When I posted about Ninth Hour’s dedication to ethics I could not have been more serious. Adam and I here at Ninth Hour are dedicated to giving our clients confidence in dealing with an ethical company and we have recently furthered our drive to be a company built on premium quality and ethical services with our joining of the Better Business Bureau (BBB). Joining the bureau was an expensive investment for us but we believe it was a worthy one. Adam and I are constantly working to improve our business and show our dedication to the customer with the services we deliver along with moves such as joining the BBB.

Congratulations to our clients Steve Poapst Hockey Academy, Clay Products, and Knowear Apparel for the launch of their new Ninth Hour Productions built websites!

Take a look at the new websites to learn about our new clients and see if you can benefit from their great products and services.

We encourage parents and kids to take a look at Steve Poapst Hockey Academy website. Steve Poapst played in the NHL for a number of seasons in the NHL with teams such as the Washington Capitals, Chicago Blackhawks, Pittsburgh Penguins, and the St. Louis Blues. Steve Poapst and his academy offer hockey clinics for young kids.

Clay Products sells numerous types of brick and stone for construction, architects,  homeowners, and developers.

Knowear Apparel is bringing a fun and educational idea to apparel. Learn how the human body functions with great designs. Learn more about their product lines by visiting their website.

We have posted a limited-edition (it will only be available for a short time) V-Day wallpaper on our downloads page. We hope you enjoy it.

Visit Download Page

We have added some of our work over the past few months along with older work to our brand new portfolio viewer. We changed or layout so that you can now view some samples of our graphic design and print work on one page. We will be sure to notify everyone via our blog when we add new work and our new work will be added at the front of the portfolio so you do not have to go through a number of pieces to get to the fresh content. We are also constantly rotating different samples in so all of the work currently up now may not be there in the future. To experience the new viewer simply go to our Work page and click the ‘view samples’ button.

Every time the new year comes around everyone talks about New Year resolutions they are making, lose 10 lbs., eat healthier, do more charity work and the list goes on. However, we never hear much from businesses and their New Year resolutions. So I am going to start off with ours, albeit a bit late now (February is right around the corner).

Last year was about getting Ninth Hour’s groundwork in place and spending our time with our current and very important clientele. I see ourselves using an analogy of a house. We started of in the basement. We were happy to be there and we understood that had to start somewhere. With more than a year of business under us we are confident in our company and are ready to move out of the basement. We will begin to open our company up to more clients and you will see this through advertising if you’re in the northern Illinois area via print and the Internet. We will be sure to update this blog to show off our latest advertisements and hopefully you will comment on this blog if you have seen any of our ads out in the wild. We love hearing about someone who has seen our ads or work. With the addition of new clients we are dedicated to staying focused on not only keeping the same quality we provided with fewer clients but we are expecting more out of ourselves as I know our clients will.

As part of our resolution we are also working hard to keep our ethics (the backbone of our company as I see it)  front and foremost. I believe I have mentioned it on this blog and I know its on our Creation page, ethics was a key characteristic in forming Ninth Hour. There are numerous businesses out there including companies that perform some of the services we perform but one of the many aspects of Ninth Hour that differentiates us is our dedication to ethics. We expect ethical behavior in ourselves and in our clients. This won’t change whether we are a struggling business or an astounding success.

I’ve included two of our resolutions; increasing business and our quality of work and keeping true to our dedication to ethics. I would love to hear what some of your resolutions are for your business.

We were pretty quiet on our Anniversary back in November with Thanksgiving, Adam and I both spending time with our families, and of course tending to our clients. It is amazing to think that it is already our 1 year anniversary but at the same time it is hard to imagine life when Ninth Hour was not a part of it. I think it is safe to say that we are much further along than we would have dreamed this time last year. We are blessed to have a great partnership between Adam and I and we could not ask for better clients and vendors to work with. However, we have a long way to go until we are where we want Ninth Hour to be and hopefully 200 8 will get us one step closer to that vision.

At the end of this year Adam and I are both donating to the churches we each go to and we are looking to donate more money and hopefully time to a variety of charities in 2008. It was our vision for Ninth Hour to be a company built around compassion and giving. We feel that we could join any company but by creating our own we would have the control to help those less fortunate and we intend to see that through.

2007 was a big year for a number of our clients. Quilt In Joy has launched its new store in Huntley along with a web site. Carl Mfg. USA and Ninth Hour has continued to grow a stronger relationship which we cherish. We have also designed a number of web sites for clients who allowed us to go through with our vision and supported the entire way. What more can a company ask for? I would say our 1st year anniversary is less about praising Ninth Hour and more about thanking our clients, friends, and families because without any of them, we would not be here to today saying Happy Anniversary. Thank you to all.

Our office closes December 21st for Christmas and New Year’s but we will be back on Thursday, January 3rd. Merry Christmas to all and Happy Holidays!

We would like to congratulate Quilt in Joy for the recent opening of their first location in Huntley, IL. We helped build a welcome page at first and have now been adding more pages as they start to run at full speed. 

If you have any interest in quilting then Quilt In Joy is certainly a place you must check out. They have a large number of classes which range in focus and levels. There is something from beginners to those more experienced. They even host birthday parties for children under 8 years old.

You can find directions on their web site along with other information about the new company.

www.quiltinjoy.com

We at Ninth Hour want to wish everyone a happy and safe Thanksgiving. We are taking the rest of the week off from work to celebrate the holiday and to spend time with our families.

If you want to get a nice recap of Thanksgiving, how it originated and the changes it has gone through in the U.S. be sure to check out these nice videos and written content  from history.com.

Welcome to our refreshed web site! Much of the content is the same for now as this was more of a visual upgrade. We will continue to be active in adding new content, more depth to the services we offer, adding more of our work for you to see, and more.

Without a doubt the most active part of this web site is this blog and we hope you can find our messages helpful or at least entertaining. If you would like to see certain topics covered or have any suggestions we would love to hear them. An easy way to do this is to make a comment on this post.

This is all for now but take a look at our refreshed web site and let us know what you think.

We build and maintain a good amount of websites for small businesses and we constantly come across the same problem. No company branded email addresses, contact page, and directions.

Branded Email

If your business has their own website then you should have the option to create an email address such as sales@mycompanywebsite.com. The web offers businesses a terrific benefit that other mediums do not (or at least not at such an affordable price) and that is the ability to appear bigger than you are. Imagine if you were to receive an email from a representative at Floral Gardens Inc. and the rep emailed you from sugarkitten@aol.com. Would you think twice about the company? Most would. Now imagine you received an email from janice@floralgardens.com. The company appears more organized and more serious about its business. So if you do not have a company branded email address talk to your webmaster today or contact us and we’ll be happy to help you out. It’s a great free way to improve your image.

Contact Page

Do you have a contact page on your website? Contact pages often take on many different names such as Customer Service or Support page. Either way, be sure to check and make sure your company’s website has one of these pages . Whether your website is designed to sell products or to inform customers about your services, you want customers (or potential ones) to be able to easily contact you. This is another simple fix that your webmaster can help you with. What should your contact page include? I am glad you asked. Be sure to include a company phone number, fax (if applicable), email address or contact form, and… directions if you have a store front.

Directions

If you have a storefront I would imagine your website is there to drive more people to your store. If that is the case, why make it harder for the customer to find your shop? The first step is to include your address (you would be surprised how many businesses do not include this) and the second step is to make it even easier to find your store and that would be via directions. There are a number of online mapping services that make it easy to integrate into your website. A couple of the free services out there are Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, and MapQuest. We however use Windows Live Local which is based on Microsoft’s MapPoint technology. The great thing about Windows Live Local is a new feature called 1-Click Directions. With this feature you enter your company’s address and then place the 1-click directions link on your contact page. This link will then show alternative routes to drive to your business plus the ability for the customer to make custom directions from their exact address. Take a look at our example of using the United Center as our destination of choice. It’s easy to see how this can be very helpful for the customer instead of trying to find out where 12548 S. Rand Road in CityPlace, IL.