Site Design, Construction and Maintenance
Our Internet clients range from cruise lines whose huge sites play a key role in generating international revenue, to small Chicago organizations needing a simpler presence. We bring an experienced, multi-disciplinary team to every project, and offer a full menu of skills in:
- Strategy and site planning
- Visual design
- Flash design and development
- Technical design and application development
- Site construction
- Web content management (CMS) integration
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
Typically our services also include managed hosting in a secure data center, and may include support for web-based marketing via blogging, social media, and RSS.
Site Design, Construction and Maintenance
Our Internet clients range from cruise lines whose huge sites play a key role in generating international revenue, to small Chicago organizations needing a simpler presence. We bring an experienced, multi-disciplinary team to every project, and offer a full menu of skills in:
- Strategy and site planning
- Visual design
- Flash design and development
- Technical design and application development
- Site construction
- Web content management (CMS) integration
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
Typically our services also include managed hosting in a secure data center, and may include support for web-based marketing via blogging, social media, and RSS.
Field Trip Factory
Field Trip Factory is an experience-based learning company that markets free field trips for school groups on behalf of regional and national organizations. As part of its service, Field Trip Factory also manages the registration and booking process for thousands of field trips each year.
The company engaged Quicksilver to redesign and rebuild its site to accommodate expansion of its business to new audiences and offerings.
The redesigned site supports more aggressive marketing, including management of advertising banners targeted to the site visitor’s location. Ad Manager is one of the features of our content management system, QuickFlex.NET, which we customized for Field Trip Factory’s specific needs. Company staff without technical skills are able to refresh all content, including the addition of new field trips and new advertising banners.
Academy of General Dentistry (AGD)
We conceptualized, planned and designed this completely new consumer-oriented site. AGD is a large membership organization with an educational mission, but is not well known among consumers. The Academy intends for the site to become the go-to location online for consumers seeking information about dental and oral health. It therefore had to be engaging and provide easy access to AGD’s considerable archive of articles and other information. One of the features that Quicksilver developed is a downloadable desktop widget that functions as a family appointments diary, as well as providing links back to the site’s rich content.
Cunard World Voyage Mini-Site
For many years, Quicksilver has been the primary Web services agency to Cunard, during that time building and maintaining separate but related web sites in four countries. The sites are high-volume properties, reflecting both the loyalty and enthusiasm of the Cunard customer base and their high-profile role in generating revenue. Events such as new ship launches create massive spikes in traffic.
One of the annual marketing tactics is the construction and integration of a World Voyage mini-site, providing detailed information on voyage itineraries and pricing. The visitor can select points of departure and arrival by date, resulting in the display of an itinerary and fares. All of this information is controlled by Cunard staff by means of Quicksilver’s content management system, which has been customized to meet the requirements of the cruise industry.
Kaplan Financial
Usability Review – multiple sites
Success in e-commerce is found in the details as well as in the grand design. It’s important to know who your site visitors are, and construct accordingly – and sometimes even more important to take the friction out of online processes so that visitors can complete them quickly. Kaplan, a leading provider of financial services training products, engaged Quicksilver to assess the usability of ecommerce-related product pages, and to recommend detailed adjustments.
Using a set of heuristics, we reviewed the usability of the shopping cart process, which included extensive product information pages. We then redesigned page elements and processes and delivered a detailed style book that Kaplan teams could apply across multiple ecommerce sites.
Transfusion Management Services
Transfusion Management, a long-time Quicksilver client, provides blood bank management and consulting services to major health care institutions nationwide. Apart from demonstrating a recently updated look and feel, this compact, 10-page site illustrates the value that our web content management solution, QuickFlex.NET, provides even for a limited number of pages. The company is able to update content elements such as news, regulatory changes, or new clients and testimonials without having to call us. The site is hosted within our secure data center.
Women’s Business Development Center (WBDC)
The Women’s Business Development Center (WBDC) is the largest and most successful organization of its kind in the United States. The size of the site, and a busy calendar of events from regular workshops to the annual conference, make frequent site updates essential.
WBDC asked Quicksilver to create a more contemporary and feminine design, working with an existing brand that includes a strong color palette. Based on user research, we also restructured the site to serve several distinct audiences, and integrated a content management system (CMS) solution, QuickFlex.NET. The site also integrates with an existing event registration system and shopping cart.
The result is a site that is readily expandable, and oriented to the most important audiences. WBDC staff manage daily updates to features such as the Events Calendar, FAQs, the Newsroom, and Links Collections.
Take Control of Your Site
QuickFlex.NET™ Content Management System (CMS)
Quicksilver’s content management system (CMS) puts you in control of site content. Without needing design or programming skills, you can edit text or images instantly. You can also schedule a news item to go live on a specific date, manage your ad banners and embed a PDF or a video for site visitors to download.
You can even manage meta data to improve your visibility to search engines.
QuickFlex.NET provides you with all this capability, and more. Built during the dotcom era and progressively updated, it’s scalable. This means that the size of the site does not affect performance, and there’s no limit to the number of users. And with QuickFlex, site maintenance is EASY.
So if you like the idea of lower site maintenance costs and increased control of your online information, call us for a demonstration.
Here is a partial list of QuickFlex.NET features:
- Content management
- Contact management
- Click-through management
- Newsroom
- Forms management
- Banner management
- Events Calendar
- Links Management
Flash Animation
Adobe claims that its Flash Player is now the world’s most pervasive software platform, reaching “99% of Internet-enabled desktops in mature markets” (which includes the U.S.). Since the Web is a visual and interactive medium, Flash has become increasingly valuable for emphasizing messages and creating visual appeal, without interfering with the core mission of your website. As in the case of The Life of a Tooth, illustrated on this page, Flash also provides a rich interactive option for organizing focused content.
Academy of General Dentistry (AGD)
Quicksilver planned and designed a completely new consumer education site for the Academy of General Dentistry (AGD), a large membership organization that historically had a low profile among the consumer audience. In line with raising their profile, AGD wanted to make the site engaging and interactive, and asked us to include a message-based Flash animation on the home page.
This animation ended up doing double duty, as it was then extended with additional images, messaging and sound and offered to AGD members for their offices – another tactic to promote awareness of www.knowyourteeth.com.
The Life of a Tooth
As part of a new consumer website rich in oral health information, the Academy of General Dentistry (AGD) decided to create an interactive timeline about tooth development and dental care. The information had to be organized by stages of life, and support the overall educational emphasis of the site.
Timelines are typically envisioned as moving from left to right along a line. However, the rapidly expanding possibilities for animation provided by Flash enabled us to propose a more ‘interesting’ approach to the application. Instead of asking the visitor to simply scroll from left to right, we created movement from foreground into the background – ‘zooming forwards or backwards according to the stage of life that is chosen from the menu. In addition to the menu, the stages of life are visually represented by collages of silhouettes that move forward or back. Information about teeth and how to care for them in each age group reside on a semi-transparent, scrolling layer in the application.
This interactive Flash module reinforces the AGD goal of presenting dry information in an engaging and interactive format, so that consumers will regard the new site as a useful destination that they will return to as an information resource.
Cunard
For many years, Quicksilver has been on retainer to Cunard as the company’s primary Web services agency. During that time, we have built and maintained separate but related web sites in four countries. The sites are high-volume properties, reflecting both the loyalty and enthusiasm of the Cunard customer base and their high-profile role in generating revenue. Events such as new ship launches create massive spikes in traffic.
New Flash animations are one of the ways in which the sites are regularly refreshed, either for the main landing page, or to introduce a major section of a site or a mini-site. This example promoted specific voyages to Cunard's UK audience.
Flash Applications
Flash has developed from a utility for creating Web animations into a powerful set of tools that has appeal to programmers as well as designers. It features a robust programming language, ActionScript, and an extremely compact file format, and provides a rich layer of programmability on top of the Web environment. It can accept user input, process business logic, communicate with the server, and then redraw the screen. Of course, it also has the ability to function as a stand-alone application, such as an interactive training program. On this page you will find several varied examples of Flash applications developed by Quicksilver’s experienced team.
Interactive Deck Plans
For many years, Quicksilver has been on retainer to Cunard as the cruise company’s primary Web services agency. During that time, we have built and maintained separate but related marketing web sites in four countries, including extensive customization of our web content management system (CMS) for the cruise industry.
We have also created applications to support these sites, including the interactive deck plans module illustrated here. Flash-based deck plans are an excellent way to make sense of the complexity of large modern cruise ships such as the Queen Mary 2 and the Queen Elizabeth.
Dental Diary
When the Academy of General Dentistry (AGD) built www.knowyourteeth.com, a new, information-rich site for consumers, it looked for ways to keep site visitors connected over time. The main draw is the extensive information AGD maintains on oral health and dental health topics. The Dental Diary is one of the tactics we came up with for making consumer access to this information easy and engaging.
The Dental Diary is a small but complex application with a Flash interface – a desktop widget that visitors can download from the site (in either PC or Mac versions) and install on their desktop. The ideal location is the family’s computer desktop, since families with children are an important target audience. Like all widgets, it can be set to launch each time the host computer is turned on, providing reminders of upcoming dental and non-dental appointments for every member of the family.
Besides this useful function, however, the compact widget interface also provides easy links back to the consumer website. Users can use the widget to search the site by keyword, or link to the table of contents of articles. A teaser on the article of the week is also pushed to the widget by an RSS feed.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
It used to be that search engine optimization (SEO) was a mysterious discipline requiring close attention to changes in search engine rules and manual submission to engines and directories. The SEO frontier is calmer now (especially since the ‘all Google all the time’ era began!) and search has become a real business. It’s generally understood now that the foundation of good organic search results includes a well-constructed site, excellent page content (excellent from the perspective of the site visitor), consistent use of metadata in titles, alt tags, links, etc., thoughtful linking within the site and to/from other relevant sites, and regular reviews and adjustments.
SEO is one of those disciplines where Rome can’t be built in a day. But done consistently, it is possible to move up to a high ranking, as this example for the Yachts of Seabourn SEO program illustrates.