Small town business are at the heart of our client base. When Bippus State Bank, a Huntington-based bank in northeast Indiana, said they needed a refresh, we were excited to work with them! Their long history and commitment to their community in Huntington, Roanoke, and Manchester, Indiana is laudable. In a time when banks merge with each other to gain profits, BSB stays independent and local.

One thing was clear – BSB needed and wanted a content management system so they could be in control of their content. Instead of editing static HTML in Dreamweaver, we upgraded them to ExpressionEngine, a PHP-based CMS complete with CSS styling to promote a consistent, modern look and feel, with beautiful, bold typography.

Beautifully styled tables with easy-to-update rates and product matrices.

Some other great features:

• Special content types for bank and ATM locations, that dynamically interact with Google Maps to provide custom directions. This increases the scalability and longevity of the site, as BSB expands and adds locations and ATMs.
• Specially-styled rate tables that display interest rates, product matrices, and structured information in a consistent and easy-to-read manner.
• A Javascript rotating banner and promotion carousel on the homepage, so BSB can constantly display new and refreshed information.
• A restyled portal to their online banking system — allowing customers to login from the homepage without interrupting their user experience.

We’re glad we can help the great staff at Bippus State Bank take control of their content and stay on the leading edge with their website.

Check out their site at BippusBank.com! And click below to see some additional screenshots from Bippus Bank’s website.

We had the opportunity to help them create their first website. When we built it out in ExpressionEngine, we knew they needed some strong photography, clear messaging and a straightforward navigation. We did just that. With simple, easy language, vivid pictures and bold primary colors, they emanate stability, rationality and friendliness; all the staples of a good insurance agency.

Be sure to find the automatically updated articles posted via Trusted Choice, an authorizing agency for independent insurance agents, and a custom “Meet the Team” page that expands contact information for each of their agents and staff!

Check them out!

Some screengrabs:

We recently had the privilege of creating the website for Fort Wayne Trails, a brand-new nonprofit in the Fort Wayne area that fundraises and advocates for this extensive trail system. Merged from three separate nonprofits: Aboite New Trails, the Greenway Consortium, and Northwest Allen County Trails; Fort Wayne Trails has the unique challenge of working with the Fort Wayne and Allen County governments in building these trails and raising public awareness.

So when we got the chance to create Fort Wayne Trails’ website, we jumped at the chance.

Because of the widespread community support, Fort Wayne Trails has some great partners in the community. One Lucky Guitar, a groundbreaking local marketing and design boutique (with some of the best work coming out of Fort Wayne), created the brand identity and print collateral for the Trails. Read about the design process on OLG’s blog, The Dial, here and here.

Working closely with the FWT Promotions Committee, we took a design created by designers on the committee, tweaked it a bit, and adapted it to fit with ExpressionEngine, our CMS of choice.

Some great features to note:

• A “Photos” page, aggregating pictures from a predefined set in FWT’s Flickr account
• A rotating slider on the homepage, displaying photos and messages set by the client
• Popovers with explanations of the many uses of the trails, with icons ingeniously created by One Lucky Guitar
• A made-from-scratch mapping functionality that overlays Google Maps’ KML files over a map. Users can turn each layer one and off, depending on what they want to route
• Blogging functionality
• Events calendar

While FWT’s outdoor events on the trails are on hold until the weather gets warmer, they’re hard at work, planning, coordinating, raising money, and making sure as many people as possible are connected to each other and points of attraction!

Why don’t you go over to their new website and take a look at who they are and what they do! And if you are able, please consider giving a gift of support — every penny they raise goes to a great cause!

This is only the beginning of our work with Fort Wayne Trails. While we can’t get into our future plans, stay tuned!

Visit Fort Wayne Trails, Inc: fwtrails.org

Our designers have been talking a lot about responsive web design, a concept we became excited about after reading A Book Apart‘s book on Responsive Web Design. On their website, they quote John Allsopp’s article, “A Dao of Web Design“:

The control which designers know in the print medium, and often desire in the web medium, is simply a function of the limitation of the printed page. We should embrace the fact that the web doesn’t have the same constraints, and design for this flexibility. But first, we must “accept the ebb and flow of things.”

Basically, he calls for an end to thinking of a website as an extension of a static, print brochure, and acknowledged that web traffic is trending to a higher percentage of mobile browsers. So many websites that are “optimized for mobile” are pieced together, as a stripped-down afterthought to a desktop browser-width site.

Responsive design changes that. A responsive website designs a layout for a desktop/laptop, tablet, and mobile browser alongside each other, and uses media queries to determine what type of browser is loading the site. Best yet, it’s a fluid, dynamic layout. If you resize the window in your desktop browser, it will reorder and rescale in front of your eyes. (Click the website screengrab and try for yourself! If you make the window narrower, you can see how it scales and reorders information.

If you scale the Jeffrey-Mohr website smaller, you can see how the header image, slow-loading on a browser running on 3G, switches out, and the phone number displays more prominently on the screen. And if your mobile browser is a phone, the phone number becomes clickable so you can call their office right from the website.

This is the future of web design. We’re making a commitment to make as many of our web projects as responsive as we can to give a site longevity. Right now, we’re at the forefront of this technology, and we hope that more in the industry will follow. We’ll be talking more and more about responsive design here.

Meanwhile, we’re excited to launch this site! If you ever need a dentist in the Van Wert Area, go meet Dr. Jessica Mohr. She’s friendly, gentle, and community driven. Cruise on by her and her father’s website, whether on your desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone, and check them out!

We just launched the Ideal Suburban Homes site yesterday, and we’re all very excited to see it in action! It’s one of the most detailed sites we’ve done yet.

Utilizing the power of the Expression Engine content management system (our CMS of choice), we wanted to make sure we had an attractive, functional website for this organization that makes and sells attractive, functional homes.

Ideal Homes has built more than 35 communities around northeast Indiana, and is unrivaled in their craftmanship, style and stability. They came to us wanting a system with highly-connected relationship matrix for its data: Realtors, prices, floorplans, locations, communities, and more. On top of that, they needed something highly visual with an eye-catching design. We got our good friend Matt at Matt Ayers Photography to take some amazing snapshots of these homes.

A sampling of the features of this site:

• Filter homes by number of bedrooms, bathrooms, price, square footage, and more
• View homes in a list or a map
• News and events listings
• FAQ page for current or soon-to-be homeowners
• A detailed testimonial page and the ability to submit your own, and reference your home community and/or realtor
• A payment calculator
• Share homes, communities and floor plans via email or social network
• Get agent information from the house pages

One of our favorite functionalities is the banner that pops down when you click the “View our Communities” button at the top. Sometimes we just sit at our desks and click it. Try it out for yourself!

IMAGE GALLERY:

New Look Exteriors, Inc., is a new company in Geneva, IN with a lot of experience behind it. They are the undisputed masters of exterior protection for homes and commercial buildings. Siding, gutters, windows — you name it. They’ll make your building beautiful while offering protection from the elements.

We realized that we had our work cut out for us: we wanted their brand to look as good as their products. We had to build siding for their website, if you will.

This needed to be a cost-effective project, but we delivered the full package — business identity and a website. The strong greens with the bold, easy-to-read typography compliments the gorgeous photography of homes and businesses adorned with their product.

Check out their website here!

Have you ever been to Berne? It’s a beautiful community, just 30 miles south of Fort Wayne, with just less than five thousand residents. With a strong Swiss heritage, Berne’s economy is on the rise, a tall accomplishment in today’s economic climate!

When we were creating this website, we knew we had to capture the rich, Swiss feeling. And without the Alps nearby to provide a good landscape, we looked toward the city.

The beautiful new 120-foot tall clock tower in Muensterberg Plaza greets visitors to the site, adorned with the iconic black bear in the Berne seal. And we captured the new with the old, combining rich primary colors from the mid-western European palette with strong modern web textures.

Head on over to their website, and be sure to check out the video about Swiss Days — it makes us hungry for an apple dumpling.

Recently, we were honored with the opportunity to work with Wells County, Indiana’s Chamber of Commerce to redesign their website. The Wells County Economic Development Commission, whose site we’ve done previously, took notice and talked with us about a refresh.

We love Wells County. Not only are they primed to be a regional economic force (being so close to Fort Wayne International Airport) with a diverse and dynamic industry base, but their motto rings true: Where ideas and success converge. So, naturally, we jumped at the chance to get involved!

Check out their site for more information about Wells County. Notice the clean, green, blue and white color scheme. Explore this top-to-bottom customized website, built on a dynamic ExpressionEngine content management system. We truly believe its custom functionality truly reflects the diversity and vibrancy of Wells County.

Check out a few other page designs below, or check out their website!

J & R Products, Inc. came to us for a revamp of their existing ProductCart site. We added a sleek new design and upgraded their version of ProductCart to enhance usability for the end user and manageability for J & R Products, Inc. The end result was a modern e-commerce site with easy access to all the products J & R Products, Inc. has to offer.

Check out the site.

District 79 State Representative Matt Lehman needed a website to make him more accessible to the general public. We designed a new site for him to discuss his stance on various issues, publicize events, offer volunteer opportunities, and give people the opportunity to learn more about him and his campaign. We also placed the site in ExpressionEngine, so that Matt could easily edit the site himself to stay current with the latest issues and events.

Check out the site.