The Infront Blog

We are happy to announce that we are moving office locations! We've been searching high and low across Colorado Springs and found a great spot on the North East side of town on Academy Blvd. You may be familiar with the location: we'll be on the second floor of the north building in the Emerald Plaza office complex, right across the street from the Target near Montebello/Academy, and right next door to the "Texas T-Bone Steakhouse."

Earlier this week, I gave a talk at a Business Growth Summit that I titled "Beyond SEO: What to do with Your Website Visitors." It was a really fun event and I had more people attend my session than I expected, which was great. I shared a lot of information during the presentation, and had a videographer record the entire talk, but that won't be ready for a few days. So in the meantime, I wanted to post here a checklist that I shared with the audience at the talk: a checklist to help you make sure your website doesn't suck.

This is part two in a series of three blog posts called "The Melody Fusion Story." We are excited to announce that we have finally launched the Melody Fusion website! It's an online band promotion website where musicians can create a free account to spread the word about their music, increase their following, and connect with other musicians.

Is your business seasonal at all? Sometimes we build websites for businesses whose websites see seasonal spikes in traffic, and it's always important to make sure that we're prepared for those sudden traffic increases.

Working in the web design field is wonderful. Nearly everything we do is electronic, so we're not constrained by traditional barriers to business such as shipping costs, geographic limits, sales taxes, fuel prices, and other challenges when selling "physical products."

Did you watch the Super Bowl TV commercials? Watch as this video explains one of the biggest benefits that television ads just can't compete with.

When we have intital discussions with potential website clients, one thing we always talk about is our Content Management System (CMS), called SiteWorks. SiteWorks is a CMS we built ourselves using an open source web development framework called Ruby on Rails (often shortened to "RoR").

People who aren't familiar with web development ususally say something like "Ruby what?" with a chuckle, because it sounds like a cross between candy and an amusement park ride. People who are already familiar with web development will also ask about it, but the question they ask is "Why Ruby on Rails?"

At Infront, we preach that the "findability" of a website is one of the three critical elements of a successful website - you MUST factor in effort and budget to make your website "findable". For many websites, Search Engine Optimization is one of the most effective strategies for getting visitors to a website. But people keep asking me why it's so expensive. Here's why.

Over Labor Day weekend, a big event took place in Colorado Springs that drew hundreds of people from all over the country, and even a few people from outside the country—the Colorado Balloon Classic. The Balloon Classic is an annual hot air balloon festival that just celebrated its 36th year, and is the longest continuously-running hot air balloon festival in Colorado. The Balloon Classic group also happens to be an Infront client: we built their website (www.balloonclassic.com). They are a great bunch of folks, and we've really enjoyed being a major sponsor of the event for several years.

I can't tell you how many websites we've built that were amazingly beautiful (credible) and functional (usable) and that failed miserably.  The client came to us with a great idea - something unique, useful and IN DEMAND! People wanted what they had to deliver!  But still the site failed.

Cloud computing is one of the least understood, but most widely used services on the internet today. The cloud is used by people both at work, at home, in their cars, and anywhere else an internet connected smartphone is used. So, what is the cloud really? What's it's history? How does it work? How is it used? Read on to have these questions and more answered.

We all hear the hype about content these days. The popular saying "Content is King" can be heard ringing from many a marketing blog and Content Strategist has become a very real profession. Content is good for your users, good for SEO and it's the "meat" of a website. So it seems strange to me that I often go into design kickoffs where the website content hasn't yet been considered... at all.

At Infront Webworks, we've been building websites for 18 years. Over this time, the company has grown and changed significantly. These days, we don't just build websites; we design them, build them, and market them. Late last year, we began work for a new client that has one of the more ambitious projects we've seen: they wanted to create an online community for musicians where people can upload their songs, share information about the band, and sell their music online. Since it's still under development, we can't give away all their secrets, but I wanted to share our process for helping them brand the website and choose the right domain name.