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Have you ever turned on your faucet and wondered "who put all that water in there"? Neither had we, until we started working with Quadvest, a water utility that builds and operates numerous facilities around the Houston area.

As it turns out, a lot goes in to providing a neighborhood with clean water, and our goal was to convey that Quadvest has a greater knowledge and breadth of services than anyone else. This site was built for developers, managers and municipal officials whose job it is to keep a community hydrated. Of course, clean water, the BENEFIT of our client's offerings, is foremost as we represent them online. Everyone would rather look at a cool picture of water doing something interesting than a valve sitting on a cardboard box, which is what goes on behind the scenes. Of course, the nuts and bolts features need to be in there as well, and they are.

As we often like to do, we developed the home page to have high-visual-impact. This, of course, is hard to carry over to pages loaded with information, so we created two different formats that tie together visually. That way users would know they're on the same site they thought they were, and not just go back to Google and start over.

This site adheres to our content structure philiosophy that a home page needn't be all things to all people, because then it becomes a garbled mess (which makes it NOT favored by lovers of simplicity, which makes it NOT all things to all people anyway, so...you get the picture). We determined who the intended users of the site were (the people who can do business with our client), figured out what they would be looking for, and gave them quick ways of finding it. We were faced with the challenge of non-standardized industry terminology (seriously, what do you call it when a private company builds a treatment plant for a municipal entity, but agrees to carry the note, operate and bill in cooperation with the community for an indefinite period of time?), so we gave users situational links to their likely destinations. Everyone understands English, right?

So in the end, we gave ourselves a huge pat on the back, took ourselves to lunch and even gave ourselves a certificate of excellence for making a completely-esoteric subject so accessible to the layman. That's just how we roll...

A good software application is effective while easy to use, offering a vast array of capability without bombarding the user with irrelevant options. Naturally, a web site for a good software company does the same thing. A clean, user friendly design showcases this marketing tool for builders, letting its features and benefits display themselves.

This web site was built to imply that the product was easy to use, that is was competently designed, and that all the necessary tools were just a click away. Lastly, it evoked (without mimicking) the application's visual interface, for a cohesive, familiar experience.

When take pride in making the mundane look cool, but when we're encountered with a truly superior product, it's a lot less difficult to make a big impact.

VTECH skylights are a new technology that delete all the cons of installing a skylight off your list. They are inexpensive to purchase, easy to install, safe to work around, hold up incredibly well to hail and hurricanes, and they simply don't leak. They're made with a completely revolutionary technology–no other skylight on the market can boast the Solid State status–and one application has been completely submerged in water for over two and a half years and has yet to leak.

Of course, as good as this product is, it doesn't photograph quite as well as an expensive European sports car, so a little brainstorming went in to telling the story visually. So maybe the apparatus itself is just a rectilinear object, but it sure represents a lot of photogenic ideas. A flag folded neatly on a shelf isn't anything to ogle at, but wave that same flag over a battle scene in the Franco-Prussian war and you've got a picture! We decided that to make a compelling image, and at the same time convey the key benefit to this product, we needed to send the skylight to war. Hence the home page graphics.

VTECH is a well-run company, and the owners, unlike most industrial companies, are firm believers in advertising, marketing and brand building. We built this home page around a certain format. Next month, a new skylight with a new storm will grace the home page. The material will be familar, but completely fresh. It keeps the folks coming back.

There is no eCommerce capability built in to this site. Even so, it's designed to sell. Products are laid out with all the information at a quick click of the mouse. Specifications are readily available, so a purchaser can contact sales staff with a very precise idea about what they want to buy. Videos showing the VTECH advantage, perhaps the best selling feature on the site, add interactivity and put the proof right before the viewer's eyes.

It doesn't take much to convince people that mosquitoes are annoying, but since they're typically browsing the web where mosquitoes aren't, getting the itchy reminder front and center on a web site is helpful to turn them on to an effective-and cost-effective-solution. If this pain point is coupled with the revelation that a mister and natural pesticide extracted from flowers could rid them of the little blighters once and for all, the bain and the benefit both become immediately apparent when they land on the site, and the user wants more information.

Few people seem to know about mosquito misters and flower-derived pesticides. Most of us hang bug zappers in the summertime and wonder why they're kids and still plagued with itchy welts and malaria (answer: mosquitoes aren't drawn to light, therefore they don't fall for that old trick.) Because mosquito misters have less market penetration than water softeners, garage door openers and bread makers, dedicating the home page to a piece of equipment is not as effective as showing benefits and offering answers to questions at the click of a mouse.

Our client is young and relatively hip, and requested a clean, linear design. They also like this shade of green, which, coincidentally, puts customers at subconscious ease about continuously spraying a toxin over their home and yard (free advice: if you want something to look safe and inviting, don't get a red and black web site).

It's fun to do web sites full of color and texture, and people love this, but the fact of the matter is, ornate, personalized design looks less objective. Subjectivity is ideal when marketing a salon; people are compelled by a salon's style and flair, so we encourage texture and color with such a piece (see here). After all, what's a salon selling but color and texture? But another advantage of white space is it compells immediate purchases. Check out Amazon, Overstock, B&H Photo, and any other site that does trillions in online sales each year. These guys have, collectively, invested enough money in focus grouping, heat map research and AB testing to know that nothing converts more remote sales than nice little pictures on a white background.