Announcements
At Enhanced Books, users get the chance to experience audio and video content for books, akin to an extras menu on a DVD. With the release of their newest book, Reckless Road: Guns ‘n Roses and the Making of Appetite for Destruction, the owners of Enhanced Books felt that their site needed a major overhaul.
Al's Garden Center is a local gardening supply store with three locations in Oregon. They needed a website overhaul that would allow them to create and control the large amounts of content they wanted to display on the site.
Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) needed a dedicated mini-site where breast cancer patients could learn about the personalized care and expertise they could expect when choosing OHSU's facility. At MyNameIsMartha.com, patients can meet Martha, the nurse in charge of OHSU's breast cancer program. The mini-site serves to humanize and sympathize with what a breast cancer patient is experiencing at the outset of their treatment.
Regent Education is a provider of financial aid management software for institutions of higher education. They offer affordable, web-based, easy-to-use solutions to financial aid departments around the world. Designed and built for the financial aid and enrollment management community, Regent enables institutions to execute their financial aid strategy, and enables the 21st century student to access information anytime, anywhere, any device, in any language. Their website was dated and needed to reflect that 21st century attitude.
Together with a reinvented brand and design from Gere Donovan Creative, Concrete was able to deliver a website that offers both ease of use and sophisticated functionality. The site features a sleek Flash slideshow and Javascript based profiles section. The capability to create campaign-specific landing pages is built into the site, which is critical for driving site traffic during special product promotions. With Concrete CMS, Regent's website is easy to update and add new content to at any time.
"Regent's software is full of features, but the service they provide is what makes it really sing," says Franz Maruna, CEO of Concrete Websites. "We feel the same way here at Concrete. You're not buying a Content Management System, you're buying control of your website."
Portland Roasting has been roasting coffee and espresso for the Portland community for over 10 years. In addition to a high-quality product, Portland Roasting focuses on sustainability and renewable resources, as well as farm and eco-friendly directives. Their website needed to reflect their commitment to both great coffee and socially-responsible coffee sourcing.
The Rock ‘n' Roll Camp for Girls is a non-profit organization located in Portland, Oregon. Aimed primarily at girls between the ages of eight and eighteen, the camp teaches music and instrumentation as well as advocating social change and a positive female self-image. They needed a new website that was both easy to update and visually reflected the vibrancy and life of the camp.
Save Natural Areas is a political organization committed to the preservation of rivers, streams, natural areas, and wildlife habitat. Plazm came to us with the need for a design centric political website. The site would need to be updated with content frequently, which made Concrete's content management system an obvious choice. The content management system was put into use to update information on the progress of the bond measure. This allowed the organization to truly speak to their audience as the campaign matured, and gave the bond measure an obvious advantage.
uXcomm came to Concrete with a problem. They needed a front-end web application that was fast, powerful, and able to convey large amounts of information. This custom management interface was needed to handle large arrays of server hardware. The application was built using Java Server Pages (JSP), and Javascript, a client-side scripting language. Our application connected to uXcomm's Java applets using SXML. The application was built to use AJAX whenever possible.
The software development process took advantage of the Extreme Programming methodology. This methodology encourages adapting to changing requirements at any point during the project life cycle, and is a more realistic than attempting to define everything in detail at the beginning of a project. Extreme Programming makes fixes and future development easier, particularly on short timeline projects.
The uXcomm application posed a hard problem. The organization needed a very complex application in a short amount of time. The initial application was delivered in four weeks, and the complete working version with in ten weeks, making uXcomm very satisfied with Concrete.
In July of 2005 Concrete the Studio featured an abstract expressionist who painted while listening to multiple audio sources playing at once. The sounds he surrounded himself with would affect the final palette and feel of his work, which is a phenomenon known as Synesthesia.
Private gifts to the University of Oregon are managed through the University of Oregon Foundation (Foundation), a private, nonprofit corporation. The Foundation consists of a staff of several dozen and a Board of Trustees who require frequent communication and collaboration.