From the Upper Connecticut River Valley region of Vermont and New Hampshire, James Becker provides custom furniture, reproduction furniture, and his own original designs.  Jim provided USM with excellent photography and site copy.  We were able to put it all together to create an awesome looking site for Jas. Becker Cabinetmaker Inc.

All of the agents at Ski Home Realty are avid skiers and snowboarders, making them experts in Mount Snow region real estate. They needed a fresh new design and content to reflect their expertise. From their office at the base of Mt. Snow, Ski Home Realty provides quality townhouses, condos, vacation rentals, and more to those looking for an exciting Vermont snow adventure.

Chip Craig and the team at GreyBeard Realty are based in the mountains of Western North Carolina.  As longtime Union Street Media clients, the came back to us to refresh their site to make it more functional and user-friendly.  We were happy to help out in the process and are proud of the results!

The Aloha Foundation on Lake Fairlee in Vermont is another longtime Union Street Media client that relaunched their site with us this past month.  After visiting the site, you’ll see why we’d love to go back to camp for a summer!

The Green Castle Estate House is an intimate vacation villa on a remarkably beautiful and historic plantation in the Jamaican countryside. Green Castle brings together diverse stakeholders that are committed to a positive future. They specialize in eco-friendly vacations and they needed a clean new design to illustrate the gorgeous environment Green Castle inhabits.

The Burlington Climate Action Plan is helping the City reduce emissions to 80% below what they were in 2007 by 2050. The BCAP needed a more functional website to make their plan more widespread and easier to find on the internet.

The Church Street Marketplace is an award winning open air mall that is a hub of activity. Union Street Media gave this Burlington cultural center a new design so web surfers can easily find out more about the various stores, restaurants, and events that make Church Street such a downtown hot spot. Visitors of Burlington can also find information about history, directions, parking, and store hours.

At the Putnam Indian Field School in Greenwich CT, children build positive relationships, grow in independence, develop skills, and gain knowledge in areas that interest them in a warm and nurturing environment. The redesigned website allows new families and returning ones to have easy access to PIFS information and enriching programs.

All of these sites are proudly welcomed to our expanding portfolio. If you want your website to better represent your business, contact Union Street Media today!

Recently we’ve compiled a video that highlights a few good words that some of our clients had to say about their experience with Union Street Media.

After you’ve signed up, check out all of Union Street Media’s videos and rate your favorites!

149 South Champlain St, Burlington, VT

I recently came across another powerful use that Twitter provides people with last week. It not only provided an awesome place to network, but it supported a new local business. Last month, I began to see a trend start to rise with something along the lines of this: #btvfall2009tweetup. Curiosity got the best of me, and I started researching what this was all about. Turns out, a new local bakery, August First was hosting a “tweetup”. A tweetup is a gathering of people who use the social-networking tool, Twitter. The event was organized through Twitter by using a third party app, twtvite. This application allows you to organize an event by giving details such as directions to the event and a yes/no/maybe RSVP option. This had been the second invite I had seen in about a month and I was ready to join in on the fun.

The event was organized by John Connors (@JohnCVermont) who specializes in Information Technology at Saint Michael’s College. Upon arrival, I was handed a badge with my real name and twitter user name on it so people would know if we had crossed paths on Twitter previously. Surprisingly, most of the faces in the cozy bakery were familiar. Everyone seemed very content with their coffee in-hand and talking technology. August First was a great location to have this event with their welcoming environment and their variety of tasty treats.

I will now be making an effort to attend every tweetup I can, not only for the geek-talk, but for great time all around.

If you’re on Twitter and want to see what’s going on with the team, you can find us on our Twitter List here. Also, you can follow August First here.

Cheers,

Matt Sisson

Tweetdeck

According to Mashable, The Social Media Guide, Twitter saw a 752% growth in 2008. It’s no wonder everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon.

There are many benefits that come with proper Twitter usage:

• Reinforce your brand and increase awareness by linking your Twitter account with all of your other web outlets.

• Check your Google Analytics; Twitter is a direct source of traffic.

• Network with like minded professionals, potential customers, and other local businesses.

• Tweets are now indexed in Google; we smell potential for organic Google traffic!

What a lot of people don’t realize are the practical uses of this valuable tool. Many businesses recognize the potential with this platform and yet after creating an account, have no clue what to do. It’s important to know about Twitter etiquette, hashtags, practical applications, and more.

Before getting started, there are a few things to remember.

Does your Twitter engage your customers?

The first instinct of many business owners using Twitter is to just spam deals and promotions thinking it will draw in more customers. Steve Schwartz, the creator of the How To Use Twitter for Business Video Series, makes a good analogy. In Part One of Steve’s Three Part video series, he says to think of Twitter like a cocktail party. You wouldn’t stand there yelling out promotions for your business, but you would engage people by talking to them. That leads to the three steps of successfully using Twitter for business which are Listen, Follow, and then Engage.

The first thing Steve’s videos recommend is to install a third party platform to manage your Twitter account. We recommend TweetDeck or HootSuite; the video refers to TweetDeck however, which makes it more convenient to reference. Tweetdeck makes the Twitter interface much more user friendly, it’s free, it automatically shortens your URLs (good to stay within the 140 character limit), and it links your pictures to a hosting service. Everything mentioned here is further elaborated upon in Steve’s awesome videos.

Tweetdeck Interface

A few more things to remember that will help Twitter success include:

• Make your Twitter profile design and name similar to your main website’s design; this is important for branding.

• Advertise your Twitter on your web site in a visible location, as well as for your blog and other social media sites.

• Consider making your updates cross platform, so all of your profiles are updated at once.  There are trade offs to this approach, however, so make sure that it’s the correct approach for your business if you pursue it.

Once you jump start your Twitter account, the next step is to measure it’s impact. There are many analytic software programs out there similar to Google Analytics. I’d recommend checking out Quantcast or Twitter Analyzer.

Once you get some followers and become more comfortable with the tweeting lifestyle, you should consider other third party applications. Here are a few you should check out.  Please comment with any others you find!

• Klout – You can measure your Twitter influence with your Klout score, see what people are talking the most about, and keep an eye on trends.

• TweetSpinner – This site offers effective tools such as profile rotation, anti-spam software, Customer Relationship Management, scheduling with automatic updates, and much more.

These basics will help you capitalize on Twitter and in time you’ll see the benefits that social media can deliver.

First off we have a redesign for Sox to Go. You can pick up any type of socks from your favorite NBA team to socks with Moose on them! We provided them with  a re-designed site to better reflect the more intuitive e-commerce flow that customers are looking for with a fresh new color palette.

From skiing to real estate Tamara McKinney focuses her business on Squaw Valley, North Lake Tahoe and Truckee areas. Tamara is a former Olympic skier and has intimate knowledge of the Squaw Valley having grown up there.

Children of Fallen Patriots is an excellent foundation based on helping children who have lost loved ones get the money they need for a college eduction. This organization needed a more secure site to accept donations and a more interactive way for visitors to share experiences and thoughts through the site and social media platforms. Union Street Media was delighted to be able to make this possible.

Tourterelle brings some French charm to New Haven VT. They belong to the Vermont Fresh Network and work with area farms to bring the freshest ingredients from the field to the plate. They were looking for an innovative design with great usability and search engine optimization to establish a presence in a competitive market.

Prestige Real Estate of Killington They specialize in listing and selling Killington condominiums, town homes, single-family homes, multi-family homes and land. Ted and Heidi at Prestige Killington are long standing clients and we were excited to take their existing site to the next level of functionality using the latest real estate tools available including seamless MLS integration.

The Corvus Group are a full-service real estate brokerage firm servicing the Dartmouth – Lake Sunapee region of New Hampshire. The designer went for a clean, crisp approach, which helps visitors locate exactly what they are looking and are able to learn about the area through fresh blog content and knowledgeable area information.

At Brookside Gynecology , skilled and caring physicians offer up-to-date information, thorough evaluation methods, and excellence in treatment options for women from adolescence through adulthood. We updated the look of their site, made it easier to navigate, and added additional information that was missing from the current sites.  The new look is more feminine, soft, and up-to-date, while still looking professional and a touch clinical in nature.

We are proud to add these websites to Union Street Media’s ever-growing portfolio!

The news was rolled out by their founder here and you can learn more about what WellcomeMat does here and even see a few of our in house offerings on our Union Street Media channel.

We would be interested to hear from anyone that has used this application and their thoughts on its effectiveness, however  the app is currently usable only on the iPhone 3G.

Brickface and Sunshine: The Offices of Union Street Media

This is exciting!  My first blog post for Union Street Media.  For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a Support Specialist and Junior Web Developer here at our cozy Burlington, Vermont office.  I’ve been here for less than six months and it already feels like I’ve known my colleagues for years.  We work well as a team and it shows, and one of those things that helps fuel our fire is our sweet workspace.

Recently, I came up with the crazy idea to take some pictures around the office.  This was a bold step on my part because it would truly expose how geeky we are with our Star Wars figurines on the shelves to the stick-figure post-it notes all over my desk.  My idea wasn’t completely random though; I not only wanted to show my peers where I worked, but upload the pictures into the Flickr pool for Lifehacker.com’s Featured Workspaces.  The idea of this image pool is to share your workspace with others and show how you remain comfortable, but at the same time allow yourself to push your workload from your inbox to the out.

Every so often, Lifehacker.com pulls some pictures from the pool and features them on their site.  This week, we happen to be the lucky group that was shown on the front page and it displayed our stellar work area.  This was a huge honor and we’re so thankful for Lifehacker taking the time of day to not only check out our office, but to write a story about it as well. This has been quite the Summer/Fall for Union Street Media with our previous Seven Daysies Award for Best Web Developer.

The article can be found here ,and we would love to hear your feedback in the comments about the article or the pictures.

If you would like to connect with me, you can find me on twitter or flickr.

Cheers,

Matt Sisson

The upcoming Media Convergence Conference in New York City, put on by The Economist, launched a video called Shift Happens, that helps put these changes in context.  They posted a fascinating video about the event here:

My favorite statistic: The average American teen sends 2272 text messages a month.

With numbers like that, and the often quoted 2008 NAR study that shows 87% of home buyers use the internet when making a purchase, I wonder how much longer people will continue to disproportionately spend money offline?

The presentation went very well. We received a great deal of positive feedback from participants from all over the region. Our friend and client Brian Boardman, a REALTOR® here in Burlington, Vermont chimed in to talk  about how a particular listing video help him get one of his high-end properties under contract.  It was a fun, engaging conversation!

Please contact us if you attended the session and would like a copy of our notes (or if you couldn’t make it, and would like a copy of our notes).

The first new website that we are pleased to present to the public is that of ACRE Strategies which is a real estate consulting firm focused on empowering buyers in Massachusetts. The ACRE site is a perfect example of a clean brand-building site for a new business.

The second site that we would like to introduce is that of the Burlington Legacy Project. The Burlington Legacy Project is a city government organization focused on promoting sustainable municipal growth strategies for Burlington as it grows into the future.  This is a wonderful organization that works to provide a framework for Burlington to help it maintain its vibrant urban nature and wonderful character far into the future.

Sneakers Bistro has been a Union Street Media client for many years now, so when they wanted an updated look for their website they came back to us. For those of you aren’t local and thus don’t know about this local legend, Sneakers is a fantastic breakfast and lunch spot in the heart of Winooski, Vermont. It is a fun, energetic place and that is just the thing we went for in our new design of the site. Have a look  – we dare you to look at their site and not want Cheese Grits.

The last Website that we would like to introduce is Atlantic Barn and Timber – a wonderful custom timber framing company in North Carolina. For artisans such as the people at Atlantic Barn, a website needs to support the images of their work – not distract from them. Their new site is subtly designed to be a digital extension of their truly fantastic craft.

We here at Union Street Media are please to add these sites to our ever-growing, diverse website portfolio!