Smiley Media is an industry leader in connecting advertisers and publishers through a proprietary ad matching service.

The new company site will feature custom tools for managing key content throughout the site.

Andrew Hamlin
Information Architect
White Lion Internet Agency

GO AMO!

Located in the US Northwest, the company is committed to providing their clients with the highest level of service.  The new website will extend that commitment while also promoting their high level of experience, professionalism, and personal care.

The site will feature easy-to-use content management tools to update content (e.g. recent specials).

Andrew Hamlin
Information Architect
White Lion Internet Agency

The resulting site will feature a complete re-branding of the site, coupled with easy-to-use online tools for updating key content (e.g. properties, news, etc.) throughout the site.

Andrew Hamlin
Information Architect
White Lion Internet Agency

Their focus has always centered around providing exceptional personalized customer service coupled with discounted pricing comparable with much larger office supply stores.

As such, they tasked White Lion with the need to develop a new website that would promote their differences to prospective clients, while also providing useful information for existing customers too.

The new site features special offers (e.g. coupons and promotions) that can be easily edited by the Daniel Office Products team as needed.  The site also features a seamless login to their online shopping application.

Andrew Hamlin
Information Architect
White Lion Internet Agency

6th Street Billboard

I thought it had good placement for a billboard relative to the amount of party traffic exiting 6th Street on any weekend evening.

Taking a step back, a good billboard should relay the intended message in a couple of seconds…max.

The DWI billboard reminded me of the importance of good home page design. Home page graphics and supporting text should work together to give visitors — who often only give nanoseconds of attention — a clear understanding of what solution the website delivers.

At White Lion, we run every project through a myriad of checkpoints — including ways we can shave cognitive overhead and deliver a fluid and intuitive experience.

Does your home page meet the “billboard test?” Let’s talk about it.

Steve C. Kahle
Managing Principal
White Lion Internet Agency

White Lion’s goal was to learn about what competitors were doing, and to engineer and develop a better interactive tool that would earn Photo Affections greater market share in the industry. Through hundreds of hours of research, planning, testing and usability experiments, White Lion was able to develop the Preview Tool you see on the web site today. Not only did this Preview Tool add instant gratification for Photo Affections’ customers, but it also provided a higher level of accuracy in order fulfillment. Unlike the previous arrangement, Photo Affections is now able to see a proof of exactly what customers want. The proofing techniques ensure the product delivered meets or exceeds customers’ expectations. This is what separates Photo Affections from the competition. Photo Affections takes great pride in delivering a quality product and, unlike many competitors, takes additional steps prior to production to inspect and fine-tune the quality of customers’ photos.

In addition to the front-end Preview Tool, White Lion also developed a fully-dynamic back-end management interface through which Photo Affections can manage products. Our innovative system made the process of adding new products, as well as managing existing products, very simple. From product categories to fonts, text areas to image hotspots, Photo Affections is able to manage every aspect of what has grown to be an extensive photo card template library.

After much success with the new Preview Tool, it soon became apparent that Photo Affections needed to further maximize processes and efficiency to keep up with growing numbers of orders and new products. Once again, Photo Affections and White Lion worked together to engineer and develop a new system to directly import product templates and designs from production software applications into the website. This process ultimately replaced the need for the initial back-end management interface, but offered a new level of speed and automation that boosted productivity.

Taking things one step further, White Lion and Photo Affections began brainstorming ideas for how to make the process of getting a customer’s design from an online order to finished product more efficient. Due to Photo Affections’ pride in pre-production quality assurance, and sometimes personally communicating with customers, they were cautious about over-automating the process. Photo Affections strongly believes personal touch and quality assurance adds to a superior product and customers value that fact. Taking this into consideration, White Lion was able to develop a system through which orders get automatically exported from the Web-based system to the local production software environment. This allows Photo Affections to fulfill a higher volume of orders, while still maintaining valuable quality control processes.

As a result of the new additions White Lion has developed, Photo Affections’ sales have increased approximately 30% year-to-date. The Photo Affections team is now able to operate with fewer resources than ever before. Considering the condition of the economy over the past twelve months, a 30% increase in sales was a feat that could only be hoped for originally, but that has become a reality.

It was only through hours of dedication, research, testing and development by both parties that this was possible. White Lion is truly ecstatic with the outcome and we value the relationship we’ve established with Photo Affections. We’re looking forward to even further expansion and development in the near future. Our team has worked hard to position Photo Affections as the industry leader through innovative web design and development. I personally look forward to expanding beyond the Preview Tool and back-end tools, and redesigning the entire site in 2010.

To see the Preview Tool in action, try following this link and clicking on the “Click Here to Begin!” button!

Justin Rankin
Project Manager
White Lion Internet Agency

After we stitched the pictures together, we finally realized what Andrew was doing in the background.

Besides our great looks, we are also very passionate about complex Web design and development.

We look forward to hearing about your next project, so drop us a line when you want The A-Team!

Steve C. Kahle
Managing Principal
White Lion Internet Agency

Recently, the website for FRS Energy Drink was passed around our office which opened a discussion on the site’s pros and cons.

While this site deserves accolades for its design, there are a few areas in which it falls short and for which it would never make it out of the White Lion doors as a finished product.

1) Search Engine Visibility - Each page of the site is comprised of three flash (.swf) files which causes the content of each page to be relatively invisible to search engines. Ideally, the content of each page would be semantically marked up with XHTML rendering it visible and relevant to search engine spiders. As it is now, the spiders that crawl each page for search engines have only the META data to feed on resulting in repetitious and consequently less than ideal information about each page’s meaning and content. Think: “How come when I search for ‘Low Cal Wild Berry’ its page doesn’t come up?”

2) Lack of Navigation Marking - When you are on any given page of the site, that page is not marked in the navigation. This is how users orient themselves within the site, and is an integral part of a site’s architecture. Think: “What page am I on? I’m lost. This site stinks.”

3) The Content is Not Accessible - Harkening back to point #1, the content of this site resides solely within flash files making viewers other than modern web browsers unable to read it. This means that screen readers (used by individuals with vision difficulties and impairments) can’t read it. This means you can’t see it on your PDA/Phone. This means your printer can’t print it, not to mention those poor Google robots eager to learn about the health benefits of FRS. Think: “Why can’t I see this site on my iPhone?”

In closing, I should point out that the drink itself is surprisingly decent tasting considering all of the amazing things it apparently has in it.

John Hull
Project Engineer
White Lion Internet Agency

More than 42,000 people rely on Aqua Water Supply Corporation to provide water and waste water for home, farms and ranches in the fertile area of east Central Texas.

We will certainly be updating the look and feel of their web presence, but the new site will also be tasked with helping their customers stay up to date on the latest news and events and provide an easier method to pay their bills.

Andrew Hamlin
Information Architect
White Lion Internet Agency