4 Quarters Design & Build is a Five Tech client that witnessed this bleed first hand.  Their recently redesigned website earned them the opportunity to take part in a TV news story and gain valuable offline exposure for their business.

A recent deck collapse in the Twin Cities led the WCCO reporter to find a deck construction expert to contribute to their story.   A quick search on Google by the TV reporter and he had his expert, 4 Quarters owner Brian Jacobson.

Building Credibility
It’s easy to see that the key to a successful website and online marketing is credibility.  The right look and feel, helpful content and other elements all contribute to your website being viewed as a trusted resource.  That resource might be needed by a search engine or by a TV reporter, either way the benefits can be numerous.

Congrats to 4 Quarters and Brian on the air time, can we get your autograph?

Johnson Mattson Peterson + Co. provides accounting and tax services to businesses, non-profits and individuals. Their old website was just a handful of pages in a stale accounting industry template.  The new website is clearly organized with multiple routes of navigation to find what you’re looking for.

The firm also offers a robust range of business consulting services.  JMP + Co. has offices in two cities to the west of the Twin Cities, located in Buffalo and Waconia.  We made sure to offer clear information and integrated Google maps on both office locations within the header, footer and office pages to make working with them easy.

A Web Design To Avoid The Norm

When working with firm partner and CPA Casey Mattson, it was clear that JMP + Co. was not the standard CPA firm. Our first goal was to drive home the people, personality and engagement level you’ll find with them.  Getting the staff front and center with the “We are people people” statement felt like a great fit.  We had fun taking the photo and also creating this clean and well organized web design.

Recap Of This Web Design Project

• Custom web design
• Photography
• Content management with the SMC
• Search engine optimization
• Local search and customer reviews
• Enhanced location pages
• Custom tax blog
• Internet marketing consulting

The Johnson Mattson Peterson + Co. web design project is a great web design and website if we say so ourselves.  Five didn’t deliver the “normal accounting” website and that was the point.  Who wants to look the same as everyone else when you’re not?

Visit the website: http://www.jmpcpas.com

A Web Design With Style & Simplicity
During the early project discussions it was clear that we wanted to bring a stronger style to the Simonson’s website.  Finding the balance between elegance and approachable was important.

Simplicity was a driving factor to make the website easier to use all around.  Clear navigation, focused services, content areas and new features combined to make the website easy to interact with for the user.

Simonson’s also is engaging with customers on social media channels like Twitter and Facebook.  You’ll notice the emphasis we put into letting website visitors know they can further connect with Simonson’s via social media.

Location, Location, Location
It’s no secret that the goal is getting customers in the door.  We put a strong focus on the Simonson’s four locations by making it the first item left in the main navigation, prominent footer information (see below) and the detailed page of each location.

Below is the website footer that displays a photo, phone and address of each location on every page.  These are also clickable to the location detail page.

The location detail page, like this one below for Plymouth, features the address, contact information, photo gallery, online appointments, store hours,  interactive Google map and other helpful links.

Finding the Right Stylist or Technician
Simonson’s has an experienced and talented staff and knows that their people make the biggest difference.  We created an easy to use search and filter tool for users to find the right stylist or technician for their needs.  If you’re looking for a stylist, specializing in red hair in Maple Grove, you’ll find it!

Recap of This Web Design Project
As you can see from the details above on a few features, a lot went into this web redesign in both form and function.  Here are a few more areas to hit upon in closing that we engaged in:

• Custom web design
• Content management with the SMC
• Custom blog design
• Search engine optimization & local search
• Salon & Spa Team search filter
• Enhanced location pages
• First time guest feature to market to new customers
• Online gift card purchase
• Online store integration
• Online appointment integration
• Prominent social media channel placement

We enjoyed the web design project, the great team collaborating together and the final outcome.

Check it out: http://www.simonsons.com

WCCO doesn’t offer a video embed, click here for the video.

Five Technology worked with Rear Window Media’s President Jessica Netter and created both the web design and an extensive web application that runs the Rear Window advertising management.  Rear Window clients can manage ad rotations, budget and track their advertising with GPS mapping right from an online account. We’ll post more on the Rear Window Project in a future blog post.

How valuable for an advertiser to know exactly what spot on Interstate 94 or what block in downtown Minneapolis their ad was displayed? Sounds like smarter marketing to me.

Check out the video, you’ll see the Five Technology logo in a few shots as we have some ads on their network.

Regardless of the service being controversial or not, Rear Window has seen a significant spike in both drivers wanting to use the service and advertisers for their network since the story aired. Any publicity is often good publicity, no matter how the story is spun.

Congrats Rear Window!  http://www.rearwindowmedia.com

Ranchline Network is a national real estate listing website, focusing on high-end land and ranches for sale. The website features hundreds of listings from brokers and agents all across the US and even Internationally.

Ranchline was founded by real estate broker Paul Taylor III who has achieved incredible success in the industry.  Paul and the Ranchline team saw a great opportunity to bring their marketing and Internet success to others in the Real Estate industry as a tool for them to market their properties and homes for sale as well.

Ranchline Network – A Better Website
At the core of the Ranchline Network website is a focus on making real estate research easy for the consumer.  The website offers the ability for a user to create an account to save properties and searches.  The layout is clean and offers clear navigation in multiple formats for any user to find their desired property.  These include:

• Type Navigation like Ranches For Sale, Land For Sale & Waterfront For Sale
• By State Navigation like Montana For Sale, New Mexico For Sale, Texas For Sale
• Search filters for land type, location, price range, listing ID# or keyword
• Visual map search with listing population numbers by state (see below)

In moving through the real estate listings users are presented with both strong visuals, clear navigation and over property details. Once into an exact listing the page consists of a variety of images, content, details, maps and more.

Content Management System To The Extreme
Our web platform is extremely flexible, scalable and capable of some great custom features. This project offered us the chance to program some great features for the updating and adding of listings.  The back-end offers a great feature and tool set including:

• Online creation of client accounts
• Online payment of one-time advertising & membership fees
• Uploading of listings, data, photos, video and more
• Listing statistics for agents to view stats on searches, impressions, views, clicks & contacts
• XML feed capabilities to automate listing population & updating process

Overall Website Project Details
The Ranchline Network project was a very expansive project and the client is not engaged in online marketing strategies with Five as well.  As an overview, the web design project involved:

• Custom web design
• Content management system integration
• User accounts and agent accounts
• E-commerce & merchant account
• Multiple search & filter features
• Banner ad network
• Photo gallery features
• Google maps
• Various XML data feeds
• Search engine optimization
• Pay per click marketing
• Web analytics

Check it all out for yourself, we’re proud to work with Ranchline as part of their team and business success.

Visit the website: http://www.ranchlinenetwork.com

The Community Health Foundation of Wright County was in need of a better web design and platform to communicate their projects and causes, events and how to get involved.

In addition to the redesign of the website, it now runs on a content management system allowing the CHF to easily update and grow their web presence themselves.  The ability to add information and photos from their events and projects gives the CHF stronger communication with the communities they serve.

Five Technology is happy to launch this new website, not only powered by great web technology, but a giving employee spirit.  Five has donated over $15,000 in projects the last 2 years to local non-profits including causes supporting breast cancer patients and local food shelves.

• New Community Health Foundation Website:  http://www.chfwc.org

CTI does some amazing things with concrete floors for both commercial and residential clients.  From large retail to a modern kitchen, they can handle your concrete flooring needs.  The client hired Five to improve the visual impact of their website as well as its search engine visibility. They will even be dropping some solid knowledge on their concrete blog in the future.

This web design project involved:

• Custom web design
• Built on the SMC for content management
• Project photo gallery
• Custom blog design
• Search engine optimization
• Content structure

Both the client and Five are excited to release this new web design.  If this design and coding work has “floored” you, maybe it’s time you holler at our Minnesota Web Design firm to go to work for you.

MotorSportsGearUSA.com

The Motorsports USA Gear site is the flagship of this e-commerce network of sites.  The initial release of the site only lists snowmobile gear for sale, but will eventually offer ATV, Motocross and more.

Brand Focused Websites
The other aspect to this site is that we are producing product line focused websites.  The first one we produced is focused on Klim snowmobile clothing and gear.  The main site will feed product information to each of the brand focused websites.

E-commerce Website Features
These e-commerce sites feature the following:

• Custom e-commerce design (we also made the site easy to re-skin for the brand focused websites to follow)
• Product catalog & shopping cart
• Multiple navigation locations for category, brand & search
• Product preview & product detail pages
• HTML sitemap & product sitemap
• On-page SEO
• Product options & product codes
• Authorize.Net merchant account

We’re excited to release these new e-commerce web designs and make winter a little more fun.

• View http://www.motorsportsgearusa.com
• View http://www.sledgearusa.com

Streeter Companies, a Maple Grove, MN Commercial Property firm came to us with this situation.  They were satisfied with their current web design, but wanted to be able to change web content themselves, get more traffic from Google and offer more features on the site for users.

The Website CMS Conversion Provided:

• Control – Streeter can now add new pages to their website, new property listings, change or add photos and more. Our SMC tool gives them complete control of their website.
• Features – Streeter’s former website only allowed them to display a PDF and a few details on each property for lease. We upgraded each listing to display photos in a slideshow, interactive Google maps of the location, overview text of the property, auto PDF flyer creation, contact forms and social sharing features.
• Search Engine Friendly – The move to our CMS upgraded the Streeter website to keyword URLs, HTML & XML sitemaps, semantic content structure and internal linking.  These SEO enhancements are the start to their website earning better trust and rankings from the search engines.

So if your web design is acceptable and you need a better web platform for control and to build upon, give us a shout about converting to our CMS.