Project Highlights :

This is the social network site that is linked to the Dirt Road Delight Web Site.

New Tricks Services:

We created a site on Ning and customized it with a complementary color and header to distinguish it from the main site.

Budget: $

Project Highlights :

Georgia Tech has a strong  history of students and faculty very involved in the major innovations in the automotive engineering and technology fields. Consequently, every year they celebrate this expertise by throwing an auto show. This auto show is unlike others in that it takes all vehicles, cars, motorcycles, planes, boats whatever,of all eras and in all conditions. If you are proud of your ride then your ride is welcomed. Sterling Skinner, of the Mechanical Engineering department,  is the founder and director of the show which is held every spring.

Sterling is something of a frustrated artist. He knew exactly what he wanted for the site, but didn’t have the skills to create it. In this case, we had to pull out of him the vision that he had for what the site and this year’s poster would look like which was somewhat like a guessing game.  After coming up with several ideas, he decided on one of our concepts of toy car/real car. It was important to Sterling to show photos of the show with people in them, this was a way that he felt displayed the unique character of the show. People could see that there are all sorts of vehicles and see that a wide variety of people were having a great time up close and personal to some fabulous cars.

Another thing Sterling wanted was a site for the Ga Tech Alums to get involved. This expanded into a vision of a 24/7 virtual auto show that would extend the feel of the auto show between shows. The site that we would create would be a place to build community and keep it going between shows. We were going to add a forum to the regular site but instead decided to create an entire social network site using Ning. The site is called Georgia Tech Gearheads and in the first three days of its existence has 25 members without yet promoting it at all.

The main site although a WordPress site, it has an almost static front page. The blog page in called news and is on the nav bar but is not highlighted. In addition to all of the show information and registration. we were able to include a gallery section with each past year with a Flickr sideshow, a synopsis of the year, the winners and a photo of the tee shirt and the trophy for each year. We also have showcased people from tech who have contribute to the field with a photo and short bio of their accomplishment.

New Tricks Services:

• Website creation: We brought in information from the existing site and supplemented it with other information provided by the client. We created a graphic representation of toy cars that when you highlight a car a real car of that type from the show pops up with real people enjoying the show. The front page is static except for a box at the bottom which highlights the latest posts.
• Graphics Created a new logo and a website header. Created background graphics for the customization of the website and the Gearheads Ning site.
• Copy and Photos: worked with Sterling Skinner who provided past files from previous shows. We rewrote  existing copy and add additional copy for the blog and about pages.
• Social Media: Started Twitter and Flickr sites and linked them to the blog site.

Budget: $$$

Project Highlights :

Dirt Road Delight is made up of a guitar, fiddle and stand-up bass playing Appalachian Soul.  You couldn’t meet a nicer person than Tedi May, the creative force behind the group. Playing Stand up bass, she has pulled together this tight little group. Their fiddle player, Billy Ward is amazing. They were recording their first CD when Tedi  came to New Tricks needing a website. We had a meeting or two listening carefully to how…they described themselves and the impression they wanted to impart to their fans, lovingly referred to as  the DirtRoadies. Tedi wanted a website that would showcase the band and what they were up to and also a site where their fans could interact with each other and the band. We decided to do that by creating a second site on Ning for the Dirt Roadies.

Tedi had been studying on-line marketing techniques and she had certain items that she wanted on their site. Of course we added a Twitter feed and we also set up a Flickr Site. Flickr is great becasue when you upload photos to Flickr it automatically resizes them to a reasonable size for a website and it makes it easy for people to upload their photos from Flickr to WordPress Galleries and Slideshows. The cross linking from Flickr is also good for search engine ranking. You Tube accounts are also good that way. Tedi has a You Tube account and can easily embed the You Tube code into her posts and pages.

When we set up sites for people we want them to be able to use them and maintain them to some extent by themselves. OF course we have maintenance contracts for people that need some extra help but we want them to be abel to upload photos music and videos with their posts and do so easily so that they keep the site active.  Lately I have been disappointed with the music players for WordPress. For the most part they are really hard to customize and a pain to go into the code and put the urls of the mp3s. A trick I use to help people easily add music is to use the music player from a Ning site which is easily customizable and the music can be added by a simple upload feature. When completed the player’s embed code can be copied onto the regular website into a post, a page or a widget for the sidebar. Voila! Even if they are not going to use the Ning site it is a good solution just for the music player.

New Tricks Services:

• Website creation: To keep the costs down we customized, Irresistible,  a free theme from Woo Themes.
• Graphics Created a new band logo and a website header. Created background graphics for the customization of the website and the dirtroadies ning site.
• Copy: worked with Tedi May  to rewrite existing copy and add additional copy for her blog and about pages.
• Social Media: Started Twitter and Flickr sites and linked them to the blog site.

Budget: $$

Project Highlights :

Santa Rosa Island Triathlon had a static website that they could not update themselves. This race, now in its 14th year has a huge following and race community. The race directors wanted to be able to communicate with them, letting them know about training events and sharing personal stories of triathletes who have competed in this event. It is a fun festive event held at Pensacola Beach Florida, yet their previous website was old school and not reflective of the amount of  enthusiasm of the event and their community. The New Tricks team developed an entire new logo for the race…combing iconic images of Pensacola Beach.  Then we downloaded the content from their previous site and rewrote and reorganized the existing text and information. We also looked at what other content was now possible with a database type site and helped them to create posts in new categories. They did not have many usable photos so we put out a call to their race community and received some fantastic action shots, a few of which made it into the new header. The font for the header was chosen to give an island feel and we were right on the money with the new colorful design.

An important component of the new site was that it be easy to navigate. Another big factor was that it be easy to update as sponsors change or new information is needed to be quickly disseminated. We also got the race onto Twitter and Flickr making it easy to post up to the minute news and makes it easy to add slide shows for each of the years of the race. As soon as it went live the website started getting three to six hundred hits a day. They expect about eight hundred participants on October 3, 2009.

New Tricks Services:

• Website creation:Existing site was easily ported into WordPress:
• Graphics Created a new logo and a website header for the race.Also customized a theme for the race site
• Copy: Worked with the race directors to rewrite existing copy and add additional copy for their blog
• Social Media: Started twitter and Flickr sites and linked them to the blog site.

Budget: $$

Project Highlights :

Nancy Bennett Photography now has a showcase for her beautiful portfolio on her new WordPress.com site, Capture Time. New Tricks helped Nancy, and business partner Brenda Stubbs, create a site to launch her new focus on senior photography. Nancy has long been known for her intuitive, creative work with children and has recently discovered the beauty of photographing people at he other end of the stages of life.

An important component of the new site was that it have a simple design that let the photos speak for themselves.  Another big factor for Nancy was that it should be easy for her to maintain herself. She had come to one of the New Tricks free seminars earlier in the year to learn about blogging and had started the site herself but needed a bit of help fine tuning the right design. We got the site launched on WordPress.com in one afternoon and Nancy was so excited about  the site that she stayed up until 3 AM that night entering and categorizing some of her favorite photographs.

New Tricks Services:

• Free WordPress.com seminar: client attended a New Tricks seminar and chose to change her site to WordPress.com
  
• Website creation: Helped to choose an appropriate theme for this portfolio site.
• Training: Taught Nancy to work with her photos to display them on the site.

Budget: $

Project Highlights :

Stromquist & Company has an existing website for product information and online ordering. They asked New Tricks to help create a complementary new site to share information with their colleagues in the commercial and industrial control community.

An important component of the new site was to provide an easy way to showcase the product demonstration and training videos Stromquist & Company has created specifically for the control industry. And they wanted to provide a component so their in house experts could share their vast knowledge with other industry professionals.

New Tricks Services:

• Website creation: Implemented a WordPress blog engine / CMS system. The new site features:
  • Embedded training videos.
  • Podcasts.
  • Group blog with multiple Contributors and access levels.
  • Workflow process to include approval of blog posts by Administrator prior to publication.
  • Events calendar displaying upcoming training schedule and online course registration.
  • Subscription service for new online newsletters.
• Training: Provided one-on-one training for five team members at Stromquist’s training facility.

Budget: $$

Project Highlights :

Shawn Black came to us after he heard about the benefits of using WordPress as a website platform. He was especially interested in the searchability of these content management sites as well as the ease with which he could learn to maintain the site and have it be an active conversation with his clients. He had already started with some other designers but after meeting with us he completely changed directions.

New Tricks Services:

• Design: New Tricks redid the Mirar Salon Log colors to go with the new site. Shawn had some beautiful professional photos of one of his clients that inspired up to choose to use one for his site’s background image . TO keep the development costs down we chose to modify an existing WordPress Theme than to start from ground zero. We chose to modify a premium theme called Cafe Press by Press 75. If you look at the theme and the finished site you would never guess that it was built using Cafe Press as its start. We customized it by removing the side bar feature boxes and adding extra footer boxes to accommodate space for four stylists. We wanted it to be feminine and yet not too much and feel that the colors reflect the yin and yang very well.
• Website creation: Shawn had a URL but we transfered his original hosting to Blue Host who does a great job keeping up to date with everything needed for our WordPress sites. We then installed WordPress and a My SQL database on his hosted site. The new site features:
  • A static, non-blog home page. We then made pages for each stlysits with links form their photos on the home page. Their pages have individualized, person sidebar with their own links and information. They each are able to blog and their blogs are avaiable from their personal pages. We. then included pages about Services, Contact and Directions.
  • Plugins were installed and configured for Statistics, Spam Prevention, and SEO
  • Social Media sites such as Facebook and Twitter were tied into and links appear on the sidebar.
• Training: Provided one-on-one training customized for client’s unique site.

Budget: $$

Project Highlights :

Susan Asher of Asher PR obtains publicity locally and nationally in newspapers, magazines, trades, online media, and on radio and TV. Susan has been able to get her clients on “The Tonight Show,” “ABC News Now,” on CNN and the FOX News Network. Having worked in newspaper and radio and written for numerous publications, Susan Asher knows how to tell a story to make the news. When Susan came to us she had a website and a blog. She was brave enough to…show her sites to the Press Club meeting for review. They gave her several tips like to combine the two sites and give her blog a name. They also gave her another important tip,

Call New Tricks… They will help you take your site the the next level.

New Tricks Services:

• Design: New Tricks created a logo for Asher PR and a name for her  site. We chose to modify the Vigilance WordPress theme in order to keep her costs low.  Since Susan’s tagline is “putting you in the Limelight,  lime green was strongly featured.
• Website creation: Obtained a URL and installed a WordPress and an My SQL database on her hosted site. The new site features:
  • Five pages were developed;  Home, About Asher PR, Clients and Accounts, Testimonials and Contact. Susan has multiple categories appearing in her sidebar.
  • WordPress Plugins were installed and configured for Statistics, Spam Prevention, and SEO
  • Social Media sites such as Facebook and Twitter were tied into and links appear on the sidebar.
• Training: Provided one-on-one training customized for client’s unique site.

Budget: $$

Project Highlights :

Amanda Earley graduated from Tulane in May 2009 in Latin American Studies and International Development. She is now attending Georgetown’s Master’s Program in Latin American Studies and Foreign Service and was back off the Rio to do research this summer. She came to us wanting a blog site where she can write about her various projects as well as being a forum for people who are living and working all over the globe.

New Tricks Services:

• Design: New Tricks created a logo for Global Girl  and we customized a WordPress Theme for the Global Girl Blog website.
• Website creation: Obtained a URL and installed a WordPress and an My SQL database on her hosted site. The new site features:
  • Four actual pages, Home, About, Contact and Subscribe were created for the nav bar as well as having a link in the nav bar to her  multiple category pages.
  • Plugins were installed and configured for Statistics, Spam Prevention, and SEO
  • Social Media sites such as Facebook and Twitter were tied into and links appear on the sidebar.
• Training: Provided one-on-one training customized for client’s unique site.

Budget: $$

Project Highlights :

SplendidVid selected New Tricks to develop a portfolio website showcasing the work of three highly acclaimed media professionals. While the principals had impressive individual portfolios, they needed an online presence for their newly formed media production company.

In a few short weeks, New Tricks and SplendidVid worked together to create a site that speaks to a variety of audiences from “button down Fortune 1000 corporations and issue oriented political groups to hard rocking musicians and hip hop performers.”

Using WordPress as the framework, the site will be able to grow along with the company. Through the training provided as part of the implementation, SplendidVid will be able to maintain the website content themselves.

New Tricks Services:

• Design: Logo and website design for SplendidVid, a newly formed video production company.
• Website creation: Implemented a WordPress blog engine / CMS system. The new site features:
  • Individual bios including links to miscellaneous corporate and social networking sites.
  • Portfolio containing 20 plus video links from the group’s collective videography.
• Training: Provided one-on-one training customized for client’s unique site.

Budget:  $$