View CBS News Profile

Bentley & Hoke provides strategic consulting, web development, e-commerce, and other services to Chartwell Booksellers.

Learn More About our Community Involvement Activities

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.

Dannible & McKee

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.

Colden Corporation

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.

C&S Companies

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.

Projects on which we’ve worked recently include:

• The Creative Core Talent Network (whose Come Home to Syracuse affinity group replaces several earlier versions of the CHtS sites we produced);
• bookcollaborative.ning.com, a site to promote Bradford Wheler’s newest book Snappy Sayings, with goals to collect content for group-authored books down the road;
• and Green NY Campus, a site from the C&S Companies to support continued discussion and action from their April 2009 higher education sustainability conference.

For blogs requiring more capabilities and/or closer integration into an existing site, the Wordpress blog engine (the web and database code which runs the blog itself) is available for free download. Hosting Wordpress on your (or our) server gives us the ability to incorporate more complex creative designs - to match, that is, the skin of almost any existing site - and to make custom changes to individual blog-post pages. A self-hosted blog also allows us to integrate the blog more closely into other areas of an existing non-blog site: we might show the most-recent three blog posts on an area of a client’s existing homepage, for instance.

Lately, we’ve turned to the Wordpress engine as a content-management system, using the code to enable easy client administration of traditional, non-blog sites. As open-source software with extensive online documentation and a thriving user community - and being built on PHP and MySQL - we can customize Wordpress to fill just about any content management need.

Please contact us to find out how we can make Wordpress work for you.

To highlight the hardware, software, energy, and support savings, we built a Javascript-based total-cost-ownership/acquisition calculator; we’ve recently updated the calculator to better match the reality of school technology support and maintenance. The calculator makes great use of the Prototype javascript library and - for the printable report generated by the user after submitting the form with his/her unique assumptions about cost of equipment, energy useage, support costs, etc. - the FPDF dynamic PDF library.

The calculator offers school-technology decision makers a tool for easily and quickly evaluating this product’s value for them, as well as for sharing these data with other stakeholders within their organization.

I suppose I’m using a not-quiet-valid definition of the phrase “social media” here - I’m talking about media including blogs, Ning, Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, LinkedIn; really any web-based media by which a firm can quickly and easily post content on a regular basis, with the opportunity for anyone to read, anyone to subscribe (through an RSS feed, perhaps), and (perhaps with some restrictions) most folks to respond or participate in the discussion.

Firstly, these media contribute to visibility, giving firms the chance to get the word out, in their own way, about their service offerings, how they distinguish themselves from competitors, their involvement in their communities, etc. Certainly these Web 2.0-ish media contribute to better search engine visibilty; blogs and their kin are indexed readily and well by Google and other engines.

And visibility might mean exposure for cross-selling opportunities: a set of blogs posts might introduce a client from a given vertical to services offered by the firm from another area - an opportunity for an “oh, I didn’t know you did that, too” moment.

Blogs and other post-ful media, if done well, offer perhaps the best web-based mechanism for firms to build reputation: much better than saying “we are an award-winning firm” is to let the reader conclude for him/herself that you are an award-winning firm by scanning a series of posts detailing those awards - with photos of the work, comments from clients, etc. An inductive argument works better here than a deductive argument.

Furthermore, social media contributes to reputation for thought leadership: allowing the geeks in the engineering, design, number-crunching, or other backend department - those whose ideas were formerly released to the outside world, if at all, only via the marketing team - to share details of their latest accomplishments. This can be daunting for the firm - since these internal folks are appropriately more concerned with doing the work than with communicating it in a polished fashion - but the enthusiasm, knowledge of industry, and currency of their thoughts can let the outside world see the innovation, complexity, and quality of the work going on at the ground level.

Lastly, social media can build community. This is the tough one: building community means accepting, and welcoming, contributions from those outside of the firm - and allowing the whole world to see those inputs. But if done well, a thriving blog, Twitter feed, Facebook page, or other social media venue can connect clients to the firm in new ways, allowing the firm to gather valuable feedback from customers, collect testimonials from community-service efforts, and participate in a professional community.

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.