Company Magazine, a Green Bay based business publication, was looking for a website that better served their goals as a business.
A major source of first-interaction with the magazine was their "Company Awards", in which community members voted for their favorite local businesses in specific categories.
To boost voter "turnout", we created a prominent and easy-to-use (yet unobtrusive!) online voting system for their Company Awards, complete with timed safeguards to prevent "running up the score" by click-happy business owners. The interface sits on the home page of the site, invisible except for a tab at its top which clearly reveals the category and candidates when the user mouses over the tab.
We also noted that as a business magazine, they had a wealth of content already available to them. Since promoting their featured writers was a priority for Company Magazine, we programmed a system by which feature articles could be added to the website and attributed to a specific writer, which then auto-displayed in a list of recent articles on that writer's profile page.
The web is great for making connections between bits of content, so The Image Distillery looks for opportunities to make use of this interconnectivity to serve both users and site-owners in a way that print alone cannot.
Oil and Watercolor Painter Molly Johnson has been refocusing on her art for the past few years, and came to The Image Distillery to establish her very first web presence.
The online gallery portion of the site features a database-driven (i.e. easily updatable) grid of available and archived paintings. Clicking on the thumbnail image for any piece brings up a larger display image, with information on price, medium, canvas size and availability for the browser's reference.
Since the site was first created in early 2009, Molly has returned to expand her site to match her expanded offerings: student and adult art instruction, as well as personally-commissioned pieces (site expansion to launch soon).
With 30+ years in the temporary employment business, Temployment has established itself in the Green Bay area. When it came time to establish their first real web presence, Temployment turned to The Image Distillery.
After kicking around a few ideas to make use of the site beyond a simple search-engine-friendly "brochure" site, we settled on an online listing of available positions.
The Image Distillery designed and programmed an easy-to-use administrative area by which Temployment's staffing experts could add information about open positions.
Another main goal of the site was to clearly explain to viewers how the "temping" experience worked for both those offering temporary work and those seeking it. After a lot of back-and-forth consideration about the wording of the copy, the end product was a clear and effective explanation of the benefits of temporary staffing for both corporate clients and temporary workers alike.
ERA Titletown, a local real estate brokerage, lost their former website when their former web host had a server-room fire (which reminds me, if your site isn't backed up, stop reading right now and back it up!).
Left in a lurch during their busiest season, ERA Titletown turned to The Image Distillery to create a new website from scratch ASAP.
In the two years since, The Image Distillery has expanded the site to include an improved module to show available homes for sale, a practical display of their real estate agents which highlights top producers, a display system for video tours of homes, and a weblog which they've used to "broadcast" relevant economic and government policy information through the recent economic downturn. All of these features are powered by an in-house database, making regular updates much faster and easier.
This project has been an excellent example of staged development; it started with the bare-bones "public display" and continues to evolve as a marketing tool for agents of ERA Titletown as we add purpose-driven features to benefit the site's users.
