First Equity Card

online banking

First Equity Card, a leading provider of credit cards for small businesses, hired Higher Media to develop a banking customer center for their 300,000+ cardholders and a web-based application for millions of businesses who are invited each month to apply for the card. Data security was a paramount concern, but we also gave special attention to usability and seamless integration with outside data sources.

In addition to the customer center, which includes tools for current cardholders to view online statement and make secure payments, the FEC site was outfitted with an online application system that allows business owners who are solicited by mail to apply for the card online.

The extensive online application needed to be quick and painless for potential customers. Following information design principles for usable forms, we created a paging system that allows the prospects to move forward and backwards in the application without losing entered data.

On the backend, First Equity required highly secure and reliable connections between partner servers. Higher Media equipped the site with redundant hardware and software firewalls, and we conduct regular security audits from outside parties.

Mobium Creative Group

email » video marketing campaign

An award-winning business-to-business advertising agency needed new creative ways to draw prospects into the thick of their website's content. Higher Media delivered a 'side-door' email campaign featuring streaming video, dynamic links to leverage existing content, and viral sharing.

Mobium Creative Group are experts on the business-to-business advertising space. They understand how to leverage changng conditions to create stronger brands and larger market share for top-tier clients. Helping their prospective clients to understand the difference between effective marketing communications and ho-hum business as usual is an essential part of growing their business.

To achieve that, Mobium decided to create a 'side-door' email campaign to gently offer friendly advice to business marketers while simultaneosly drawing them into the existing Mobium site's extensive library of information on integrated business branding.

Higher Media suggested the creation of mobium.tv, a sister website dedicated to achieving the side-door goals. We produced a series of 30+ video interviews with Mobium's principals, allowing them to share their thoughts on successful business branding. Higher Media provided talking point outlines, on-camera coaching, and multi-camera editing to help Mobium's experts perform confidently on screen. The resulting short clips are delivered by streaming video in a custom youtube-like player. To encourage prospects to delve deeper into a web of expert advice, we developed an animated Flash interface for navigating related videos. In addition, a database tagging system allowed us to connect related pages from Mobium's original website to relevant videos at mobium.tv.

HigherMedia then delivered all this to prospects through an extensive monthly email campaign, coupled with comprehensive analytics to track prospects through their activity on the site. To save time from Mobium's busy schedule, we provided draft copy writing in their company voice as part of our campaign solution.

Habana House

e-commerce / online shopping

Talk about a success story. Habana House, a major cigar wholesale and retail company in Texas, wanted to make a big entrance into the online shopping market. They called upon Higher Media to build the best cigar e-shop on the web, and we were up for the challenge. While remaining true to the quirky ShowMeYourAsh.com brand identity, we equipped the site with advanced search tools and creative web 2.0 enhancements.

The Habana House e-store needed to be engineered to satisfy both expert and novice cigar smokers. Experts who usually know what they are looking for want advanced search tools to navigate habana's vast collection by brand, size, strength, nationality, and other cigar characteristics. To embrace casual smokers or gift-givers the site points them in the right direction. We achieved a balance through powerful but compact usable forms, and pages including "recommended cigars" for gift givers and cigar newbies.

What makes the Habana House brand successful is the way it celebrates the male camaraderie and humor that often accompany cigar smoking. One of the Web 2.0 pages we built was the "Ash Hall of Fame," a page where visitors submit photos of their cigar ashes.

Instead of going with a one-size-fits-all shopping cart solution, Higher Media provided a customized solution built around cigar products. The administrative area saves the store managers time by managing information in a way that is specific to cigar products and inventories.

Egan-Jones Rating Co.

interactive reports and data visualization

Egan-Jones Ratings Co., an investment research agency famous for publishing early warnings on Enron and Worldcom, depend on their website and email system to deliver current and accurate information to their clients. They turned to Higher Media to build tools to rapidly publish reports and to empower their clients with search and visualization features.

Egan-Jones clients, like most investors, want fast and painless access to pertinent information. Their website therefore needed to satisfy a wide range of investors. Some clients want to delve into numbers and cross reference financial data using advanced tools. Some don't have the time to do their own investigation, and look to Egan-Jones to provide quick and understandable summaries or warnings. Still others do not want to log into the site at all and wish to have all reports sent by email. Pages were outfitted with unobtrusive tips to explain terminology to the less advanced clients while not getting in the way of others.

Egan-Jones also collaborated with Higher Media to build web-specific tools that allow clients to work with a customised portfolio and visually plot bonds across industry, sectors, or credit ratings. Customers also have specific control to customize their user prefeneces and set what email alerts they receive.

Review Publishing Company

online publishing / e-classifieds

Review Publishing is the largest alternative newspaper publisher in Philadelphia with over 600,000 readers. Higher Media was hired to intelligently repurpose content and extend their success to the web. Review Publishing’s flagship website, www.philadelphiaweekly.com, is a high traffic website featuring content of the printed publication as well as interactive web-only sections. We eqipped the site with banner ad delivery software using a leading provider.

Review Publishing publishes four major alternative newspapers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey including Philadelphia Weekly, which boasts the largest circulation of any weekly newspaper in Pennsylvania. Higher Media worked with Review Publishing to create the online platform for all of their publications. The websites are full featured with user registration, interactive promotions and restaurant guides, and an online classifieds section that accepts secure credit card payments.

To manage all the content, Higher Media developed a custom content management system that makes it easy to manage all areas of the website. There are tools for tasks like organizing and releasing weekly publications, managing and tracking advertisements and exporting and processing submitted classified ads.

Willner Realty and Development Company

interactive property management

The Willner Realty and Development Company needed to deliver timely information to highlight changing availabilities at their diverse properties for lease. Higher Media provided a dynamic solution with automated property maps tied directly to an WRDC-managed custom content management system (CMS).

The key to the project was to make everything cost-effective and easy to edit by the WRDC staff. So we took a modular approach to displaying the different kinds of information needed for different properties, be they strip malls or office buildings. WRDC properties may include any number of features on the webpage: site map with highlighted available units, site photographs, aerial views, interactive maps, and downloadable brochures and demographics profiles. Any of these features can be turned on or off at the flick of a switch, providing a solution very responsive to WRDC's needs.

Higher Media's solution uses a database-driven architecture to display property information and maps, allowing for quick turnaround when properties become available or are leased. All of this information is organized through a custom content management system built to WRDC's specifcations to help them to quickly and efficiently keep their site up to date.