Attribute it to industry trends, the exposure to ever-evolving technology or sheer coincidence, but sometimes there just seems to be a “run” on requests for a certain website feature. BrownBoots will build a new a whiz-bang application for one client, accomplishing a feat we hadn’t attempted before, and then, soon thereafter, another client out of the blue will ask for something very similar.
Not long after BrownBoots built a tool for The Commonwealth Companies to showcase their development, construction and property management projects (www.commonwealthconstructioncorporation.net/portfolio2.php), another client asked us to make something for them that sounded quite familiar.
Followed by a third client.
One of the joys of creating customized solutions for our clients is that we can carry over our expertise from one project to another without making the exact same thing twice.
(We don’t do cookie-cutter websites.)
With the creation of the Commonwealth portfolio pages, we gained valuable experience in Google Maps integration, which formed the foundation for the next project: a new “Available Properties” page for the Downtown Fond du Lac (www.downtownfonddulac.com/dfp/available_properties.php), which has its own unique bells and whistles, including a list that allows visitors to sort the properties by price, square footage and so forth.
When adapting the concept for Excel Engineering (www.excelengineer.com/ portfolio/portfolio.php), we made even more modifications, developing individual icons for each category type, enabling the markers to appear or disappear depending on whether a category is selected and developing a “wide screen” version to optimize the size of the map itself on larger monitors.
Three different clients. Three distinct set of circumstances (e.g., audience, geography of projects, budgets). Three separate solutions. But they all sharing similar technology.
If the phone rings and another client asks about how they might use a map to visually demonstrate the breadth and depth of their work, we won’t be at all surprised. But we will be eager to see what new directions we can explore and what new ways we can push these tools.
