We dove into the deep end of the talent pool and came up with four new senior creatives, each dripping with experience (I swear, no more water puns).

Mark Abernethy, Creative Director
Mark has spent time with multiple top digital agencies and, more recently, has been slumming it as a freelancer in Toronto. His vast experience in design includes work with Nike, NASA, Aeroplan, Saab, BMW/Mini Canada and Chapters Indigo.

Mackenzie Olson & Rich Albornoz, Art Directors
A husband and wife design team that’s worked for agencies and clients based all over Western Canada. Their combined project experience includes work with Hyatt, Albertsons, Dell, Corus Entertainment and the Alberta Children’s Hospital.

Tyler Hellard, Senior Copywriter
In addition to copywriting, Tyler also has experience as a content, editorial and social media strategist. He has previously worked with Dell, Mercedes-Benz, iStockphoto, Moxie’s and the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority.

These four join Zach Perkins (who was getting a bit lonely) as the core of zu’s creative efforts. We’re excited about the experience and ideas they bring, helping us move forward with an ambitious creative vision.

Morris Industries is at the forefront of innovation in the agricultural equipment market. The company’s forward thinking attitude and passion for customer service made them a perfect match for zu. The Morris team worked closely with our strategy department to craft the structure and content of the site and to ensure users could quickly and easily navigate Morris’ extensive product line.

The new site features large, dramatic imagery and intuitive navigation, as well as a Russian site to speak to international customers. Other features include:

• A Searchable “Find a Dealer” map
• Listings of upcoming trade shows
• A new Careers section
• A News section
• Become a Dealer and Dealer Login sections

Congratulations to the Morris team—it was a pleasure working with you!

Ted is the Director, founder and former CEO of Critical Mass, one of the largest and most successful digital agencies on the globe. He has worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was the strategic online force behind websites that included Mercedes-Benz USA, Nike, Proctor & Gamble and NASA. Ted stepped down as the CEO of Critical Mass in 2003 to take on the role of Co-owner and Managing Partner for the Calgary Stampeders until last year. Now, Ted is turning his attention to the digital space again, and he is excited about new technologies in the field.

“The technical knowledge that zu brings to the table was a major factor in the decision. The digital world has become a very fascinating place in which to develop consumer and personal communication opportunities. This is a great opportunity to build on zu’s strong technical and creative base and merge the two strengths for a more comprehensive international vision.”
– Ted Hellard, incoming Managing Partner, zu

Ted will play a key role in driving zu to leading-edge digital development—creatively, operationally and strategically. He will be working with executive team members Ryan Lejbak, Tony Zuck and JL Schmidt.

“By bringing in Ted as a managing partner, we also bring on board his business acumen and international recognition. We look forward to using some of Ted’s ideas and our talented staff to produce some amazing websites, web apps and mobile apps. Our message to the digital world, basically, is that we are open to partnerships.” – Tony Zuck, President & CSO, zu

JL has worked in digital media for more than a decade. The bulk of her career was spent at Critical Mass (www.criticalmass.com), managing account teams for Nike, Adidas, Mercedes-Benz USA, and UnitedHealthcare. Alongside NIKE in 2001, JL lead a talented team at Critical Mass to a Cannes Cyber Lions Grand Prix award for its work on NIKEiD (nikeid.nike.com). As the company began focusing more specifically on excellence in production quality, she led a 23-person project management department and then applied her experience to overall project operations as VP of Project Planning.

“This is an exciting time for zu, especially in the areas of mobile and web application development. I look forward to working with talented teams across the company to improve execution, accountability and overall operational quality.  I’m impressed with zu’s commitment to more agile processes and the value I see it bringing to our clients.”
– JL Schmidt, COO, zu

As COO, JL will oversee the day-to-day operations of the company, work with production teams to realize better efficiencies, and lend her knowledge and experience to the New Business and HR teams. She will work with CEO Ryan Lejbak and President & CSO Tony Zuck to grow revenues and margins and create a solid position for zu in the North American digital landscape.

“We are extremely excited to have JL come on board. Her experience in working with international clients coupled with our talented staff puts in place for zu the missing piece to a solution for significant growth.”
– Ryan Lejbak, CEO, zu

THE SITUATION
With one of the largest fan followings in the league, the Stamps were looking for a way to get merchandise to their fans quickly, efficiently and on the fly. The only official Stampeders store where fans could purchase merchandise was at Calgary’s McMahon stadium. The Stampeders approached zu, looking to test the waters with a new e-commerce site.

THE JOB
zu enlisted the expertise of GrowDevelopment, out of Texas, to develop the backend, which was created in Magento. For the design portion of the project, zu’s design team created pages that remained consistent with the current Stampeders’ site.

THE RESULT
Fans are now able to browse and purchase merchandise through the online store as well as connect with the store on Facebook. It just got a whole lot easier for fans to don that red jersey they were eyeing up!

The Gold Quill Awards are a global competition held by IABC to recognize outstanding achievement in communication. Cameco recently received the Merit award for its communication effort at Cigar Lake– Mine crisis calls for journey to the centre of the Earth: Restoring confidence after Cigar Lake floods.

Cigar Lake is the world’s largest undeveloped high-grade uranium deposit. The mine is currently in development and is projected to start producing uranium in 2013.

In 2006 and 2008 the mine suffered severe flooding. Cameco solved the operational issues, improved its processes and kept investors and members informed on the developing situation, by hosting tours of the mine site. Those who were unable to visit the site were kept informed via frequent updates to the Cameco website. The company’s forward thinking earned them the Gold Quill award in the category of Issues Management and Crisis Communication.

Congratulations Cameco team!

The Health Quality Council of Saskatchewan (HQC) was awarded Best in Class in the Healthcare category for their Quality Insight Tool. The Quality Insight Tool was launched in December 2010. This web application was developed as a performance management system to help healthcare professionals make informed decisions about healthcare in Saskatchewan. The entry was awarded a score of 485/500. For details about HQC and the Quality Insight Tool, head over to our earlier post, Web Based insights into health care.

In the Hotel/Resort category, Elk Ridge Resort was granted the Outstanding Achievement award. The resort’s website was chosen from among 186 entries and achieved a score of 476 out of 500. The Elk Ridge Resort website underwent a complete overhaul with zu in late 2009. For details about the site’s development, check out our previous post, The Elk Ridge Treatment.

Teck Resources brought home the IMA for Outstanding Achievement in the Investor Relations category. Chosen from among 43 entries, the Teck IR site earned a score of 479 out of 500. Collaborating with zu, Teck relaunched its site in 2011 with a brand new design and strategy. For details about the project, check out our previous post, Teck’s New IR Site.

Cheers to everyone involved in the projects!

Head to the IMA website to see a full list of IMA-winning sites by zu.

Established in Saskatoon as a small cabinet-making shop in the early 1980s, Superior has grown to a company of more than 200 employees in three locations across two provinces. They have also won numerous awards for their products. When Superior came to zu, their old website was dated and the page backgrounds were dark. They wanted a new site that would showcase their abundant kitchen styles and options in a presentation that would breath light and space.

THE PROJECT
The crew at Superior took the same care and attention in their approach to a new website that cabinet makers would take building cabinetry. Several key Superior personnel including two top executives were involved in the initial project digital strategy and analysis. zu provided strategy workshops to educate their staff, while they toured our staff through the company’s factory and showroom to inspire design and content for the new site. The team then set out to discover what could be achieved with the new website within the scope of the project.

Superior’s goal was to position itself as a company that offered more than just cabinets. They provide not just products but service, from the beginning to end. The Superior team remains a support through the entire process to provide an outstanding and highly regarded customer experience.

One of the main objectives for the new site was to allow site visitors to book appointments with a Kitchen Designer online. We added key features to the site, such as the Kitchen Planner, where users can save favourite styles to a Design box, and the Product Showcase, where users can click through photo galleries featuring a wide array of styles, accessories, layouts, and finishes. These features help to streamline the planning and booking process for potential customers before they even begin building or renovating. A Customer Experience section introduces customers to Design and Installation team members and helps them find Superior product dealers and showrooms across the prairies.

THE FEATURES
The Kitchen Planner feature filters sample kitchen designs by budget, colour and layout. Images are filtered by design type—Old World, Urban, Contemporary and Traditional—then pulled in from flickr, an offsite image gallery and repository, to speed up loading time on image-heavy pages. Customers can choose what they like in the Planner and save their images to a Design Box.

The Design Box feature allows customers to collect images that show the kitchen styles they like. When their collection of favourites is complete, they can send their images to a Superior Professional Designer as they book an appointment. This particular feature simplifies and streamlines the process of browsing, planning, deciding and booking an appointment to plan a new kitchen.

Other site features:

• Tool Tips: This home-page feature highlights kitchen details and gives a glimpse into the drawers and the behind cabinet doors of Superior kitchens.
• Find Us: Powered by Google Maps, this tool helps users find the nearest Superior dealer.
• The Design Corner (blog): Enables Superior’s Designers to post blogs and lets viewers follow their favorite Designer’s blog.

THE OUTCOME
The end result of the strategic planning, collaboration and meticulous development was a user-friendly and effective retail presentation site with large photographs to showcase a huge array of available products and associated services. Congratulations to the entire Superior Cabinets crew. It was our pleasure and privilege to work with you!

The Back Story
Like many top companies we’ve met, Teck’s website had grown organically in response to comments about the existing site. But this caused the website to come off as unfocused and piecemeal. Though zu was initially brought in to assist with the Investor Relations area, it soon became apparent that a complete re-design would be the most logical and effective tactic.

The Process
In developing a new strategy, we turned to Teck’s offline communication materials. We also integrated elements of President and CEO Don Lindsay’s description of the company when speaking to investors and stakeholders. With these relevant content resources, we created a foundation for a new narrative structure upon which existing materials would be organized.

This structure—combined with existing corporate standards, communication elements highlighted by the IR and web teams, and a dash of zu creative flair—resulted in the clearly focused visual design and hierarchy of materials on the new site. Teck.com emphasizes the core nature and strength of the company—Diversified Mining—paired with its core reality, Responsibility. The site is secondarily a communication vehicle to the stakeholder group, Investors, and this completes the main navigation choices in the site architecture.

zu’s roles included assessment, strategy, design and graphic preparation. Teck supplied subject matter expertise, a wealth of content resources and a programming team to complete the final build on the in-house content management system (CMS). As always, zu provided the complete website production process team and whatever skill elements Teck needed to complete their own team.

The Result
Teck.com: Simple, powerful messaging and visuals crafted for a strategically operated, diversified mining company with unlimited potential. To all involved—good job! And a huge thanks to Greg Keller, Vice President, Investor Relations and Strategic Analysis, and his team at Teck for the opportunity to work together in building a useful and informative IR site.

The Quality Insight tool was featured recently through media outlets across the province, including on CTV news, in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix and in the Regina Leader Post.

Cheers to HQC and its insightful new venture!

For more information on the Quality Insight Tool, please see our previous post, Web-based Insights into Health Care.

These two Saskatchewan industry leaders keep setting the bar for online investor relations, and the 2011 IR Global Rankings are only one of multiple international recognitions.

We are grateful for the long-standing relationships that we have with both PotashCorp and Cameco, who understand and appreciate the value of strategy on an investor relations site. Thank you for choosing us to help you tell your online story. We look forward to celebrating future awards with you!

Thank you, also, to Creative Fire for its role as collaborator in the PotashCorp website creation.

View these best-ranked IR sites: PotashCorp and Cameco.

The Backstory
In early 2010, Feronia was about to go public, offering an investment opportunity in large-scale commercial farming and plantation development in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. However, the company needed an online presence to show how its operations fulfill a vision to transform African agriculture and address a global need for food. So when Osaka Capital approached zu on Feronia’s behalf, we knew we could deliver a concise, investor-focused site.

Feronia’s is an intriguing story, with 100 years of chapters conveying a value creation strategy of “world-class farming conditions” without deforestation and with a vision to help feed more than two billion people. Along with its sustainability, development and growth drive, an investor relations (IR) focus was key from the onset to communicate Feronia’s vision of becoming “the largest agricultural company in Africa.”

Strategy
Our Strategy team first explored Feronia’s key stakeholders: potential and existing investors, communities and their citizens, and the environment itself. The team then reviewed the company’s branding guidelines and existing print and PDF material for investors. From there, we created an information architecture that addressed Feronia’s audiences and reflected its competitive strengths. The company’s sustainability practices warranted a separate section, featuring its own schools and hospitals, and maintained a prominent and consistent theme throughout the rest of the site.

Design and Development
The Design crew incorporated stunning photography, provided by Feronia, with modern style to capture the company’s history and its vision to drive Africa toward self-sufficient food production and profitable exportation. As a recently public company, scalability of the site and content was crucial for Feronia so it could grow online as the company worked towards its mission. Our Development team brought the site to life with IR features, social media sharing and a News & Press Release content management system module for convenient content access.

The Result
Feronia now greets website visitors with rotating banners depicting lush African crops and a commitment to sustainable agriculture, along with key growth facts. Deeper in the site are operational strategies and information about the highly skilled management and Board of Directors. To engage potential and existing shareholders, we pulled Feronia’s competitive strengths from existing materials to create an Investment Highlights page and compelling infographics for the homepage.

Through partnering with Osaka, we delivered a website that visually showcases Feronia’s agriculture roots and its flourishing grandeur. And, while the company continues to grow, so must its online story. Next up for Feronia is a French version of the site, along with a “Feronia in the news” video gallery and archive.

We were privileged to work with this growing company and we thank Sangeet from Osaka and her Feronia team for choosing zu!

About Feronia
Feronia Inc. is a large-scale commercial farmland and plantation operator in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (“DRC”). The Company uses modern agricultural practices to operate and develop its oil palm plantations and arable farming business division. Feronia believes in the immense agricultural potential of the DRC for high-quality foodstuffs and edible oils, given its ideal climate, excellent soil and highly skilled and experienced workforce. Feronia’s management team is comprised of senior agriculturalists with extensive experience in managing both plantations and large-scale mechanized farming operations in emerging markets. Feronia is committed to sustainable agriculture and environmental protection, and to providing support for local communities. For more information, visit the new website: www.feronia.com.

zu has been working closely with the Health Quality Council (HQC) of Saskatchewan as part of a Quality Insight project to build a web application that provides meaningful reports on the most relevant indicators of health care quality in the province.  These solutions enable the HQC and its partners to make better decisions for health care and move forward with confidence and clarity.

Project context
Each year, the HQC has traditionally produced a print and PDF report summarizing the state of health care in Saskatchewan based on a selection of key quality indicators.  The HQC realized that this approach, while  transparent and informative, didn’t adequately solve issues of timeliness.  With reports created only once a year, and the time lag between data measurement and publication as long as 6 months, the Council and its partners have found it difficult to verify whether their system improvements were correctly aligned and delivering the most meaningful benefits.

One key reason that the Health Quality Council approached zu was our previous proven experience in both the health care industry and with performance management solutions. zu’s ability to provide rapid, customized, online solutions to the HQC and its partners has been instrumental in easily identifying appropriate performance indicators, achieving buy-in from partners, and avoiding the long delays and high costs of complex ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solutions.

The Quality Insight tool
Together with the HQC, zu has built an online performance management system that can

• deliver accurate reports frequently;
• provide reports in a variety of meaningful formats;
• empower HQC’s partners to better understand the areas of improvement; and
• demonstrate system change through continued tracking.

The Quality Insight project continues to be delivered in an economic climate where funding is limited, where health care priorities are varied and sometimes conflicting, where appropriate performance indicators have not always been well established, and where the supply of high-quality data is not always feasible. However, the flexibility of the project implementation team has been vital in ensuring the project’s continued success.

Key features of the tool

• dynamically report on KPIs based on various stratification variables (age, sex, facility, region, etc)
• ‘On the fly’ loading of new indicators and indicators updates as data become available.
• Add and adjust targets/goals for each indicator.
• Import current and historical data for indicators as soon as ready (data is most frequently exported from SAS).
• Data is stored in a robust and flexible data warehouse.
• Immediately analyze data through executive dashboards, detailed graphs, “sparkline” graphs, data tables, and a selection of other appropriate reports.
• Customize a taxonomy that can connect and group data in meaningful ways.
• Responsive performance even with large data loads.

The Quality Insight project has helped the HQC engage better with its partners to find solutions that will improve care delivery and reduce costs. Sharing business intelligence continues to facilitate discussions around barriers, overcome resistance to change, align strategic priorities and improve communication.

So, what is the outlook for the health care industry?  Is it ready to implement business intelligence tools?

Business intelligence tools in health care
The Health Quality Council is on the forefront of health care organizations that are implementing solutions to provide business intelligence. At zu, we see these steps in the context of a worldwide trend to implement wider process improvement practices and increase public accountability for health care management. zu also recognizes that many of these improvements are driven by increased legislation and regulation (e.g. in the USA, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, also known as the HITECH Act).

In taking the temperature of the health care industry, we see not only an industry that actively seeks performance management solutions, but an industry that intelligently differentiates and selects those solutions that are most suitable.  The industry continues to move beyond clinical applications used in the day-to-day care of individual patients and towards solutions that engage professionals and help them predict the evidence-based priorities of tomorrow.

zu thanks Creative Fire for its partnership role in the website creation and thanks PotashCorp for choosing us each year to help tell its online story.

Want to view an award winning site? Visit PotashCorp’s website and while you’re there, check out the full press release.

Elk Ridge Resort and zu started the process of building their new website earlier this year. The resort’s main goal was to be known for more than just their golf course as in fact, it is a year round destination.  This meant creating a balanced website and highlighting not only the golf course but the many other features of the resort. With great photography, we were able to show off the new lodge, spa, four season activities, the resort as the perfect wedding destination and so on. The fancy new sitemap was built by our Creative Director, Albert Jame.

To get in the game at the beginning of the project, zu’s designers even headed up to Elk Ridge to take in a weekend at one of the cabins. We don’t really know how much work went on that weekend, but the designs definitely hit the mark. Over the next few months, zu and Elk Ridge worked through the rigorous back and forth of approving designs, planning out content and finalizing features.

The designs and the content really came together on this project thanks to our Content Strategist, Susan Bond. Susan would work with our designers as well as the client ensuring the designs weren’t compromised by content insertion and instead married the two together to create a tight piece of work. These things, along with the beautiful Elk Ridge imagery, create a really prestigious looking site.

There were quite a few new features born out of the designs and these expanded the initial scope of the project. Our lead designer, Brett Ede, came up with the cool new idea of what we eventually deemed, ‘The Reason Generator’. This feature on the home page delivers a list of reasons why you’d want to visit Elk Ridge. Once our development team got a hold of the site, they brought other features to life like the online Elk Ridge gift card purchase, the plan your stay feature linked directly to Elk Ridge Resort’s reservations system and even a season selector to see exactly what’s going on at Elk Ridge year-round.

zu was lucky to work with a great client like Elk Ridge who understands the importance of a strong web presence. We are pumped to continue our relationship with Elk Ridge Resort and we’re already chatting about the next latest and greatest feature additions to the site. Thanks again Elk Ridge!