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July 2008 News

Despite it being the middle of the summer vacation season we have seen lots of activity in both design and search marketing areas. In particular there are several new entrepreneur driven website design projects that proves there is still life in this economy. One of the most exciting opportunities has been our strategic alliance with Conversion Associates. They will be providing advanced analytics and lead tracking for our online clients.

Some new projects we worked on this month were Zoe Foods, Sensibuilt, Uncommon Productions; American Violet movie site; Price of Sugar movie site; Crusade movie site and the new Boston Mutual public website. Most notable was the online campaign for Zoe Foods that resulted in a doubling of their email subscriptions and a 100-fold increase in traffic in less than two weeks.

New projects scheduled for the remaining months of the summer are Thrive Networks, Spine Universe, and several new movie sites. Our team also launched Harvard's JLICA website, Blu Homes' website, Guaranteach's innovative teaching platform and Journey Page's amazing application this month.

June 2008 News

The summer is heating up and so is the debate between traditional development and rapid prototyping. We've had a lot of questions about this topic so we have a few new blog postings that will hopefully shed some light on the subject. As expected, we are also seeing a lot of activity in the areas of 'green' and 'social' awareness. It's encouraging to see these new companies rising to the environmental and social issues facing us all. The summer has also brought some great new clients to Fresh Tilled Soil. The latest additions are Harvard's JLICA, S.E.V.en's Pioneers of Prosperity, Guaranteach, Pro-Hub, KMC Partners, Zintro and Infante Sano.

April 2008 News

At the high school I attended we’d frequently orchestrate seemingly random events to disrupt the class. One superb example was when a nervous substitute teacher was on duty and we staged an imaginary fire drill. On the mark, one of the boys would leap up and shout “fire”, which resulted in a well-prepared evacuation of the classroom. These events appear entirely random but clearly need to be choreographed to be successful. The same is true for achieving search-marketing success in social networks. The appearance of a seemingly arbitrary article on the front page of Digg is hardly ever a mistake. Take a look at how to achieve results on user generated social network sites. This month we add a few new clients to the roster. Mint Houses, Threadsmith, Teach for America and Microsoft. We also have new marketing projects for the S.E.V.en Fund, OliveNation, EnerNOC and Inviting Home.

March, 2008

It's been another terrific month of positive changes and new business. We're delighted to be adding Microsoft to our client roster, with a cutting edge social networking project that will launch later in the next quarter. To learn more about the social networking optimization techniques we are using to get our clients noticed take a look at our blog. Some of the other exciting clients we have added are FirstDIBZ, WebNotes, SPEC Engineering, Wiser Together, Zintro, and FreeGreen. Existing clients that have started new web design or SEO are Newpro and Boston University's Center for Design and Imaging Arts.

We've seen a spike in traffic to our site especially around the topic of rapid web prototyping. If you're wondering how rapid prototyping works read this recent posting on our blog or browse the recent articles in our Publications section.

February, 2008

One of the best parts of working on new designs is that we see the latest ideas from cutting edge entrepreneurs before the public does. This gives us the insight of a trend spotting team and keeps us on a very steep learning curve. Some of the latest new clients to keep us on our toes are HousePass, BenchFly, 4CLimited, Olivenation.com, BetterTogether and EnerNOC. Keep your eyes open for big things from these companies. We also are working on the personal site of Charles L. Harper,Executive Director and Senior Vice President of the John Templeton Foundation. Some of our existing clients doing re-designs are Phillips Candy House and The Holland Companies.

Towards the end of 2007 we launched the SE.VEN Fund site, which grants funding to innovative enterprise poverty solutions. The fund has been an instant success and nothing tells that story better than this snapshot from Compete.com.

Not bad for a newcomer to a very exciting new socioeconomic sector.

January, 2008

Happy New Year to all of you. Based on the current workload in our studio it looks like its going to be a busy and exciting year. Thanks to our amazing clients we grew by 300% in 2007 and it already looks like we'll be doing the same again in 2008.

We recently launched the totally overhauled Newpro and Building Engines websites. Watch out too for new ThingMagic and Isis Maternity launches soon. We have also added several new clients recently. Some of those that are not in stealth mode are Swift, Wedding Wire, The Farmington Company, Corporate Telephone services, Best Student Help, and The François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University. We're also very excited to be working on new projects with First Marblehead in conjunction with AMP Agency here in Boston.

Our SEO team have also had enormous success with our social networking optimization campaigns. In a recent project for Beau-Coup Wedding Favors we generated over 2,500 diggs, 100,000+ unique visitors and 300 back-links in a 48 hour campaign.

December, 2007

Fresh Tilled Soil Co-Founder Alex Fedorov named in "7 Young VARs to Watch" on Channel Web Network.

November, 2007

This is crazy season for our retail clients as they deal with Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the onslaught of shoppers to their sites. There is some interesting research that points to the fact that December 12th and 13th are actually bigger spending days for online shoppers. Tiny Prints, our favorite greeting card client, is offering a special on several of their packages through one of our other client's sites, Bobby's Best.

We were recently speaking to Harvard's ABCD group, which is an association of all the designers at the Harvard schools. The topic was Happy Design and we discussed the advantages of Rapid Prototyping and it's positive influences. In line with our ongoing design education we've also launched a series of small websites entitled How To Guides for Designers. These short guides will help other designers learn from our experiences in growing our studio into a million dollar business in just two short years.

November saw us adding several new clients which are all in super-stealth mode as they approach the new year. Looks like it's going to be a busy holiday season for our designers. Happy Holidays to you all!

October, 2007

New England looks spectacular this time of year. Even the unseasonably warm days are not dissuading the trees from showing off. This year has seen lots of positive changes and consistent growth in the design and search marketing areas. One of the newer services we offered this year was Web Usability Testing for websites and web based applications. The popularity of this service has been keeping us very busy and keeping our clients informed as to the effectiveness of their web properties. Many of you have asked us for more information on these web usability services so we’ve added some information to the site for you to read.

Some of the new clients to join us this autumn season are ThingMagic, Cambridge Innovation Center, Isis Maternity, ACCION International and Commonwealth Ventures. We also recently launched new design projects for GotVMail and the prestigious MIT 100K competition.

On the SEO front we saw new advances into the top three positions on the results pages for Tiny Prints, Newpro, Wedding Paper Divas, Beau-coup and Inviting Home. If you are wondering if your rankings could be improved please let us know and we’ll run a quick report to see where the opportunities and threats exist.

August/September, 2007

The summer was a chance for our internal projects to get some attention and come out of hiding. If you’re interested in finding out how to improve your site's search engine ranking, download our free ebook: Get Found: The simplest, fastest path to higher returns from your search engine marketing efforts.

Some of the recent projects we have launched are GiftZinger, Blue Water Septic and Collegiate Link. We’ve also added a few more clients to the studio like GotVMail, The Orchid List, First Marblehead, Union Federal Savings Bank, Umagination, and The S.E.VEN Fund.

Our search marketing team has had some big wins this month getting Newpro Replacement Windows to # 3 and Wedding Paper Divas to #1 on Google!

This month we also moved into our new offices in Wellesley to accommodate our growing team and centralize some of our services. It’s great to have the extra space to expand. We’ll be having a office warming party soon so our clients and partners can get to enjoy a cocktail or two with us soon.

June, 2007

One of the best parts of working here is getting to work on cutting edge sites with creative and progressive clients. Take a look at Cwerty and Greendeavor for example. Cwerty is changing the way entrepreneurs and executives get the best practice secrets from the most successful business people out there while Greendeavor is making being environmentally conscious fun and rewarding. We’ve also just launched the new MIT 100k site sporting an all new logo. Now that we are launching their marketing campaigns, everybody gets the chance to change gears and come out of stealth mode. Some of the search engine marketing clients that have joined is are Beau Coup Wedding Favors and Wedding Paper Divas. Thanks to everyone who made this a very exciting and enjoyable month.

May, 2007

You know you’re busy when you get an email telling you to update your news page! Well, here goes. This has been a terrific year so far. With the launch of several projects and the addition of a dozen more, we couldn’t be happier. Some of the noteworthy new projects are a new user interface for GE Healthcare’s Centricity application, application development for Politico.com and search optimization for Lawline.

March, 2007

You know you’re busy when you get an email telling you to update your news page! Well, here goes. This has been a terrific year so far. With the launch of several projects and the addition of a dozen more, we couldn’t be happier. Some of the noteworthy new projects are a new user interface for GE Healthcare’s Centricity application, application development for Politico.com and search optimization for Lawline and Collegeboxes. We also launched the American Brewery Lofts site and marketing campaign this month.

This quarter we have also expanded our services to include custom Affiliate Programs for online retailers and communities to manage their internal affiliate marketing programs. These programs include both the web applications required to track the affiliate sales and the business development services required to build the specific business relationships needed to market the programs.

We’re pleased to announce new design and search projects with Inviting Home, Edvisors, Priority Leasing and the France-based patent experts Intellectual Property and Take-Out.

January, 2007

Can you believe it’s almost February already? This year has started with a bang. We’ve added a handful of new clients and launched some truly awesome projects. HeartScreen America launched last week and have started screening clients up and down the east coast with the application we built for them. Some of the newcomers are Harvard Vanguard, Greendeavor, ExpoTV, Newpro and London based 50Lessons.

Our clients have been taking advantage of our usability studies and search engine optimization solutions. It’s very rewarding to see their sites go from the sixtieth page on Google to the first page in just a few weeks.

We’re also very proud to announce that we’ll be working with the MIT 100k Competition organizers to launch their new site. If you’re in the Boston area and would like to meet us come to either the Web Innovators Group meeting on the 30th January at the Royal Sonesta Hotel Cambridge or to the MIT Enterprise Forums Brave New Web event on the 7th February where we’ll be presenting our Referral Monitor product.

December, 2006

I thought I'd beat the holiday madness and post some news at the beginning of the month. We reached another milestone today by adding our 70th project to the production list this year. We've expanded our services to help our existing clients move their projects forward. In addtion to web optimization we have always offered with our websites we are offering an enhanced set of search engine optimization and marketing services. Several of our clients are already taking advantage of this including Phillips Candy House, Holland Construction and others.

This month we will also be hosting a SEO/M workshop at our new offices at the CIC in Cambridge. We'll post the details on our blog.

November, 2006

October and November have been banner months with the launch of the Startup Business School and adding another several new clients to the fold. We also got Knover launched and finished off big projects with Harvard's School of Public Health, World Granite Source, and Tycoon Systems (makers of the hugely popular Industry Player). Locally based College Boxes have asked us to rebuild their website and intranet. Dharmesh Shah's HubSpot is another project we're working on. Soon it'll be a whole new site but in the meantime read Dharmesh's blog. It's awesome!

If you've ever wondered what a bunch of high school kids do with a box of robot parts, then check out Boston First. This nationwide program is the brain child of Dean Kamen and Steve Wozniak.

June, 2006

We're very excited to be working with Retention Engine on a new client project for Schering-Plough. Our focus will be to build a web-based application to simplify the tasks of planning, tracking, managing and reporting on several of the complex recruitment processes currently used in their organization.

Fresh Tilled Soil is happy to be supporting the development of new website for The Boston University Center for Design and Imaging Arts. We will be executing the development in XHTML and CSS based on the stylish designs of renowned Boston Graphic Artist Jonathan Sachs and installing a custom build of our FullControl Content Administration platform.

The TIECON East presentation was a success. Fresh Tilled Soil CEO Richard Banfield presented a workshop centered around Social Networking as a viable business development tactic to a crowd of several hundred.

May, 2006

Our recent redesign of Referral Monitor is in preparation for a public launch of this clever little web application. The tool that is aimed at small to medium sized business that want to track their referral and word-of-mouth marketing is priced perfectly to be affordable for even the littlest business. Referral Monitor already has its first customers and will no doubt be a big hit with many more.

TIECON East is one of the biggest entrepreneurial conferences in the world and we are excited to have been invited to present a workshop on networking at this year’s event. The keynote speaker is the UN’s Secretary-General Kofi Annan and he’ll be joined by luminaries such as Clayton M. Christensen of the Harvard Business School . Our partner on You Should Meet, Rajesh Setty will be on the panel alongside us. We hope to see many more of our friends there.

April, 2006

In April we added Lawline, Way Systems, BingoRama, PawSpot and a few other soon to be announced start-ups. Some of our most exciting user interface projects are under heavy wraps until they are completed. We’re bursting to show off these new projects but then we’d have to wiretap you. We also helped many of our existing clients like Office Playground, Designer Shoes and MagicBeans get their e-newsletters done.

March, 2006

March proved to be our best month this year with several new clients and projects being added to our portfolio. We also launched Upscale Living and eRichards Consulting’s new websites. One of the best projects we worked on was David Schnurman’s TrueNYC, a website for entrepreneurs featuring interviews with some of the most exciting emerging businesses in New York , Boston and Miami. We’re looking forward to developing the next phase of the website with David and his team.

Harvard’s School of Public Health recently contracted us to build a content management system and ecommerce backend into a website they are designing for an upcoming conference. We’ll be integrating these systems into a design that their in-house design team has been working on for a few months. The release of the final site is scheduled for June.

Seattle’s Judy’s Book has engaged us to build several vertically focused websites that further their strategic goals. It’s been a fantastic experience working closely with their business and development teams to design the websites and develop usability features that capture their audience’s attention. This month we’ll be working on the main site as they expand their offerings and features.

Boston University’s Center of Digital Imaging Arts has graciously invited us to deliver a few special topic lectures to their web design classes. This has given us the chance to discuss some of the ideas that we are passionate about and learn from the newest generation of designers what matters to them.

February, 2006

February was a busy month for us. We added Supporting Strategies, Isis Maternity, New Boston Ventures, Coldwell Banker and Dataguide to our client list. Phew! These are exciting times for our small studio.