This multi-national company needed a complete brand identity to help establish them as a serious entry in the industrial and fleet fuel additives market. The logo was designed to be used on everything from pellet packages to 55 gallon drums of industrial fuel additives. Bob worked closely with the principals of the company to create a successful brand and to develop a branding guide to keep the brand use strong and consistent. To get started with your branding or re-branding, please fill out our request form or call us at 603-924-1978.

This hi-tech custom machinery company wanted to improve its image as an innovative designer of custom automation and machinery. Bob provided a design that helped create a strong, clean and accurate image for the company, all the while working well within their limited budget. To see what FirstTracks can do for you image, use our contact request or call us at 603-924-1978 and we’ll be happy to help you build a successful brand or create a memorable logo to help start your business out on the right foot.

Nashua Community College in Nashua NH needed a new website that would make it easier for them to reach more prospective students while also serving their existing students with more current information. CC Stephens & Co. contracted FirstTracks Marketing group to take on this project because they needed a development and design partner with the technical know how and experience to achieve the high level communication and development goals of the project.

The Solution:

Working directly with the Director of Communications and the Web Development Specialist for Nashua Community College we developed a plan to meet all of their online needs. Our approach was to build the site using Joomla, the easy to use content management system. For this project Joomla fit our needs perfectly because of it’s easy to learn user controls and highly customizable database structures. Nashua Community College’s challenge with their previous site was that all their course information for every term was locked away in PDF files. To drastically increase the digital footprint for Nashua Community College (NCC) and make their website more useful to visitors while being easier to manage, FirstTracks Marketing Group developed a custom admin component that allows NCC to upload and maintain all of their course schedules with one click AND make all of that information 100% searchable and indexable by ALL search engines. This drastically increased the NCC digital footprint and SEO rankings for all of their content.

Project Features:

• Database import function for uploading and managing all current and upcoming course information
• Basic and advanced course search functions to make it easy to access all course information
• Global search functions that allow users to quickly pull content from ANY area of the site
• Events calendar database dynamically integrated with multiple areas of site, fully searchable and enhanced with JQuery presentation elements
• News and PR database dynamically integrated with multiple areas of the site, fully searchable and configured with social sharing tools
• All elements of new site feature complete search engine optimization (search engine friendly URLs, meta keyword and description tags, and custom page titles)
• Joomla Content Management System runs all content editing and management tools making it simple to edit and grow all site content
• Vastly improved design created and implemented by FirstTracks Marketing Group to make all user experience more efficient and useful
• Completely integrated tracking and analytics for all areas of NCC site using Google Analytics package

The Result:

NCC’s new website has produced a HUGE increase in visitor retention stats. Over the past year the half million visitors to their previous website would only view an average of 2 pages or less before leaving the site. This is a good indication that people didn’t see a reason to stick around, that there wasn’t much for them and it was hard to find what they needed. Since the site has gone live we have increased that number to an average of 8 pages per visit! This signals a vast increase in visitor retention and improved usability based upon the database and design improvements. We are very pleased with the initial results and look forward to the growth and success NCC will have with their new website.

Partner with FirstTracks for Your New Website

Could your business or organization benefit from being able to publish, manage, and manipulate your digital footprint? YOU BET IT CAN, AND WE CAN PROVE IT! We can guarantee you that you will be amazed at how much functionality and flexibility we can provide even with the tightest of budgets. Why not fill out our online request form and find out for yourself, or better yet give us a call at 603-924-1978 right now and ask us. We look forward to hearing from you!

So where’s your brand at?

What’s your promise and what tactics do you think will get you, your products and your company to the next century? At FirstTracks Marketing Group we help companies answer these questions by starting with the STRATEGY. Let’s get together and talk STRATEGY. Call us at 1-603-924-1978 or fill out our online form.

In early 2010 Northeast Delta Dental issued a public request for proposals to redesign and implement a new website for their organization, and selected the FirstTracks website development team for the job. This project had some unique aspects to it, the largest of which was their choice of Kentico for their content management platform. The other main unique aspect of this project was their current market position. Northeast Delta Dental is the largest provider of dental insurance to the northern New England region and maintains a marketshare of over 80%. This made our website design and implementation focus on the user experience. We worked very closely with employees from all areas of the organization to ensure the new website would deliver a user experience that would be organized, concise, and properly tailored to each of their primary audience targets that include Patients, Employers, Providers, and Producers.

Project Highlights:

• Homepage design that features an edit ability and an integrated JQuery slider component
• Global Site Search
• Vastly improved content organization
• All new wrapper template design
• Complete Kentico CMS integration and training
• Custom workflow training and organization
• All page content formatted for optimum SEO performance
• Social media sharing tool integration on all article content

The Solution:

Northeast Delta Dental is known for their exemplary customer service and they felt it was time to up the ante with their online customer service by revamping their website. The new website now features a very distinct audience division within their main navigation structure. This makes it easy for each visitor type to find what they are looking for. Very bold and prominent navigation elements complete the design by making it simple to subscribe to email and RSS updates and to login to secure portal management areas. The new website also features social media integration with Facebook and Twitter feeds embedded into the homepage. These improvements have created a site for Northeast Delta Dental that is accessible, optimized, and serves their audiences more effectively.

This new website is operating on the Kentico Content Management System (CMS) platform. Kentico is a relatively new player on the CMS scene and is a very robust system that features the best workflow management tool structure we have ever seen. Kentico is quickly gaining significant market share and is currently being used by some heavy hitters such as Gibson Guitars, McDonalds, and ESPN. The Kentico platform is a perfect fit for Northeast Delta Dental because it runs in ASP.NET and features a multi-user management tool and customized editing controls that are second to none. FirstTracks worked hand-in-hand with the Northeast Delta Dental staff to get the most out of the Kentico CMS platform. Since the launch of the site the reception has been extremely positive and the staff is having a blast with all the new control and flexibility.

Partner with FirstTracks for Your New Website

Could your business or organization benefit from being able to publish, manage, and manipulate your digital footprint? YOU BET IT CAN, AND WE CAN PROVE IT! We can guarantee you that you will be amazed at how much functionality and flexibility we can provide even with the tightest of budgets. Why not fill out our online request form and find out for yourself, or better yet, give us a call at 603-924-1978 right now and ask us. We look forward to hearing from you!

Kim Peck approached FirstTracks about developing a new website for her photography business. Her previous site was splintered into a few different pieces. She had an HTML version of her site for slow connections, a full Flash version of her site, AND a separate blog on blogspot which had no connection with her main website. There was no integration between any of the individual pieces which made it very difficult for her site visitors to get what they needed and it made the whole presentation feel clunky. Our challenge was to create a whole new website experience that would revolve around all the outstanding photographic work that Kim does and make it super easy for her to integrate and relate all her content together in one place to improve her search engine optimization and online reach potential.

The Solution

FirstTracks built Kim a brand new site using the open source CMS WordPress. WordPress was the perfect fit for what Kim wanted to achieve because it’s easy for her to edit and manage her content and now all her photos are searchable and accessible in one location. From a content prospective alone this is a huge upgrade for her business. Now Kim can post new samples to portfolio galleries that she maintains and updates AND will dynamically reference blog postings and event news that are related to that content based on the tags she gives to it! With this extension of her digital footprint it is much easier for Kim to grow her photography business. More content being indexed by search engines means more ways for prospective clients to find her business.

Other Project Highlights:

• Cu3er Image Rotation on homepage (completely editable via admin panel)
• Custom contact form creation (unlimited form creation possibilities via included plugin)
• Custom navigation both in global and sidebars (using theme features and WordPress 3.0)
• Custom footer design with integrated Facebook fan module
• Fully-trackable social sharing links added to all blog posts (using ShareThis application)
• Complete SEO and tracking package using Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools
• Integrated with 3rd party proof system to allow for password protected review of client photos and online ordering

Partner with FirstTracks for Your New Website

Could your business or organization benefit from being able to publish, manage, and manipulate your digital footprint? YOU BET IT CAN, AND WE CAN PROVE IT! We can guarantee you that you will be amazed at how much functionality and flexibility we can provide even with the tightest of budgets. Why not fill out our online request form and find out for yourself, or better yet give us a call at 603-924-1978, right now and ask us. We look forward to hearing from you!

Spreading the word

As we leave the farm each week the farmer always tells us to “tell our friends” and “spread the good word” and we are more than happy to do so, but they could be initiating and facilitating these types of recommendations and communications on a daily basis using free tools like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. There is no shortage of community connection tools available to businesses these days. They can use these free tools to generate conversation and equity for their brand of service or product. The numbers to support this are there! Facebook just recently passed Google and the most frequented web destination in North America boasting a user base well over 400 million (and growing) that on average spends about 20 minutes PER DAY on the site. That’s online engagement time that you will be hard pressed to find anywhere else.

I’ve heard this before. Tell me what it means for me.

For farmers in NH (or anywhere else for that matter) what it means for you is this…..you need to get a decent website and you need to start talking and engaging your customers online. Create yourself a Facebook account, set up a business page for your farm and then link those elements to your website that needs to have a form mechanism for customers to contact you about your products and services. If it was my farm, having both of those elements in place I would notify all of my customers that I would be providing them at least the following each week:

• Weekly updates as to what’s going to be available for shares
• Recipe Suggestions and Links to coincide with the available veggies that week
• Post weekly specials on your Facebook Business Page to entice more people to “like” your products/service
• Offer specials for people who sign up for your email updates

These simple tasks completed on a regular basis will help to build awareness of your services. It will make it very easy for all your customers using social media tools such as Facebook to be able to recommend your product and your content to all of their friends. Best of all every time people engage with your information and content online that activity and data is cataloged in all major search engines creating even more opportunity for your business to be found by more and more people.

Sound interesting to you? Not sure how to get started?

That’s where FirstTracks Marketing Group comes in! We are on top of all the new and current social media applications and we know how to use them properly to generate success for your business. We can help you set up Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare or Linkedin. You name it and we can help you develop a strategy for it. Give our office in Peterborough NH a call at 603-924-1978 or fill out our request form to get started. We look forward to hearing from you soon!