We’ve just totally rewritten and restructured the online documentation to FireControl, our proprietary content management system. We’ve broken out each cms function and explained them in detailed, albeit understandable, terms commplete with screenshots.

If you’re currently a client, check out the new docs.

If you’re not a client (and you should be), check out the new docs.

If you’re curious about FireControl and how it could help you manage your website, check out our online demo.

FireBox has just been selected to redesign the official site for the Ohio Association of Convention & Visitors Bureaus! We are honored to have been chosen for this exciting new project and we’ll be posting updates as available.

FireBox has just launched the new official site for the 2006 River City Film Festival. While specifics on actual films will be coming soon, the site provides the basic Who, What, When, Where for the event, as well as a PayPal-enabled online submission system.

New additions to the site will be ongoing, so be sure to sign up for the mailing list to stay in the loop!

Grocor, LTD came to us to revamp their e-commerce web site, which was powered by Yahoo! Merchant Solutions. They wanted to add many new products and make the site more attractive and easier to maintain.

Unfortunately, Yahoo!’s store system leaves a lot to be desired, requiring that you create many static pages for products, which totally goes against our mantra of making web sites that are easy to maintain and as automated as possible.

When I first started digging into the Yahoo! catalog system, I could hardly believe it. The interface and functionality seems to have been frozen in time, circa 1999. You have to navigate an unnecessary sea of links to get where you want to go and there are lots of places where you have to enter data in multiple places when one would have sufficed.

And have I mentioned everything is sloooooooow? Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve just upgraded our blog system, which has required a change to our RSS feed. The new feed is now http://fireboxstudios.com/blog/feed/. Please change your reader subscriptions accordingly. Thanks!

FireBox Studios is handling the creative and web development for the River City Film Festival, a fund-raising event to benefit the renovation of the Colony Theatre in Marietta, Ohio.

So far, we have created the official film festival logo and the Call for Entries flyer.

We are also in the midst of working on the festival’s website at www.rivercityfilmfestival.com, to be launched by June 1st.

The new site will have all the information for submitting a film as well as discussion forums and more. Feel free to visit the site today to download the flyer and sign up for email updates.

Kudos to The Blennerhassett Hotel for the recent successful launch of their new website, designed by FireBox Studios.

FireBox was contracted to create a new look for the hotel, and provide easy-to-use templates to their in-house web team for use in building a new site.

The hotel’s web team took our designs and standards-compliant prototypes and created a full website that provides a wealth of great information for their guests (of particular interest to us is their Starbucks® bar

The Blennerhassett is an elegant hotel in Parkersburg, West Virginia, built in 1889. The hotel caters to both the leisure and business traveler and is a member of Historic Hotels of America.

The new O’Neill Senior Center site features a wealth of information about their available services, their regularly-scheduled trips, a photo gallery, and the most comprehensive event calendar FireBox has ever built. O’Neill staff have the option of entering events in one of six different event types, recurring daily, weekly, monthly or annually.

Visit them at www.oneillcenter.com.

FireBox Studios has just won the Best Website Award for 2005 from the West Virginia Division of Tourism at its annual Governor’s Conference on Tourism in Morgantown, WV.

The award was for the site we developed for Mountwood Park earlier this year. Among the judges’ notes were comments like: “Nice, tight, and informative; Made me want to visit.”

The awards are part of Stars of the Industry program that each year recognizes the best in West Virginia tourism promotion, growth and media coverage. Additional Stars of the Industry categories and first place winners were announced during the ceremony.

The Hocking Hills Tourism Association and FireBox Studios have received a Ruby (Recognizing Uncommon Brilliance) Award at the Ohio Travel Association Fall Conference, held Thursday, October 20th in Cincinnati. The Bureau was recognized for the best tourism web site (within the $500,000 and less budget category) in the state of Ohio.

The Ruby Awards were created to recognize outstanding advertising, marketing and public relations in the travel and tourism industry.

The website we built for Hocking Hills at 1800hocking.com is an example of technology applied creatively and effectively to portray the beauty of the Southeast Ohio’s Hocking Hills and promote tourism business in that area.

Designed to make planning a visit to southeast Ohio’s spectacular Hocking Hills simple, 1800Hocking.com offers links to accommodations, attractions, shops and more. Guests can check availability for hundreds of area lodging options and access website links for attractions, accommodations and special events and festivals, as well as the area’s state and national forests and the six areas within Hocking Hills State Park.

The primary challenge FireBox faced was the large amount of data that would need to be integrated into the site, yet be easily accessible for visitors. For example, they had almost 400 member records, each with up to 60 database attributes apiece! We were able to import all their data into our proprietary content management software and make it available in multiple ways on the site.