Our favorite part of this site is the weather function. Using the weather tower at the downtown Swiftel location, we pull live data from the National Weather Service. Then we overlay it on Google Maps so users can zoom in, move around and automatically see the current radar loop for the past three hours. Humidity, wind speed, sunrise, heat index—it’s all there for your convenience.

The website is excellent at cross-promoting products and services. The system is aware of what page a person is viewing, and in what category, and will promote a different related product or service in the sidebar.

One last cool bit: remember how Swiftel wanted to be the homepage for their community? Well, with the use of RSS feeds, we’re able to stream news from the local news station and South Dakota State University automatically—no updating required. Whenever a news feed updates, so does the homepage of Swiftel.net. If you live in Brookings, set this as your homepage and check it every morning for your local news and weather. (Seriously, give that map a spin.)

A bunch of new features are becoming standard on sites these days: search bars, drop-down menu navigation, featured sliders on the homepage. And it’s all packaged in a way that hands the controls over to the client.

We hooked Northern Truck Corp. up with every bit of goodness we could. We organized all their products by category and provided a sidebar to jump to any of those categories. Their site features some new animations and style interactions that improve the end user’s experience. Plus, we trained Northern Truck Equipment Corp. on WordPress, which gives them the customization they need paired with an unmatched ease of use. The right equipment paired with the right clients – well, that equals a great user-friendly website.

The calendar provides the tech-savvy with easy notification when something new is happening at the country club; all people need to do is click the RSS icon in the calendar to download the appropriate feed. Other features of the website include a slider, drop-down navigation and full CMS support.

Combining a hint of nostalgia with the clean refinement of contemporary design and typography gives the Web site a tactile online presence. What’s more, we kept SDSU pride alive and well with a nice, refreshing approach to SDSU blue and gold.

Best of all, it was all done under pressure. A tight deadline (design wasn’t approved until less than a week before launch), a couple of pots of coffee and an all-nighter all contributed to a site that was built – from concept to completion – in under 24 hours.

Go Big, Go Blue, then go home and take a nap.

Stick with the brand, adjust for the medium. When Steve Herman with the Coffee News of Sioux Falls came to us for an updated Web site, we set out to make the online experience (and update-ability process) as easy and fun as the publication, which is delivered to restaurants, coffee shops and hotels so readers get a daily dose of good news and humor.

Give ‘em what they need, not just what they want. We added incentives for advertisers by placing their ads directly on every page of the site, showing no particular favoritism by displaying them all in random order. Locations link to local business Web sites, and the online “Readers’ Contest” is a great way to collect customer data for the future.

Create solutions. Everything on Steve’s new site is easy to update and expandable for the future. Now Steve can login, update his copy, create new pages and delete old ones all through the access of any Internet-equipped computer.

WordPress has come quite a long way from it’s blog roots to a full-out content management system. It’s easily one of the simplest and most intuitive content management system around these days, and because it’s open source we’re able to pass some savings along to the client.

Being the most popular system has its advantages too—hordes of developers out there creating unique solutions to all of the webs hurdles—just waiting to be customized, extended, developed, designed and refined to suit the individual needs of the client.

Prairie View needed a new site, and they wanted to reinforce their online message with print materials. A win-win for budgets, timelines and brand consistency.

The first order of business was their logo—fuel-injected with new our new typeface and ready for the world.

Keeping the golden rule of consistency in mind, we designed an elongated mailer that reinforced the letterbox imagery found online. For added cohesion we refined the logo slightly to tie in with the unique typeface choice for these (and all future) pieces.

When it comes to consistent messaging it’s always best to go with a single agency. This is just another example of how time and budget dollars can be saved by putting the same team on your print campaign and online advertising efforts.

So that’s what we did – by developing not just a Web site, but a community. Which makes Southfork seem pretty awesome.

Now each time a hunting group comes through, their story can be archived by uploading photos and videos, thus allowing everyone to participate in the dialogue. Real feedback from the people who matter most: your customers.

Better yet, the system is completely expandable from anywhere. By utilizing an intuitive content management system, updating and maintaining a site no longer requires long expensive updates, and Southfork’s website will stay up to date. This means dynamically pulling recent events onto the main page and spotlighting the main events. (And for those that are hip to the jive of syndication, there’s even an RSS feed.)

By designing a system that engages the key audience, allowing anyone to participate, we gave Southfork a much needed web presence. And in doing so, we helped build community.