I am proud to announce Mitra Creative’s win of two 2010 MARCOM CREATIVE AWARDS, including a MarCom Platinum Award. We received the awards for our work for Nurture Marketing (formerly the Nurture Institute). 

READ THE PRESS RELEASE HERE 

With this year’s wins, Mitra Creative now has two MarCom Platinum Awards (2010 and 2009), and three MarCom Gold Awards (2010, 2009, and 2007). Thank you to everyone on our team for your brilliance, and a huge note of thanks goes to Nurture Marketing and our clients for making these wins possible!

It is always a challenge to justify the price of web design and development when clients want special features. Today’s climate is one of an aggressive buyer’s mid-market, where prospective clients who ask for estimates for website builds will often negotiate project prices with interactive agencies down to the bare minimum of profitability with the threat of using low cost templated offerings or individual contractors with limited experience instead. When digital agencies possessing experience in producing high quality work are successful in winning deals with clients for fair prices, more often than not the clients expect the agencies — even when a very clear scope of work is produced — to design and build every customization, every toolset, every other feature “in their heads” because they have “given them so much money” to design their website, and provide post-support (often very complex post-support) for free.

We at Mitra Creative, like all agencies, have experienced similar circumstances. We are truly grateful to win the business, and support the needs, of our clients, but we often work very hard to educate them on how sometimes even their smallest perceived requests for custom features are not “so small.” In that light, related to something very different yet very much the same, check out this article from today’s edition of “The Wall Street Journal” (via “Yahoo! Real Estate”), entitled “A Dream House’s Difficult Birth,” by Nancy Keates, of WSJ.com. It tells of a couple’s pursuit to have their dream house built their way, and the impact of custom requirements on the budget of a project. Though people frequently perceive interactive projects differently, websites of true uniqueness, that differentiate brand and function not only properly but with tools, visuals and language that help to reduce the time of sales cycles, speed delivery of information/data to users and to the company that hires the agency (e.g. performance data), show up higher in placement in general and local search on Google, Bing, Yahoo! and other search engines, and are secure and stable, come at a higher cost than often useless templates, and with measurably skilled labor. If new features are to be built, or if ongoing support is required, they too require, time, skill and attention, and agencies should be remunerated for their efforts.

Mark Feldberg and Emilyn Page’s Carmel home. (Photo from the Wall Street Journal by Mark Feldberg.)

We at Mitra Creative are proud to announce our latest achievement–the creation of a new brand and progressive new website for NURTURE MARKETING (Nurturemarketing.com). Nurture Marketing (formerly the Nurture Institute), is a full-service marketing agency that offers a broad spectrum of traditional and non-traditional services (lead generation, communications, direct mail, e-mail campaigns, assessments and planning, branding, training and meeting facilitation), as well as a highly-developed platform of channel marketing services (they have built comprehensive programs for Microsoft, Nokia, and others).

The concept of Nurture Marketing was originated more than 20 years ago by the company’s co-founder and one of its senior partners, Jim Cecil. It focuses on combining good marketing principles with the nurturing of prospects and customers to dramatically increase sales revenues. Today, Nurture Marketing is not only a set of best practices, but also the name of a powerhouse of a company, led by Jim, and the company’s other partners, Eric Rabinowitz (Jim’s co-author on the successful books, “Nurturing Customer Relationships,” and “101 Business Love Letters“), Barbara Pfeiffer, and Jennifer Herold-Garcia. They believe in, and now ARE, Nurture Marketing.

We were invited to bring our business expertise, award-winning design acumen, and our technical expertise to the task of taking an objective look at the former Nurture Institute, and now (with the new branding), Nurture Marketing’s visual brand and web presence and uplift and modernize it–in keeping with Nurture’s progressive offerings and recent, significant growth. We took the company’s now-previous brand assets and revitalized them with a fresh, forward-looking visual sensibility. We also built a new website for Nurture from scratch — approach, design, development — utilizing a modernized, easy-to-use content management system framework, powerful, provocative 21st Century aesthetics, and a true Web 2.0/3.0-and-beyond information architecture. For example, we put Nurture’s Blog at the center of the site’s Homepage, enabling a “living dialogue” with prospects, clients, and business partners, and tying together follower and consumer communities.

Nurture Marketing’s management team is thrilled with the results. According to Eric Rabinowitz, “Thanks to the design, creative, and implementation team at Mitra Creative, we now have a magnificent new brand and website that reflect the quality of our work, and our service to our customers.” We are thrilled to have been given the opportunity to serve this wonderful company and team!

Mitra Creative is proud to announce our 2010 update of RickyLizalde.com, the website that we produced to showcase the fashion lingerie line of designer, Ricky Lizalde (of “Project Runway” Season 4). The revised design highlights Ricky’s exciting new 2010 collection.

We want to thank Ricky for his continued work with us!

Mitra Creative is proud to announce the launch of a new website for DEEP RIVER TECHNOLOGIES, a Greensboro, North Carolina-based Microsoft® Managed and Certified Partner. Deep River’s specialization is in providing real-world business solutions surrounding the Microsoft® Dynamics® NAV ERP software suite to clients in the Consumer Packaged Goods, Industrial Equipment and Medical Device manufacturing, distribution, warehousing and sales disciplines, as well as others.

VISIT THE NEW DEEP RIVER TECHNOLOGIES WEBSITE BY CLICKING HERE.

• Deep River’s new site was produced as part of a complete re-branding/corporate identity effort for the company, including a renaming (they were formerly known as SoftBytes LLC).
• Among the virtues of the rebranding is the highlight of the Deep River team’s core values, the ways in which they engage with their clients (creating true long-term relationships), their extensive knowledge of the vertical industries to which they provide solutions, the ways they use the Microsoft software suite to solve business problems by industry and by their clients’ roles.

Illustration of the SoftBytes LLC Website Home Page (the client’s former website)

• Mitra Creative collaborated on the entire initiative with The Nurture Institute™, an innovative, forward-thinking marketing solution provider and think-tank that founded and delivers the Microsoft® Partner Essentials marketing program and the Microsoft® Partner Marketing Roundtables.
• The new, fully Web 2.0-enabled website encompasses Deep River’s new name, logo, messaging, as well as uplifted, professionalized visual branding and fresh new written content, and is supported by a custom-programmed/implemented content management system (CMS) and database framework.
• While the Deep River team will continue to engage both Mitra Creative and The Nurture Institute for projects comprising the website (development of new graphics, new site modules, etc.) and other marketing, branding and promotional efforts, they will be self-empowered through the use of the CMS to keep fresh across the site text content, material downloads, embedded video and audio clips, simple graphics, and much more.