And the Winner is… US!
Atomic Interactive, the digital marketing agency headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, created the design, development and marketing strategy for Slickplan.com. Slickplan was created to fill a hole in the web design process that Atomic encountered every time they picked up a new project. Like most design agencies (and freelance designers), Atomic begins the web design process by creating a sitemap that displays the page titles and navigation of the finished product. A growing frustration within the Atomic team due to an alarming absence of quality sitemap creation software led to a proactive decision – “We’ll make our own!”
Fast forward two years and two versions of Slickplan – the web application has become a trusted design industry resource for over 35,000 users who love the simplicity of the creation process and the beauty and functionality of the finished sitemap. This past weekend, the Atomic Interactive team was overjoyed to learn that Slickplan was chosen as one of three finalist for Best New Web/Mobile Application in the App It Out contest hosted by
At the conference, 4 members of the Atomic team will have 10 minutes to showcase the finest points of Slickplan in front of a huge gathering of web designers, developers and digital agencies, as well as a panel of judges that will be voting to send one lucky app development company to a conference in London. Future InSights Live is conference that hosts cutting edge trends and personalities in the web design community, and this year such well-known industry personalities and web entrepreneurs as Dan Cederholm, Josh Clark, Steve Fisher, Paul Boag and Molly Holzschlag will be featured as speakers.
Ryan McCoy, one of Atomic’s co-owners and a member of the presentation team, is particularly excited. “This is a great honor to attend the Future InSights Live conference to present our software to all of our peers within the interactive community,” Ryan said. “We created Slickplan because of a need we had as an interactive agency, and to get a chance to share our creation with a gathering of all these potential users is really a dream come true.”
Slickplan’s creators are well aware of the fact that this opportunity presented itself thanks in part to the contributions of Slickplan’s users. Ian Lawson, Atomic’s other co-owner, explains, “The improvements made to Slickplan are based on our own day-to-day use and feedback from 35,000 very active users. Together, we’ve made something great.”
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Professional Development: A Gift For Everyone On Your List
At this time of year, lots of folks stress over choosing holiday gifts for their staff. Chocolates? Too generic. A gift certificate? Way too generic.
We’ve got a different concept. We’re giving our folks the gift of a stronger career.
In the past few months, we’ve invited some of our key staff to attend professional development sessions focused on interactive design and development.
In November, two of us attended the Future of Web Design conference in New York. This was an amazing opportunity to meet thought leaders in our field and explore developing technologies and trends – everything from code management and CSS3 to mobile UX and HTML5.
And in November, two more of us attended the WebVisions Web Usability Conference in Atlanta. Again, we got to socialize and share with the developers who are creating the cutting edge in UX. A huge focus of the conference was on responsive design, a paradigm that we’ve already brought back to Atomic and are applying to our work.
Spending time and money on this kind of training is valuable in so many ways. Not only does it teach us how to implement specific new technologies, it helps us think about problems differently. It’s easy to get stuck in a rut and keep solving the same challenge in the same way. Being exposed to so many new ideas has helped everyone on our team break out of our creative patterns and come up with new solutions for our clients.
It’s also reinforced our commitment to each other – to building a team, together, that’s as strong as it can possibly be. Lots of people think that developers are closed-off computer nerds, but we know differently. Developers share a unique passion: to be awesome at what they do. And it’s a great feeling to know that we’re helping everyone at Atomic do that.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, everyone.