Chartwell Booksellers, an independent bookseller in New York City, was featured this past Sunday on CBS’s “Sunday Morning” program. Program host Charles Osgood visited with Chartwell owner Barry Singer in this profile of the shop, timed to coincide with the 45th anniversary of Churchill’s death.
Bentley & Hoke provides strategic consulting, web development, e-commerce, and other services to Chartwell Booksellers.
Brian Hoke, Principal of Bentley & Hoke, was this month appointed to the Board of Directors of Transitional Living Services of Onondaga County, Inc., a Syracuse-based human services agency. TLS “serve[s] individuals with developmental disabilities, mental health issues, and traumatic brain injuries, and provide support to many of their families.” The agency’s more than 200 staff members deliver a wide variety of residential, career, outreach, day, and family-support services.
Learn More About our Community Involvement Activities
For about a year now, we have turned to Ruby on Rails as our default platform for web development. Recent, in-progress (and all, as of this writing, not-public) projects include a redevelopment of the Colden Corporation’s intranet; a video-based site for a startup helping companies dialog with physicians on back-to-work requirements for job positions and injured workers; a web-based mailing list and contact management for the Syracuse University Office of Community Engagement and Economic Development; and an online application for a local economic development agency.
Depending on the exact nature of the goals and technical infrastructure of a given project, we do not dismiss the value and appropriateness of technologies such as PHP, ColdFusion, and other web platforms - but we certainly find Rails an attractive option of late. Our goal, as always, is to marry the right blend of tech, design, marketing, and strategy to accomplish our clients’ goals.
Professional services firms have always represented an important market for our work. A typical project often comprises strategic/marketing consulting, development of content management capabilities, analysis of traffic anayltics data, creative redesign, content population, testing, launch, and maintenance. Here are some highlights of recent work from the last year or so.
We produced two wholesale website revisions for Syracuse accounting firm Dannible & McKee: the main firm website, dmcpas.com, and their associated business valuation consulting firm, dmconsulting.com. For each, we worked with a team of firm partners to ensure that the design, user experience, site organization, and other aspects of the redesign project served both the firm’s core marketing goals - presenting a true portrait of the commitment to service and dedication to quality from this 30-year-old firm - as well as the internal needs of easily updating content.
A consulting firm offering services in industrial hygiene and occupational safety, environmental compliance, and occupational and environmental health science, Colden turned to Bentley & Hoke to redesign their website with a more professional appearance, a better-organized information architecture, and a suite of easy-to-use content management tools. The new site, launched last month, has been a hit with clients and firm staff alike. We are currently producing a new Ruby on Rails-based firm intranet, allowing firm staff to easily manage proposals and projects.
We are proud to number C&S - a family of engineering, architecture, and construction companies comprising more than 400 employees in offices across the United States - among our clients for more than eight years now. We produced the redesign of the C&S corporate website last year, providing strategic consulting, website development, and other services. We have produced sites for their Quecentre and Fiddlehead products and have been on the team for a number of projects, offering services in search engine optimization, social media, web development, and other areas.
Brian Hoke, Principal of Bentley & Hoke, was recently named to the Board of Directors of the Onondaga Historical Association. Located in downtown Syracuse, OHA’s Museum & Research Center exist to inspire people’s understanding that the history we share as a community is the foundation for our future together. Brian is excited about this chance to contribute to the success of one of Central New York’s leading cultural institutions.
Often our work involves the creation or integration of content syndication systems: publishing text/images/etc. from one source in (an)other place(s). The benefits are pretty clear: managing content - news headlines, say - in one place sure beats managing content in several places; coordinating the management of content on two sites, especially when it is content you want to keep consistent, introduces extra time, extra headaches, and extra cost.
A quick example: the Near Westside Initiative, a collaborative community effort which combines multiple projects aimed at rebuilding the residential and commercial vibrancy of this Syracuse neighborhood, publishes information about houses for sale (at very attractive prices) in the neighborhood. The information about the houses - price, details, photos - comes from Home HeadQuarters, a not-for-profit organization committed to creating housing and related opportunities that improve the lives of underserved Central and Upstate New York people and revitalize the communities in which they live.
Originally, Home HeadQuarters and the Near Westside Initiative put up duplicate content on their respective websites: staff from both organizations would email details back and forth, and each would publish to their sites. Of course, maintaining consistent information became a challenge: changes would be temporarily out of sync, and the effort to publish the same data required twice (at least) the effort that should have been needed.
The solution: syndication. Using PHP’s cURL library, we built a system by which the properties page on the Near Westside Initiative site automatically populates details on the properties for sale from the corresponding page on the Home HeadQuarters site. The properties information remains current on both sites and only duplicate effort/time/cost is removed.
Another area in which often use syndication is blog posts. Often, publishing links to the most-recent posts from a blog related to a given site offers requires that the posts be authored in the blog, then duplicated on the main site itself, again requiring extra effort, time, and cost. On C&S Companies’ Fiddlehead site and on the 40 Below site, we programmatically consume RSS feeds to automatically display the top few blog posts; this eliminates duplicate effort, enhances the connection between the sites and their respective blogs, and presents site visitors with a wider offering of relevant content.