December, 2010

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December 2010—Winchester Trails, a non-profit educational site for school children in Winchester, MA (where Radar Media Group is headquartered), needed a website to post its announcements and attract volunteer trail guides to the organization. To help out, we designed and built a new site for them that provides basic posting ability for not just news, but photos as well. Links to maps and trail guides that that the organization sells to help finance their work are also provided.

To add interest to the photos posted for various woodland trails, we used some new slide show rotators that provide a number of interesting effects, all without the need for Flash. Click here to see an example of the “Ken Burns” effect for animating slides.

November, 2010

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November 2010—Selling online is increasingly important even to our business-to-business customers, and this month we completed two major e-commerce projects for clients.

For International Poster Gallery, a brick-and-mortar gallery on Boston’s prestigious Newbury Street, selling its world-class collection of poster art is just as important online as it is in the store. With many of its customers overseas, Internet commerce is the only way to reach them. While IPG already had a basic shopping cart set up on its site when it first engaged with Radar, the cart was limited to PayPal sales only. The cart worked, but forced customers to have a PayPal account in order to do business and provided no linkages back to IPG’s wish list or other functions. The new Radar cart replaced the old shopping function with a new credit-card payment system that works all over the world. It includes customized shipping logic that automatically calculates shipping costs based on shipping location, quantity and size of shipping frames. Equally important, customers can now save favorite posters in their wish lists, and then move the items to their shopping cart at any time.

The second e-commerce project was for long-time Radar client, Covaris, Inc.

Here again, Covaris already had an existing shopping cart, but certain functions were limited. Covaris wanted its customers, for example, to be able to easily find scientific supplies by not just looking up product categories as before, but to be able to search on names, part numbers and descriptions. Being able to accurately calculate sales in states where the tax amount varies by city and town, like California and Illinois, was also critical.The new Radar store not only provides all this functionality, but the redesigned cart also displays well on mobile devices such as smartphones and Apple iPads.

September, 2010

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September 2010—Next Computing (www.nextcomputing.com), right up the road from Boston in scenic Nashua, NH, engaged with us in late spring to completely redesign their site. As a specialized manufacturer of portable and powerful computers, the company relies heavily on its website to reach a niche audience of users in such industries as defense, entertainment and computer-aided design. The new site, which went live this month, includes a new design to showcase the company’s products and a complete rewrite and reorganization of the content and messaging. Needless to say, Radar’s contribution was a team effort involving our top design, writing and project management talent.

Also noteworthy is the site’s back end. It is based on an open source content management system that streamlines and simplifies site maintenance at Next Computing. The CMS will also make it easier to extend the site in the future with new content and features.

August, 2010

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August 2010—This month we welcome new client Acacia Communciations to the Radar family. Based in Maynard, Mass. in the famous Digital Equipment Corp. mill building, Acacia is pioneering super high speed subsystems that will ultimately be targeted to major telecommunications suppliers. Radar designed and produced the company’s first web site and used a modern, open source content management system for maximum flexibility and ease of maintenance.

Acacia is a startup company still in major growth mode and wanted a site that could grow along with them. Planned functionality for future releases includes a private client log-in section where registered users will be able to download proprietary technical and marketing documents.

March, 2010

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March 2010—In December, we welcomed FieldView Solutions (www.fieldviewsolutions.com), an Edison, NJ-based software developer, into the Radar fold. Since then we’ve been busy designing and building the company’s website, which went live this month on March 5. The new site, www.fieldviewsolutions.com, is the company’s first website as FieldView Solutions itself was formed late last year as a result of a venture capital-based spin-off from parent Energy Options. The FieldView Solutions software aims squarely at helping managers of large data centers better manage their electrical power, cooling, and other assets. The potential to save money is huge, and the software is already successfully running at multiple Fortune 400 companies worldwide.

The new FieldView Solutions website is based on a modern, open source content management system. The CMS separates content from design and enables content administrators at FieldView Solutions to update the site on a regular basis using simple web editing tools that run in a browser. In addition, the site utilizes several forms allowing users to download product brochures or to request additional information from FieldView. That customer information is captured in a database and easily accessed at any time by FieldView’s content team.

The entire website was design and deployed in just over two months thanks to a concerted effort by the content, design and production teams.

February, 2010

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February 2010—The Radar team put the final touches on the interim site for VacationPhotos.com and launched the site live earlier the month. The VacationPhotos.com site (www.vacationphotos.com) previews what’s coming for the full site, which we are currently building and will be launching live in the spring timeframe.

VacationPhotos.com is a Burlington, MA-based startup coming aiming to become the premiere Internet address for taking virtual vacations on the web. Featuring top quality photographs and videos from the best professional photographers, users will be able to quickly navigate to vacation areas of interest and view multimedia presentations based on scenery, areas of interest and special attractions.

The permanent site under construction will prominently feature a number of cutting-edge web navigation tools empowering visitors to choose vacation destinations with ease. These include a multimedia global map, multiple web tools for choosing types of vacation areas of interest, and advertising from top vacation travel bureaus and travel companies all over the world.

Stay tuned for this launch; it’s going to be big.

March, 2009

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March 2009—It’s another busy month, but some of our news (including details about the most interesting of projects) we cannot release due to non-disclosure agreements. Suffice to say, our design team is being increasingly tapped by developers for its user interface design (UI) expertise. In these cases, we work with developers to understand their applications and review mock-ups. We then set to work designing the screens, buttons and navigation widgets that people will ultimately use on their PCs, mobile devices and Internet browsers.

Typically in these projects, our job is to deliver finished artwork, often in the form of polished Photoshop files, for incorporation into these applications. One custom application we are working on now will soon be released as a new feature for Facebook, the popular social media site.

Our core web design and content development business continues to represent the bulk of Radar’s work. And we are proud to say that two new Radar websites are now live. One is for NewRiver, Inc., a financial services company based in Andover, MA with a powerful electronic prospectus delivery service. The other live site is for Osage Partners, a Delaware venture capital company which discovered Radar through a recommendation from one its portfolio companies.

Finally this month, a growing number of Radar web clients are beginning to experiment with e-commerce. We provide clients with a number of options here, and always recommend the best fit for each customer. We are currently putting the finishing touches on a new shopping cart capability for Radar client Covaris, Inc., a fast-growing biotech/life science based in Woburn, MA. The e-commerce capability should be live by the end of this month.

January, 2009

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January 2009—It’s shaping up to be another busy year for the Radar Media team. As the New Year begins, several significant web projects are in development; more clients are leveraging our marketing copywriting services in addition to design for print and electronic materials; and Radar’s own website continues to draw more traffic (thanks to superb tracking by Google Analytics) with more hits than anticipated going to our blog.

On the website development front, two websites in particular are now well underway: NewRiver, Inc., a financial services company based in Andover, MA with a powerful electronic prospectus delivery service; and Osage Partners, a Delaware venture capital company that also happens to be an early investor in SevOne, another Radar client with a new website we launched for them last year.

Meanwhile, we’ve noted an uptick in the number of HTML e-mails and Flash banner ads we are designing and building for clients. With the economy in questionable condition to say the least, the potential ROI of Internet advertising is too strong to ignore.

As for the Radar blog, we attribute to the increasing traffic to several factors. Chief among them is our new staff writer, Lesley Anderson, who brings to the Radar team a fresh perspective on the power of good Internet writing. Second, readers seem to sense, correctly, that a company’s blog often houses its most up-to-date content. And third — blogs offer readers the opportunity to provide feedback directly and to begin to create a community that’s more than just a company’s publishing platform.

October, 2008

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October 2008—Radar launched its new website this month. Under development since July of this year, the site represents a big team effort by everyone on the staff working in between client projects (which always come first) and tight deadlines.

Top priorities for the site were, first and foremost, to create an easy to read, easy to navigate foundation allowing for easy browsing of our work. We figured the best way to do so would be to allow readers to see samples based on the two views that resonate best with most people: By Client and by Project Type.

Second, we wanted to provide customers, prospects and the general public with a forum where they could more easily provide feedback and to generally sound off. That’s the purpose behind the Radar Resources blog. We hope to see the blog evolve over time into a useful “best practices” marketing tool.

Third, our goal was to provide clients with a secure and interactive extranet for viewing their custom work and to provide us feedback.

How are we doing? Feel free to join in the blog discussions!

February, 2008

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February 2008—Several client projects went live in the first two months of the year. Chief among these was a large, new website for new Radar client Oco, Inc., a leading purveyor of hosted business intelligence solutions based in Waltham, Mass.

A new tradeshow booth and company identity was also completed this month for long-time client Protein Forest, a biotech provider, also based in Waltham. A new Protein Forest website is currently in design stage. Meanwhile, Radar is busily engaged with the Innovation Group, an insurance software and services provider with U.S. headquarters in Newton. Stay tuned for updates on our design and development work associated with this industry leader.