ProRanK Studios

J.D. Abrams, L.P. (Abrams) is a Highway Construction firm based in Austin, TX. Highway construction is an old industry that requires young blood on the front lines. The folks at Abrams knew that in order to attract those fresh faces, they needed to cast their recruiting net onto the World Wide Web.

ProRank Studios met with the executive team at Abrams to gather information and formulate the vision that Abrams had for their website. At first, Abrams didn't exactly understand the extent to which their website could drive potential future employees into their fold. After we gathered the business data and requirements the client had for the website, we knew exactly what they needed.

Aside from hiring new employees, the Abrams Company has two major functions: To bid on letting jobs, and to execute the jobs for which bids were won. Abrams' old static website had outdated sections displaying projects bidding and current projects with rarely-if-ever updated image galleries. Their IT team did not have the time to give the website the love it needed in addition to other tasks, so the responsibility had to fall on those with less technical skills. This was most definitely a job for the Camo CMS.

Camo was customized for Abrams to include sections for managing those projects. Abrams supplied organized data on quite literally all of their projects ever worked all the way back to 1966, their first year of operation, giving the site a sense of completeness and history. The CMS was created to allow for project data entry and image galleries associated individually to each project.

Camo was also customized to include a section for Projects Bidding. Abrams posts timely bid wins for sub-contractors to monitor so they can offer estimates on materials to Abrams as soon as bids are declared won.

Along with their "What's New?" section, all this frequently updated customized content breathes life into the Abrams site daily as the non-technical staff at the company are able to efficiently maintain the latest images and project data on their website without contacting their IT department or contracting web developers to do the work.

On to the primary goal: Recruiting. Abrams' wants the upcoming technical-minded generation as future engineers working for the company. Students can visit and pull the career fair schedules, and anyone can visit the careers section to view what current open positions are available along with complete legal job descriptions. In the cases of field positions, there are even Spanish-translated job descriptions available. Lastly, candidates are able to submit resumes and fill out the standard Abrams employment application which is immediately mailed directly to the head of Human Resources.

The 360 Wakeboard Club is a group of friends, volunteers, and people who love all wake-related sports and enjoy coming together in the Austin area in order to meet with like-minded people and share information, experience, and even just to find a pull behind a boat.

The 360 wakeboard club's old site had nearly all the features as the new ProRank Studios site, but since it was so difficult to update the site, rarely if ever was anything new or interesting posted to attract attention, even from club members. The does have a phpBB Bulletin Board System which frankly was the only part of the site anyone visited, even club members, as that is where all the action was.

The 360 Wakeboard Club knew they had to change things up. They had a design they had drawn up that they wanted to use, and gave that to ProRank Studios to implement the ©CAMO CMS around it.

With the goal of attracting visitors to the site, increasing traffic to not just the bulletin boards, but the site itself, we went to work integrating the rarely used features of the old site into the new one, using the CMS as the control point for those features.

Now, whenever a club board member is willing to take the time to write up stories and post images, the ©CAMO CMS allows them complete freedom to do so without having to bother with the intricacies of the code.

The most important part of their page is now the events calendar which is a modified "News" post ©CAMO CMS option. Along with a page worth of data and images that can be written up and displayed for a particular event, the list of chronological events is populated from the data input into the CMS, and they are even allowed a "marquee" image to display when an event is one of the next few upcoming events that has a marquee uploaded. The site automatically rolls the event list out with time, and self-updates as the clock ticks away the days.

©CAMO CMS allows the club to post image galleries of events, post articles such as featured wake-riders, spotlights on any subject they like, maintain their "about us" page, and maintain a list of links for the site to promote other businesses or relevant sites.

Lastly, the SPONSOR bar allows 360wakeboard to derive some income from their website now that traffic has been increased to other areas of the site besides the bulletin board.