Today is the last day you can register to attend the 2nd annual Biz Tech Expo! As the area’s largest Business to Business conference, this year’s event will include a variety of educational topics and seminars, a presentation luncheon with two impressive keynote speakers, and the ability to network with tons of successful local businesses. The conference will be held at the Wilmington Convention Center this Thursday, January 26th from 12-7 pm.

Sage Island has been given a special discount code just for our Facebook fans and customers, so if you are in the area and want to attend,  register with the code: sagebiztech. This waives the $5 entry fee to attend both the Expo and the after hours event. We hope to see you there!

In early 2011 we were tasked with the challenge to rebuild both SeaDek.com & SeaDekStore.com into one seamless, streamlined website. Today I’m pleased to announce we have successfully completed this project and you can view the new and improved site here.

Built in both ASPDotNetStorefront and WordPress, this site is a beast in itself and includes a wide range of functionality:

• The Home page features a rotating JavaScript, Embedded YouTube video, Blog Feed, Flickr Feed and a Constant Contact Email Opt-in
• The Products section of the site is custom per product category and some product categories include multiple price changing drop down options. Each product contains a Facebook Like and Addthis Share, as well as an overview, installation instructions, features, color options, photos, videos and return policy.
• The Photos section of the site includes a Flickr Embedded thumbnail view of photos in the WordPress platform. It brings up a neat lightbox/ajax when clicking to enlarge the thumbnail.
• The Videos section of the site utilizes a third party tool allowing us to dynamically feed in videos uploaded to SeaDek’s YouTube channel.
• The News section of the site is a WordPress Blog. We imported old posts (3 year’s worth) from client’s old blog (previously Blogger) into WordPress, and skinned this blog to look like the new website.
• The site’s storefront is fully manageable and integrates with a UPS account for shipping calculations

We all came together as a team to make this site possible and it was such a joy working with SeaDek! Overall the client is very pleased with the results thus far and has hit the ground running in editing the site and keeping content and product information up to date. Be sure to check out the new site when you get a chance!

New Site:

Original Site:

We are looking forward tothis year’s Biz Tech Conference/Expo on January 26th at the Wilmington Convention Center!

The event is the region’s largest business-to-business conference and this year’s agenda is packed with seminars, excellent keynote speakers (PPD founder Fred Eshelman & former NC Governor Jim Hunt), and will include a ton of local exhibitors.  If you are in the area, we invite you to register with our special BizTech discount code. This waives your $5 entry fee to attend the BizTech Expo and AfterHours- both great networking events.

Visit the Biz Tech website and use the code: sagebiztech (This code will only work until Monday, January 23^rd so register soon.)

Sage Island will be in booth #203. Stop by and see us!

We hope everyone is settling back in from a busy holiday season and tackling January 2012 with all you got!

The first few weeks of the new year have been busy ones for us. We’ve already hit up Surf Expo, an action sports tradeshow in Orlando that is near in dear to our heart–  they are both a client of ours and the hub of all things action sports for a lot of our customers! We have kicked off many new projects on a local level that we are can’t wait to share with you. A few ecommerce projects are underway, a favorite local hangout is getting a website facelift, and we have been fortunate enough to receive several real estate and developer clients this month- an excellent indicator for our local economy. Stay tuned for more details!

We feel so fortunate to be starting off the year with such a bang, and are anxious to see what the year will bring. Our resolution is to continue to stay ahead of the trend in terms of cutting edge marketing and design technologies, and bring you the best products and service possible. Here’s to a great 2012!

Sage Island is known for their edgy, innovative websites, and while we love creating websites for any industry, recently what was REALLY exciting was developing a mobile site property search for Century 21 Sweyer & Associates.

Now that everyone has smart phones these days, having a mobile site (not to be confused with a mobile friendly site), is crucial. Seeing how Century 21 is in the real estate industry, it was very important to the client to include a mobile site focusing on the property search. Now, instead of accessing the full site on a smart phone, we jump right into what people want to access: the property search–complete with search options, summary pages and detail pages.

Check out the mobile property search with your smart phone! Keep in mind you will only be redirected to this search if using a smart phone.

Below is a fun, parody of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, written in Sage Island jargon! Enjoy and happy holidays!

‘Twas the night before a site launch, when all through Sage,
The whole production team was working in quite the rage.
The site was designed, and built with care,
In hopes to drive many business leads there.

The meta data was nestled, all snug in the right spot.
While visions of qualified traffic danced as a marketing thought.
And the SEM team had on their thinking caps,
Of just how to bring in qualified traffic, and not traffic crap.

When out in the hosting department arose such a clatter,
The whole team sprang from their chairs to see what was the matter.
Away to Stuart and Brandon they flew in a flash,
Only to find out the server had temporarily crashed.

Not to worry, we were told, it will be fixed A-S-A-P.
Then the site was back up, and everyone jumped with glee!
When, what to our marketing eyes do we see,
But an awesome launched site, functional with J-Query.

Built in a content management system, so lively and slick,
We knew at the moment, our marketing skills did the trick!
More rapid than eagles, the qualified traffic then came,
And Google analytics was tracking, calling keywords by name!

Now Conversions! Now Pageviews! Now Bounce Rate! Now Unique Visits!
On Referring Sites! On Traffic Sources! On Time on Site! And on New Visits!
To the top of organic search! To the top of the search wall!
Now, convert away! Convert away! Convert away all!

And then, in a twinkling moment, we read from our stats,
Our hard work paid off and we were due a “congrats!”.
For the site was truly a success, increasing that ROI,
The client was pleased (and we were, too—we won’t lie).

And we smiled proudly, but went straight back to work.
We filled out our timesheets, then turned with a jerk–
We heard the phone ring, a potentially new client we hear…
Another project to start, with a deadline so near!

So we sprang to our computers, and to our team gave a whistle,
And away we all worked like the down of a thistle.
And you’ll hear us exclaim, as we dove into our new, fun, project task,
“Thank you for your business. If you ever need marketing services, you need to just ask!’