and php from scratch, but do we really need to?  At Workshed, we think not.

It’s been our experience that custom themes for WordPress are expensive…at best.  Most of the time they end up being problematic maintenance nightmares,  wasting time and money for the duration of their existence.  This is not to say that websites should be templates or even that customization isn’t worthwhile, just that it’s what and where you spend your time customizing that matters most.

We prefer to start with a premium framework like Genesis or Thesis and customize from there.  Doing this allows us to focus our customization time on things like SEO, content, images and graphics (we are not fans of stock photos), as well as layout and functionality.  All of the security, maintenance, and updating is expertly handled by the teams of developers at the theme framework companies; software engineers that focus exclusively on writing excellent code.  This delegation of the core functionality means we can focus on the stuff that leads to more sales; things like creating content that makes your phone ring with new orders.

A full custom, built from scratch website is fine too, just know it’ll come with a few idiosyncrasies…kind of like owning a vintage British sportscar.

Contact us if you want to discuss how we use websites, social media, and our business perspective to grow your business.

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