The Antioch Development Blog

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Still Cooking...

It's been a long time since I last posted, but alas, AntiochWebHost.com suffers from the "Painter's House" syndrome... the painter is busy painting everyone's homes, but his own could really use a fresh coat...

It's a suprisingly busy time of year as companies are getting their budgets together and strategies for how to weather the economy in 2009.

The great news is that for the multi-family industry, things couldn't look better -- homebuying is at an all time low, and according to the laws of population expanse, there is always a developing need for housing... so new apartments, expansions to old apartments and continued marketing to get to that sweet 100% occupancy is directly influencing many of our clients.

So, Show Me What You've Done...

Okay! Since September, we've launched the following new sites:

General Web Sites:

www.fmysa.com - Flower Mound Youth Sports Association *
www.ggbcr.com - Global Green Building Commercial Realty *
www.musiciansacademy.us - Musician's Academy

* Subcontracted under Covenant Designs Label

Western Rim Property Services:

AND ...

We have a fresh, new look that is sizzling on the grill and almost ready for launch in conjunction with a rebrand of our site ... we'll soon be operating as 'Metroplex360.com' and refocusing our efforts exclusively on the Multi-Family Apartment & New Homes industry. It makes sense if you look at our portfolio!

Easy Room Planner v2.0 is nearing the first usable deployment - you can see a preview at the following link - please note, it's a preview, thus it's rough around the edges:

www.easyroomplanner.com/v2/

See pricing details at: www.easyroomplanner.com

PHOTO & VIRTUAL TOURS

We've setup a full portfolio of our work from 2008 at:

www.antiochwebhost.com/Photo.html

And current pricing and links to new Virtual Tour work (including Oaks at Bentwater! Check out their fantastic, coastal community with amazingly beautiful interiors that look like they are out of a Crate and Barrel magazine!):

www.antiochwebhost.com/360.html

SO WHERE ARE WE NOW?

We are currently developing the following sites:

www.mansionsprosper.com
www.estatesofcantera.com
www.landonhomesusa.com (Subcontracted for custom CMS work for their upcoming new site -- you won't see any of our work!)
www.southgateglen.com (New website pending contract ... video work ... photo work ... and more! )

AND ... we're currently talking to a new property management service concerning bringing 6 under-construction properties online with our full suite of solutions!

So look forward to our move to Metroplex360.com!

Thursday, September 11, 2008

What's Cooking...

Things have been extremely busy for us in August and September.

In August:

We've relaunched New Life Fellowship Church's website with a new, more open design with simplified navigation -- just in time to celebrate their 1 year anniversary! (www.nlifefellowship.org)

We launched the first of a series of 15 websites commissioned by Western Rim Property Services -- we're rehauling each of their property websites to a more simple, fully graphical look. This goes hand in hand with integrating our video productions, new photography and our new super high quality Virtual Tours!

You can see the first in the series at: www.towersattpc.com (for any SEO concious readers, please view the source of the page -- don't worry! Fully justifiable whitish-black hat optimization in place so that the search engines can index the text on the site.)

Speaking of Search Engine Optimization... we're also focusing on boosting our search engine rank and by proxy, that of our clients (because every site we do is linked on our site and every site links to us, so in theory, we're a giant, fully search engine acceptable link farm). I'm happy to report that searching for 'luxury apartments' on Yahoo! will bring up www.westernrim.com as the #5 result. How cool is that?

September So Far...

The second site in this big rehaul dropped last Friday at: www.mansionsatcanyonsprings.com and I've been poking and prodding the site since then to fix up any small little areas of concern. This site differs from the Towers at TPC in that content is available for all of the site's pages including Virtual Tours (which I will be replacing in October because they are just NOT up to our new standards), Photos (which will also be replaced - they've opened up their 13,000 square foot clubhouse to residents and we're excited about showing this off on the website) and also including our Easy Room Planner software (which I need to get finished up for the Towers at TPC website.

I'm working on the third right now ... the second took a while as the prototype that provides the foundation for the other sites needed to be worked on and made generic enough to fit all of the sites in any way that it could (generic without compromising each site's individual look ... a format can and should be shared, but all content and artwork should look unique)

More fun with Search Engine Optimization... I resubscribed to SoloSEO (www.soloseo.com), which is a good SEO Project Management Application ... but I'm a bit frustrated with it... I just want something to monitor the exact stats that I see as important benchmarks of my progress with sites... so... if I don't already have too many projects going on at once, I've started on my own little SEO Management Web Project: SEOlog. Haven't checked to see if this name is taken - hope it isn't. The main point of SEOLog is to check in to all useful statistics to an SEO campaign such as PageRank, Inlinks, Alexa Rank, Compete Rank, and several other factors -- and to actually automatically get this information on a daily basis and store it into a database. Saves me time and allows me to focus on more important things! I've only thrown about 4 hours into it so far, but I have the basic database structure up with code in place to get the Google PR, Yahoo Inlinks, Alexa Rank and a few other bits ... hopefully I'll have more time on this in the next week... it's going to save a lot of time and for the life of me, I cannot understand why someone hasn't already made a simple logger. The closest things are Firefox plugins that are available at SeoBook.com... but they just don't do exactly what I'd like =)...

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We'll be travelling to San Antonio, Tyler and Rockport this month to shoot 6 new videos and have 6 photo shoots at multi-family communities owned by Western Rim and Capstone Real Estate Services.

I have a few projects going at once right now... it's crunch time.

There's my rambling done for the week.

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Random Things:

Texas Weather = Frusterating for Outdoor Photography

Google Chrome was released. What an absolutely fantastic browser... there's a comic on their website that explains why it's so great. Now, if only I could get my SEO tools for it (or finish my automated SEOlog app) and a built in HTML validator ... then I could replace Firefox fully... which I wouldn't mind doing considering how v3.0 is not very stable for me...

Sweet Tomatoes has opened in Las Colinas, which is one of the single most important things to happen this month for myself, my family, and fans of ridiculously fresh, delicious soup and salad buffets

I ordered a new DELL Laptop. Or rather, my wife said that she had logged into my DELL account and clicked on the 'buy' button as I needed the notebook and wouldn't do it myself. After becoming emotionally attached to the notion, she revealed that she was going to, but wouldn't've clicked the button without talking to me ... and thus, you have someone who has manipulated me into buying myself something that I need but was hesitant to buy. That's brilliant.

Monday, August 4, 2008

Welcome to the Antioch Interactive Media Blog!

Welcome to the Antioch Interactive Media Blog!

This blog will provide a way for us to informally communicate to clients and visitors about the different projects that we're working on with samples and other great ideas!

We look forward to updating this blog and keeping everyone in the loop!