The Erickson Group is a high-end design and marketing shop based in Calgary, Alberta. They specialize in Medical/Dental marketing, though you wouldn’t guess that from their extremely diverse portfolio.

When The Erickson Group needed their new site converted from a Photoshop mockup to standards-compliant XHTML and CSS, they turned to us. We’ve worked on a few things together before, and this certainly isn’t the last you’re going to see of this partnership.

It doesn’t happen too often, but sometimes it just makes sense for our clients to run a little print ad campaign. Arbutus Cottage Spa on Mayne Island was looking to do a mail-out advertising their spring sale, and we were happy to help out.

This was a really fun site to work on as it was our first foray into tying into live real estate listings from the Victoria Real Estate Board. We brought RE/MAX over from a third-party system, with the goal of improving the experience of buyers and sellers on the site, and also to drastically improve their search engine rankings (so far so good).

As a new company, Dharma needed to establish it’s identity, and develop some materials to assist with their marketing at various shows and fairs.

We helped Dharma by developing a business card as well as taking some photos of their recent projects.

Postmark provides you with an API for sending mail from web applications.  You’re probably wondering why you’d want that, instead of just using an SMTP server — well, there’s a bunch of reasons, but not the least of which is that you don’t have to administer an SMTP server and getting blacklisted as a spammer, or worrying about patching software.  They’re in private beta at the moment, but if you ask nice on Twitter, they might just let you in.

The why isn’t the interesting part of this post though, the how is far more interesting.

HelpMeApp is built using Adobe’s ColdFusion.  No, ColdFusion isn’t open source, or the latest in trendy frameworks, but it is rock solid and has been delivering great performance for all of the API-related stuff we’re doing.  That said, Postmarkapp doesn’t have any sample code for ColdFusion developers (not that that’s a problem).  Postmark has one of the best APIs I’ve used in a while (they actually give you meaningful error messages when something goes wrong!), and it’s dead simple to use.

Enough fluff, here’s the code:


<cfset mailBody = #JSStringFormat(mailBody)#>
</cfset><cfset mailSubject = #JSStringFormat(mailSubject)#>
</cfset><cfset mailTo = #JSStringFormat(mailTo)#>

<cfhttp url="http://api.postmarkapp.com/email" method="POST">
<cfhttpparam type="header" name="Accept" value="application/json" />
<cfhttpparam type="header" name="Content-type" value="application/json" />
<cfhttpparam type="header" name="X-Postmark-Server-Token" value="*your token*" />
<cfhttpparam type="body" encoded="no" value="#jsonPacket#" />
</cfhttp>
</cfset>

That’s all there is to it. The only part that had us a little befuddled was the need to escape your text before sending it in JSON (not too experienced with JSON). But one of the great things with Postmark, is that they’ll send you back a meaningful error pointing you in the right direction as to where your error is (it will tell you something like Message: or To:). The rest is cake.

Update: Here’s a ColdFusion Component for doing the same thing. There’s a README file in the .zip archive too explaining how to use it.

Download PostmarkCFC (.zip, 4kb)

That’s a lot of technical speak, but the bottom line is that we’re ecstatic that we were given the opportunity to work with Cobworks on re-launching their site.  By all accounts, they’re pretty happy too…

We’re really excited to be working with Cobworks in re-desging and developing their web site.  Look for a launch announcement in the near future.

Me too!  Unfortunately our markets have wrapped up for the year.  Maybe you’re lucky, and your local market operates year-round, but even then it may only be one or two days of the week.

We’re working on a new project built on top of BuddyPress to help local consumers hook up with local producers.  Moveable Feast allows people to go on and fill out a profile.  Everyone identifies their locale down to the city/town/municipality level.  People can identify themselves as either a producer or as a consumer.

Producers can then fill out additional information about what they have available.  BuddyPress is extremely versatile, and the option is there for any user to create a blog, or to make short posts on their “wire” (kind of like a short-form blog).  Producers can elaborate on the food they have available, consumers may opt to blog about recipe options for various types of food, or offer kudos to local producers.

It’s in the early stages.  As with all communities, it will have to hit a critical mass in order to be useful to anyone.  We’re going to start actively promoting Moveable Feast on Mayne Island, and would encourage like-minded individuals in other places to do the same (it’s free for everyone).

Eric Erickson put together the design for this Calgary, Alberta-based moving and storage company. The goal was to update the look of their site, and to provide it with a great foundation to score well in search engines. We did both by semantically marking up the pages, and by re-organizing the URL structure.

The main goal of Dawson Photography was to create a web site that wouldn’t be impossible to maintain, and that would show off the tremendous portfolio of Lisa Dawson.  The various galleries can be updated simply by uploading photos by FTP (no need to mess with anything else), and setting up client preview galleries is a one-step process.