Musings of Eric Sharp

Assisted on a product photo shoot yesterday evening for a new project that’s beginning to kick at CG.

Very exciting stuff, on many levels – yet this is all I can provide at this stage. Sorry ya’all. ;)

Yes, I am a thumb model on the weekends.

Call my agent if you want to book.

As observed in previous posts, the travel bug consumed me in month of July. Between my cabin trip to Wisconsin, and my annual fam reunion in Illinois, it took a lot of my time and concentration to plan and setup. Though we were able to get our CaxiamGroup.com site out the door (which was imperative & monumental) in July, we were between a lot of different projects and no new clients had stepped through the door. That was then, this is now.

August 2006, wow do things change in a month. We’re on the verge of obtaining, or have already signed contracts with, 6 new clients. One of those companies found our new Caxiam Group site through google, compared us to other Orlando Web companies, setup a meeting, flew in from NY for a meet & greet, and were ready to rock 2 weeks later. These guys knew what they wanted, and we stood out from the crowd. Mission accomplished. So, on top of this new work and existing updates/enhancements for current clients, we learned that Will (a core team member) is leaving us at the end of the month. His new company is not a competitor of ours in any way, shape, or form and this opportunity represents an amazing vertical career move for Will. We are all very happy for him and he’s leaving on the best of terms. As a friend, we are sad to see him leave – as he’s been there through some serious company evolvement. Ethan and I are trying make the transition as painless as it can be by expediting the application and interview process from Full Sail prospects. Hopefully that someone will be able to step in and keep us afloat during this very fragile period. We’re embarking on new territory here, so we’ll see where we stand early next month.

As our company and this vision keeps growing, we’ve really felt the need to improve an array of internal tools. Our marketing presence is somewhat established with our new site, but internally we recognized that our backoffice suite needed an overhaul. This not only included a creative revamp, but the entire core needed re-written and built from the ground up so that it would cater to custom sites (our specialty). This is the whole nine yards people. Some may not exactly understand the complexity of this, but for us, it’s a whole new platform for our services & products. The concept itself isn’t ground breaking from an industry standpoint, it’s just another step in the right direction for us. LOTS of work, but with LOTS of reward when finished.

Last weekend I decided to just dive right into it, and by the time the weekend was over, I was pushing 20+ hours on this project. I focused on establishing our Caxiam brand with the shell design, integrated some kick butt iconography, and kept in mind all along that it must account for growth and expansion – which was tricky at times. We’re into development now (I think), and about ready to integrate a couple new clients into the system (I think). I guess I should check in with our team before I promise deliverables to my blog readers. ha.

It’s all very exciting, have a look for yourself below.

Parrish Medical Center has officially branched some of their marketing into their local public transportation.

Though we didn’t design the actual vinyl layout for the bus, we DID have to re-create the homepage of the website in a colossal resolution so that it could be used in this type of printing format. Billboards throughout the Titusville area and East coast are next in line I believe.

We’ve been pretty heavily involved with some Parrish enhancements lately. The backoffice/content mgt. requests just keep coming, and they also are very proactive with their marketing appeal with little apps like this above. It’s nothing fancy, just a subtle animation outlining some maternity testimonials. They have a full advertising campaign around these testimonials as well, so they of course wanted to integrate it somehow onto the site.

Check it out

I just love this client. They are so extremely easy to work with that at times, it just doesn’t seem feasible to have such a dynamite client. They enjoy periodic enhancements, fresh ideas, and possess irregular insight (for a client) into quality and the time commitments to achieve that level of quality.

The CG (how I reference Caxiam Group from now on) team has experienced some vigorous growth over the last month.

We’ve landed an enormous contract with a fabric distributor up in Ohio and have a multitude of other large projects on the boards. This has enabled us to officially add onto our core team this past Monday. This is very exciting, but becomes a double-edged sword for me towards the end of Summer as these current projects get finalized. With 2 programmers on board, it looks as though the bottle neck will shift from development/programming, to creative. That’s trouble as we take on more and more work, sorta.

Don’t let that confuse you – our goal IS to grow, get more projets, more recognition, and so forth. The more quality team members we have, the faster we can get projects done, which then opens the cycle to produce more work and ignites company growth. Fairly simple concept, but it’s quickly becoming a reality in multiple areas in which requires some initial planning. It’s easy to talk and discuss conceptually, we’re pros at that without a doubt. But, the challenge relies in actually finding a quality individual that works within budgets, our team chemistry, and can contribute to the type of work in the queue. We’ve become quite aware of how difficult this can be over the last few weeks. We’re confident that this new Caxiam Group member will carry us through these projects and bring us up another notch. We’re all extremely pleased that he’s on board as he continues his training.

…Ha, who am I kidding? We’re more pumped that we can finally have 2 vs 2 matches in Half-Life than anything! :)

Anyways, here are a couple snapshots of what’s been happenin’ lately. I wish I could post more, but most of the work is sensitive to some confidentiality agreements. Basically, the clients don’t want us to reveal anything to prevent their competition from sneakin’ any peeks pre-launch.

Custom designed logo for an online sports betting company here in Florida:

Screengrab of the site, currently in development:

Company from NJ, who will actually be in the CG office in 2 weeks. We’re building this custom software app from the ground up. The client simply loves the design, I think they approved it in a matter of 5 minutes upon the design review. Integrating the iconography schema for this project has been the highlight thus far.

A current client of ours came to us last year, in need of another site – this time an e-commerce solution to sell his architectural plans. It’s a fairly clean, to-the-point type of site with not a whole lot of glitz and glamour. But, none the less, was challenging and took careful structuring and user interface tweaks here and there.