Tonight our beloved Blackhawks take to the ice to face Nashville, beginning a month-long bid to bring Lord Stanley’s Cup back to Chicago for the first time in 50 years. (The very idea of the Music City having a hockey team is, of course, preposterous.. but that’s another post.) So here at Manning, we’ve spent the last few weeks scraping the bottom of the creative barrel trying to think up a way to show our support.
FirstGroup, the largest provider of surface transportation in North America, selected Manning to develop an online strategy for four of the firm’s major business units. The company wanted this strategy to help integrate corporate acquisitions through consistent branding across service types and website platforms. They also wanted an easy to use content management system and one provider for all their hosting needs.
As part of that strategy, Manning recently launched the site for the company’s First Vehicle Services division. The site was designed to target key decision makers by showcasing the company’s fleet maintenance services. In addition to the First Vehicle Services site, Manning has developed sites for First Student, the nation’s largest student transportation provider, and First Transit, which operates a number of mass transit systems throughout North America.
We invite you to take a ride on the new First Group sites.
I hopped onto Google Analytics this morning to check in on all of our sites, and was pleasantly surprised to find that traffic to our newly launched Snowflake Workshop, has skyrocketed the last few days! We’ve yet to see much snow outdoors yet we are in the midst of a full-blown virtual blizzard.
Two sites showcasing hot new well-designed websites have chosen to feature Manning’s recently-released Snowflake Workshop on their top site charts. We created the workshop for Brinks Hofer Gilson & Lione to give users a chance to create their own piece of intellectual property. Try it out, if you haven’t already; create a snowflake and write a message to share with friends and family this holiday season. The snowflakes fall in a snowstorm gallery so all the unique designs are on display. The workshop debuted at number 30 on Design Chart’s illustrious top 40 sites. We’ll see if it moves upward…
You may have also seen our post about the making of the workshop from the design perspective–look for another post soon on the development work that went into the site!
SnowflakeWorkshop.com
Whenever I come across creative work that I like, my first thought is often, “How did they do that?” As someone who works in the industry and knows all the moving parts that go into a great project, I find others’ processes fascinating. But the resources for discovering this information are frustratingly few and far between. So to do my part in providing more of this kind of background info, I am going to try to spotlight a few of our projects here on the blog. Hopefully someone will find it helpful (or at least interesting) to see us pull back the curtain a bit and reveal our creative process.
I’m not a big Dallas Cowboys fan. But having shot a video with Hall-of-Famer Terry Bradshaw on the old Texas Stadium field, I agree the Cowboys needed a home. With it’s 100,000 person capacity, its a monument to how important football is in Texas.
Newspaper Graveyard
Everyone knows that the internet has really rocked the boat of traditional media outlets. File sharing and iTunes have taken a bite out of the record industry. Newspapers everywhere are in the midst of a death rattle. And it hasn’t been that long since the WGA dared to protest the fact that they were not getting paid for work distributed over the internet.
It’s kind of a free-for-all right now. The technology is so new that no model really exists, and big media distributors are in a panic trying to find ways to squeeze revenue from this new system. But there is a silver lining for aspiring artists. Everyone now has relatively equal access to new distribution channels.
What do you get when you combine one part co-workers with two parts alcohol? It’s the Office Holiday Party! To honor this great tradition we at Manning used this as a theme for our holiday e-card. So come on in, brush off the cold and join the Greatest Holiday Party!
