We also got the opportunity to play around with the IDX integration piece offered by GreenStreet’s MLS listings vendor, and are happy to report it was smooth sailing. The listings appear in various places throughout the site, and can be searched from the sidebar widget. Clicking a property listing brings the user to GreenStreet’s results page which is actually external to the website, an integration that looks seamless to the user.

Our content department (Erin, Nicole, and for layout, Rachel) contributed extensively to this project as well, with support including social media set-up, research and copywriting. And, there’s more to come! Stay posted for more exciting project updates…

We feel that availability and efficient communication are central to web development and technical applications consulting. So we’re here. Pretty much always. From the real person who answers the phone every time it rings during business hours (thanks Nicole!) to a prompt email reply from Keith, to Patrick, who knows the minute there’s even a hiccup on your server even at 2 am on a Sunday, we are here. Just ask us.

Aside from being available, we go one step further and consider it our job, not yours, to do all the legwork. The nature of software and the web, and especially error-reporting, is that there are always a multitude of questions. It is written company policy here that it is not the client’s job to figure out all the finer points before they approach us with an issue. We’ll ask you which browser you are in. If it is a particularly tricky issue we may ask you for a screenshot. But like any good professional consulting and development firm, if you don’t have the answers we will leave it at that. We take your report, employ our robust issue tracking system and our cross-browser testing software, and come back to you with what the trouble is and what can be done to fix it.

Oh, and it is fitting to also tell you that as far as the details go, we will take care of them. Ever get caught in what seems like an endless loop of email back and forth? Communications are streamlined and efficiency is served when the responsibility for fact-checking, looking at the system one more time, logging in and checking the orders in your shopping cart for the tenth time, falls to one person. That “person” is us, whichever member of the team here you happen to be talking to.

We can’t claim perfection in these goals (who can?) but we do strive toward them each and every day and with every client interaction. When we are working on deadline and the impulse is to shortcut, we remind ourselves. We hope it leads to a smooth and engaging experience for our clients, and we take pride in hearing positive feedback in this regard from clients.

Earlier this month, we received a lovely letter in the mail from Beth Wells, Executive Director of the NV STEM Education Coalition. “Our website (ed. note: and its custom WordPress regional events calendar module) has garnered positive feedback and has contributed to the amazing growth in support for the Coalition this year. Erin’s training and Nicole’s patient support and training in keeping the website up to date have been outstanding. I am happy to recommend your services to prospective clients.”

Thanks, Beth! And a big thanks to all of our (more than 40) 2011 clients. Here’s to another year of doing our best work on your behalf!

You know the staff. Now, what is the process? How do we approach your project?

The term “applied” in the name of the company is no accident. A cumulative thirty years experience in software and web development speaks volumes on behalf of the partners, and is directly applied to every project we produce, problem we approach, and product we deliver. The process behind your website or web application development is not piecemeal or made up as we go along.

Consult, research, facilitate, plan (and plan and plan some more), design, develop, test, adjust. Rinse and repeat. Every time, for every project. It doesn’t matter the size or the complexity of the project at hand, we spend the time at the beginning on analysis of your company, research, and planning. In fact, if you have already been through an estimating and proposal process with us, you know we spend a considerable amount of time getting to know you before we’ve ever even won you as a client.

Think every shop that advertises their easy and cheap WordPress package, or their hosted solution you dial right into, does that on your behalf? They don’t. Believe us, because we hear time and again from clients who tried out the competition first because of a really attractive price point, and since have realized they didn’t need a cookie-cutter approach. Or they went with a big media and advertising agency and were shoehorned into marketing decisions based on what the agency was “really good at,” and how it wanted to promote themselves as a full interactive shop.

Well, that strayed from the topic a bit, but the point is, at Trinity Applied Internet you get specialized, considerate, and tailored service that addresses your needs specifically. If you are a marketing department working with some IT constraints, we plan for that. If you are a small organization with one paid staff member and no time for teaching yourself website administration, we plan for that when we design your project, rather than discovering it at the end (or not at all.)

The adage about “prior planning prevents…” at best catastrophe and at worse any number of irritating little hassles. We take it to heart, to the extent that we are researching, discussing, and planning your project before you have even officially engaged us.

So, you have chosen TAI to build your application, redesign your WordPress website, or maintain your online presence. First, thank you! We love to meet new clients, learn about your business, your goals, previous successes and past challenges. (In fact, if you have come to the point of engaging us, you know we have already discussed most of that with you, even as we developed the proposal for your work.)

Next, you wonder what can you expect from working with us, the first thing being – who are we? In short, you will be working directly with a team of staff members and/or contracted designers and developers. When the project dictates, we also manage partnership resources for illustration and graphic design, hosting, analytics and SEO, or e-commerce, on your behalf. (All professionals based in the US – no offshore code factories need apply!)

Keith, Lead architect, user interface, and art director: Begins most projects in consultation and facilitation around goals and technical requirements, leads production of wireframes and comps.

Erin, Lead project manager, content director, operations: Tracks project progress, supervises content production, load and testing, manages accounts.

Patrick, Lead developer, database architect, and technical director: Designs the code behind all our work, as well as develops a good portion of it, maintains, monitors and upgrades existing sites and/or applications, and manages our development and production servers.

Nicole, Content management assistant: Serves as communication central around here, takes your requests and gets them where they need to go, as well as loads content, posts to your blog, administers your social media.

Rachel, Designer: Creates wireframes and comps, codes HTML/CSS templates, addresses maintenance and testing code issues.

Kym, Developer: Codes HTML/CSS templates, builds custom plug-ins, modules and apps, addresses maintenance and testing code issues.

Depending on the work, your project will also be supported by part-time freelance designers and developers who are directly supervised by Keith. They help keep us fresh, and insure that every problem we tackle is addressed by someone with a breadth of experience.

One last note: as the staff roster on the website indicates, four of us share the same last name. We are a family-owned and operated business, just another guarantee that we’ll go to great lengths to produce an outstanding project and experience for our clients – the family name depends on it!

Invariably, after working with us a while, these clients look at me (usually in their mind’s eye because we’re meeting online) and quip something like, “How can you manage this stuff when everything is constantly changing? Doesn’t this drive you insane?”

The answer to question number two is, yes…and no. Luckily, everyone we are fortunate enough to have on this team thrives on learning. Research. Applying lessons learned in one area to another. Patrick brings many years’ experience designing and developing software systems (with a bit of hardware experience, to boot.) Keith has spent an equal amount of time navigating the waters of “we-think-it-can-be-done-let’s-work-it-out” in teams both large and small. We are all perpetual students, continually following industry news and taking learning opportunities wherever we find them. We clock lots of overhead hours to R&D. Those interested in doing one thing over and over their whole day, week, career, need not apply here.

And then, just as we start to feel smart-ish, there’s a new version of IE, or Google releases some big hairy updates, or someone goes and invents something. (Twitter?) Every lesson we learn seems to point to more undiscovered territory, but also allows us to keep a solid footing when recommending solutions, troubleshooting issues, and making informed choices throughout the design and development process. We are keep at it on behalf of our clients, because we’re curious, fascinated, maybe even a little obsessed.

Excuse me, but I’ve got to go review my Google alerts on search marketing now.

One year ago, TAI consisted of Keith, Patrick, and Erin. We have grown by more than 60%, adding Nicole and Rachel full time, and Kym part-time. We have built a content marketing team, and now are able to offer clients services including copywriting, blog management, social media management, shopping cart administration, and other strategic marketing tasks in conjunction with our standard websites and application development. Many thanks go to our outstanding content clients, including Joelle K. Jay and The Inner Edge, TopLine Leadership, Our Broken Family Court System Conference, and NV Stem Education Coalition. We can’t wait to see what the next year brings!

Our ongoing maintenance, hosting and support business has been humming right along, as well. We continued providing service and support to Server Technology, PDUS Direct, KUNR, and a number of other companies, while adding the Nevada Immunization Coalitions and ITS Logistics to the mix. We provided project management and support to Vitamin Research Products and performed a Microsoft AX to Salesforce systems integration for Haws Corporation. As always, Trinity Applied Internet is proud to be invited to work for these industry-leading, globally or regionally respected companies.

And, as always, we’ve been launching a steady stream of custom content managed websites for companies big and small. This year’s site launches included the Nevada Small Business Development Center, The Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Foundation, Edible Pedal 100, Reno Sunrise Rotary, and Cart Barn, just to name a few!

We had some new opportunities this year including the chance to participate in Reno’s first ever Hack-a-Thon, Hack4Reno. We had a great time and even won Best Social App for our community-driven event application, EventSmash.  We also jumped into the conversation online, and created a goofy little app that helped anyone keeping track of the Old Spice Guy contest know who was ahead in “mentions” at any time during the contest – great fun!

There isn’t really any way to wrap everything up in one blog post – it has been such a busy year. But suffice to say there is a lot going on, with even more exciting developments on the horizon. The start of 2012 will see the reveal of some very exciting projects, as well as new developments in the office… (Namely, an office!)

We’ll keep you posted!

If you haven’t heard yet, The City of Reno and Reno Collective are organizing the first ever Hack4Reno – a 24-hour ‘hackathon‘ which is a team competition where apps are to be built to benefit the community. Apps can be anything from serious and potentially life changing to something fun and light hearted.

Why are we participating?

We want to help get the community involved in giving back with their mad designer and developer skills to the city (and region) and to promote the openness of platforms and data.

We are not only forming a team (Go Trinity!) but we are also sponsoring the kick off luncheon for participating teams on Saturday at noon, and coffee for participants later in the evening.

Perhaps it is not for the faint of heart: let’s remember that this is October in Reno and the competition is being held outside (out in the open – like the open public data), but it will be 24 hours of having a great time with fellow developers and giving back to the community.

Come root on the Hack4Reno teams this Saturday, October 15th at noon at the Pioneer Center for the kick off and if you are really excited you can join us and stay all night! Or come back on Sunday, October 16th at 2:30pm for the announcement of the winning team!

We love our jobs. As part of our daily course of business, we get the opportunity to work with some wonderful clients, provide solutions to solve some of their tough problems, and generally make things better for them. Some of the work is not very glamorous, but we are here to get the essential important stuff done for our customers – not grab headlines. Last week, we got the chance to work on something that was challenging, fun, and a little crazy in its reach. We built an application (overnight) to display data about the current Old Spice online campaign, and got a huge response. It does not get much more fun and exciting than that.

If you are not familiar with the re-vamped Old Spice brand and their innovative use of social media channels, let me give a brief synopsis. Last year, Old Spice hired the “Old Spice Guy” to promote their new products. Their agency (Weiden + Kennedy) created a series of fanciful commercials with the Old Spice Guy.  The campaign moved online with a series of YouTube videos,  posted as responses to users asking questions (both famous and not famous) on social media channels like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. For a more in-depth description, head over to Mashable or Digital Buzz.

This year Old Spice‘s online campaign involved a YouTube based battle of words between Fabio (yep, that Fabio) and the Old Spice Guy. Fabio was attempting to usurp the title of New Old Spice Guy, and Old Spice Guy rose to defend it. You can still watch the story unfold on their YouTube channel.

After watching the first day of the campaign, we decided to build an application that tabulated mentions of Fabio and Old Spice Guy (and related terms) across five social media channels (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, and Digg.) We displayed which character had more mentions (as well as made a worm graph of the trending in real time) ostensibly to figure out who was “winning.” You can view it here.

We blatantly stole some of the design elements off of Old Spice’s YouTube channel (they didn’t mind, apparently) to make our site identify with the campaign, then Pat went to work furiously coding the entire database application working well into the night. (He can do that, he lives in the Land of the Midnight Sun.)

The next day we crossed out fingers, and Tweeted out the application’s URL to Old Spice. Old Spice must have liked it, because they tweeted it out to their followers and posted it on Facebook.

We got 25,000+ unique visitors in one day. As a thank you the Old Spice Guy even made us a video. How awesome is that?

Despite their response making us a little giddy–

(I mean, this campaign made some big waves in our industry last year, and here they are, Tweeting and posting to YouTube about us!)

– we got a lot more out of this than a video. We demonstrated working with large amounts of data coming from different sources, creating data-crunching applications quickly and with creativity, handling irregular and enormous traffic surges, and enhancing an existing social media campaigns.

And, we had a great time. Thank you Old Spice, for a great opportunity.

Nicole brings eight years of experience managing projects, deadlines and documentation to the Trinity Applied Internet team. She acquired a passion for the business applications of online media, including website design and social media channels while in college. Prior to joining TAI, Nicole’s attention to detail was critical in her job at the regional Starbucks Coffee Roasting Plant, in the Quality department. She holds a BS in Business Management from the University of Nevada, Reno.

Nicole has jumped right in and is happily working away on several projects, and has (thankfully) taken over most of our appointment scheduling. Feel free to contact her with questions or requests as you see fit.

Welcome to the team, Nicole!!