PowerUp!

Cudos!, an awards and gifts store, recently received recognition from the Augusta Metro Chamber Commerce as the Small Business of the Year. Powerserve congratulates Audrey Snuggs, Sloane Wiggins, and all of the Cudos! staff on this achievement.

Chamber honors Cudos! as small business of the year

Visit the Cudos! website: http://www.cudos2u.com

Last year’s recipient was R.W. Allen LLC, another great client of ours.

The Lydia Project is a non-profit organization that provides free services anywhere in the world to women facing cancer. This support includes a handmade tote made by the loving hands of volunteers and filled with encouraging items as well as correspondence and encouragement every month for at least a year.

In 2006, we designed The Lydia Project website after they won the Powerserve Extreme Website Makeover Contest conducted on WAFJ, a local Christian radio station in Augusta. The new site and its content management system aided Lydia’s growth and expanded their reach around the world. However, after meeting with the organization’s leaders in the summer of 2009, we realized the website needed to do a better job of communicating their mission. From the homepage, Lydia wanted visitors to easily request services, get involved, watch their video, read their newsletter, make a donation, and view their faith sponsors. Powerserve accepted the challenge and delivered what we believe is a great redesign that enhances the mission of this worthwhile organization.

TheLydiaProject.org - 2006

The New TheLydiaProject.org

Visit The Lydia Project website: http://thelydiaproject.org

The New TrinityontheHill.net

The new Trinity on the Hill website is the culmination of a successful multi-phased website project. Powerserve’s first task was to empower the Trinity staff, giving them total control over their website content. Once that part of the project was completed, we would then develop an updated design along with a more intuitive navigation structure for the site.

Content Management Solutions have dramatically changed the way organizations maintain their websites. Rather than be tied to the traditional client/webmaster model in which you’d send your update requests to a web developer who might take days to turn them around, modern CMS’s are easy to use and allow you to update your site using any computer with an Internet connection. But don’t be intimidated by the thought of maintaining your own site. Many CMS’s, like Powerserve’s Web Site Accelerator, are designed with usability in mind. If you have clerical skills, you can maintain your own site!

Following the migration of Trinity’s content from a static HTML framework to Powerserve’s Web Site Accelerator, the next step was to develop a brilliant new design for the church. Using their new logo as the starting point for our creative process, one of Powerserve’s design leads was able to craft a new concept that really enhanced Trinity’s brand image online. Then we reorganized the content under a new navigation structure that was more visitor-centric. Church members are better served by being able to access the information they need, while new visitors find the site to be the first source to look for information about Trinity on the Hill.

Visit the Trinity on the Hill website: http://www.trinityonthehill.net

Smith & Smith Attorneys

You may remember the blog article we posted, “Not Your Typical Lawyer Site,” which profiled Smith & Smith Attorneys, a family law practice in Augusta, Georgia. The ladies at Smith & Smith came back to Powerserve with a new goal; they wanted to take the new site to the next level and start driving some organic web traffic to it. Powerserve recommended a locally targeted search engine optimization campaign.

Zeroing in on a local search engine market can be extremely cost effective as compared to a national or global campaign. (National or global campaigns can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on the competitive landscape of the targeted key words and phrases). It can also produce very quick results, sometimes taking just a couple of weeks (although, there are no guarantees)! And often times local businesses will find that their competitors are pretty easy to beat in the rankings because their sites may not even be standards compliant, much less search engine optimized.

Our initial analysis of SmithandSmithAttorneysAugusta.com confirmed our suspicion—that the site seemed to be buried in the website rankings by a lot of other sites that, frankly, were winning the search engine game only because no one else was playing. Our first clue was the abundance of directories—not competitors’ websites—that were scoring above Smith & Smith in the rankings; these sites typically score well due to the abundance of semi-relevant content they aggregate. They can also be unseated in their search engine rankings by developing highly relevant content and by using some key SEO techniques.

The end result? SmithandSmithAttorneysAugusta.com jumped from page 6 of the Google search results to the second position on page 1! So anybody who searches the web for family law practices in Augusta, Georgia should arrive at the Smith & Smith Attorney’s website straight away, which also means that their phones are ringing a lot more!

The New SmithandSmithAttorneysAugusta.com

Smith & Smith Attorneys came to PowerServe through a referral from one of our clients. They were informed that if anyone can design an atypical lawyer website it was us. We wanted to avoid the typical cliches: Lady Justice, scales, gavels, etc. The ladies at Smith & Smith gave us the creative latitude to be unorthodox and adventurous with the design – “chic” was a word heard often – but it still needed to be professional.

Family Law is a very sensitive practice area. Smith & Smith Attorneys often come to know their clients during one of the most difficult times of their lives – the end of their marriage. PowerServe decided to focus on the personality of the law firm rather than the particular aspect of the law that they practiced. The atmosphere of the firm is really very different; a warm and inviting environment designed to make clients feel comfortable and at ease. The challenge for PowerServe was that the website needed to reflect the character of the Smith & Smith practice. The jury is in and they’ve ruled in our favor!

I would certainly say that your company was able to capture the essence of who we are as a firm and to convey that message to potential clients who will view our site. We wanted a non-traditional site that would express our personalities and show who we are both as people and as professionals. Your company provided consultation with us to understand our message and recommended a photographer who was able to capture our personalities on film. We could not be more happy with the services we received. Thank you for a job well done.Beth Ann Smith, Smith & Smith Attorneys

Visit Smith & Smith Attorneys at http://smithandsmithattorneysaugusta.com

The New SuperheatFGH.com

Superheat FGH is the premier industrial heat treatment service provider in North America. As PowerServe worked with Superheat we began to realize that rather than being a high-tech welding company, they are actually a technology company that deploys its expertise in the construction industry. Needless to say PowerServe discovered a kindred spirit Superheat right away.

Doing business with the likes of Bechtel, Fluor, Chevron Texaco, ExxonMobile, and many others, as well as having plans to expand into Europe, Superheat FGH needed a professional site that reflected the innovative nature of their process and company. Their previous site wasn’t meeting their needs, and they wanted a solution where they could easily edit content in-house. By creating a custom design and setting them up on our WebSite Accelerator CMS, we enabled them to manage everything on their site without having to know markup.

Gary Lewis, Superheat’s website project lead and Business Development Manager, had this to say about the project:

PowerServe was tremendous to work with. Their creative energy and design expertise allowed us to expand on our brand with a fresh, progressive, comprehensive, and very professional looking website. It was important that the site maintain functional simplicity yet incorporate more advanced technical capability for seamless visitor interaction, routine updates, improvements and navigability to important related sites as a resource to our employees and those on the outside wishing to expand their knowledge base.Gary Lewis, Business Development Manager, Superheat FGH

The site was launched in March 2009, in conjunction with a cover story about Superheat FGH in Business and Industry Connection magazine. We’re glad to have played a part in improving Superheat FGH’s web presence. We always enjoy working with a client that understands the value of a strong Internet presence and the role it plays for helping to acquire world-class clients.

Visit Superheat FGH at http://www.superheatfgh.com