Advanced Energy Technologies (AET), a leading global provider of structural solutions for renewable/alternative energy applications, has a new site!

Check out their new site at ati-energy.com.

Setting up a WordPress site proved to be the fastest way to get a site up and running for Miki Pro Soccer. Relying heavily on WordPress extensions for the galleries and forms allowed us to minimize the amount of custom code. For the camp and training registration portion of the site, we may fall back on custom coding to implement a seamless registration system. For a small site like this, WordPress proved to be a perfect solution.

Check out the WordPress site: MikiProSoccer.com

Great Lakes Wire & Cable’s website (greatwire.com) has a brand new look and a lot of solid content for the search engines. The new site features a search engine optimized and user-friendly product catalog that is easily updated through the content management system (cms).

Visit the new site!

Congratulations Global Impact Group!

While not fully built out yet, we completed phase I of the Global Impact Group’s web site. For this new venture getting a basic website to highlight their capabilities and provide their contact information is the first step to supporting their global sales team. Phase II will be rolled out over the next month!

Check out their site www.globalimpactmfg.com!

We just put the finishing touches on Otsego Club’s O Park site (the-opark.com). This is a fun site for the kids at Otsego Club to upload their photos and video, check out the latest news and rider events, view the web cam of the terrain park, and add their comments/feedback in the forum.

Check Out The O Park Site

Today we launched a new site for professional snowboarder, Ryan Neptune. Currently sponsored by Burton, Oakley and Fuel the new site features awesome photos from Neptune’s 25 years of snowboarding.

Phase I of the new RyanNeptune.com site has been rolled out. We’ll be delving into Phase II soon - adding news releases and magazine articles as well as more awesome snowboarding photos of Flyin’ Ryan!

Check out Ryan Neptune’s New Site

What a great feeling - knowing our clients are all Home for the Holidays! It’s nice to have a little time to catch up on all our projects and tie up the loose ends before the year is out. I can’t remember the last time that our holiday vacation actually lasted the entire two weeks between celebrating Christmas and the New Years! It’s a nice thought, but there’s only so much time to catch up! This holiday turned out to be quite effective.

1. Launched 2 new “small” sites: The-OPark.com and RyanNeptune.com.
2. Set up and expanded our flickr, facebook, and linkedin accounts - we instruct all our clients to get into social networking and figured it is about time for us to do the same!
3. Took a lot of fun snowboarding photos for Planet and The Otsego Club (and enjoyed some nice snowboarding along the way).
4. Started development on 4 new sites: LatitudeES.com, Adventures-in-Music.com, KCKCreations.com and GlobalImpactMFC.com.
5. Worked on an assortment of odds-n-ends for our clients.

It’s hard to believe the holidays are over. Monday, most of our clients will head back to the office, and we’ll be off and running in all directions again. It’s a good thing we truly love what we do!

We launched the new sagegc.com web site this week! New features include a blog to keep their customers up-to-date on projects and industry news, a more effective way to view their portfolio projects, a little more depth of content, and a look that ties in tightly to their rebranding efforts. It has been a fun redesign!

Visit Sage Construction’s New Site

Everyone talks about SEO, search engine optimization, but what does that really mean and how can you identify whether or not a web developer really understands how to optimized a site for the search engines?

SEO essentially means the process of making a site user-friendly for the search engines.The search engines “read” a site differently than your customers read it - looking for indicators and clues as to where the site best fits into the massive world wide web of sites on the Internet. There are three fundamental steps in SEO:

1. Write standards compliant code. The search engines understand standards compliant code, but have a hard time with sloppy code or slang much in the same way a foreigner that has studied a language struggles with local dialect and slang.
2. Include proper indicators for the search engines in the code. Embedded in the code are tags that can be used by developers to highlight certain content in the site as more relevant and important. These tags guide the search engines as they navigate through a site.
3. Write relevant content.

Point in Case: About seven years ago a client approached us about their lack of exposure in the search engines. At that point we were only doing small updates on their existing website. The site was poorly coded, had no indicators in the code for the search engines, but worse than that, the site didn’t even include the primary keywords that their target audience would be searching for. The CEO asked why the site wasn’t pulling up under the primary keywords. My response was simple - let us rewrite the copy and then it will. I’m not talking about duplicating the keywords over and over. I’m talking about writing solid, legible content that engages both customers and the search engines. We rewrote the copy, and low and behold the site quickly started moving up in ranking under the designated keywords. Once we had proved our methodology, our client then asked what more we could do. We ended up redesigning and recoding the entire site. Now the site consistently shows up in the top 1-2 positions for every major keyword, beating out corporations with much larger marketing budgets that spend lots of money buying their position within the search engines.

Every site has two target audiences: search engines and people. As such we develop our sites to target both audiences simultaneaously. We integrate SEO into our entire web development process. That’s what makes us so successful at positioning our sites.

Now how can you check to see if a web developer really understands how to optimize a site for the search engines? Very simply… look at their track record. For example open up Google and look up the following keywords. You’ll see our clients consistently come up in the top positions within the search results for their targeted keywords.

• automotive forecasting - csmauto.com shows up in the top 1-2 positions.
• snow tools - planetsnowtools.com consistently ranks in the top 1-2 spots.
• sports and entertainment - generalsports.com is in the top 2.
• east coast halfpipe - eastcoast22.com is ranked number 1.
• sports executive conference - generalsports.com maintains the top spot.
• sports sponsorship negotiations - generalsportsalliances.com is in the top 4.

The proof is in the pudding.

CSM Worldwide now has the ability to sell a lower level quarterly forecast subscription. This store allows subscribers to access their subscriptions online, receive email notification when quarterly subscriptions are released, and facilitate the process of renewing a customer’s subscription.

We are particularly pleased with the AJAX interface we built into this store. It allows instant exchange rate calculations and quickly totals the shopping cart. The store processes transactions in the currency selected by the customer. Exchange rates are automatically adjusted according to real time exchange rate data. We used hide/display functionality to allow customers to get more detail on a particular forecast. The backend administrative system is intuitive and easy to use. As the beta tester developers for the bank’s new international payment gateway we were faced with some interesting challenges along the way in building out the ecommerce back-end. It was definitely a fun challenge, and the end result is a powerful store system with a clean and simple user interface.

View CSM’s Forecast Subscription Store