Welcome Michael Hartman, Technology and Usability Director - We are so thrilled to have Michael join us and lead our technology and usability team! In addition to being a Drupal powerhouse, he’s a stellar project manager and usability expert. And he’s got your back – he’s a black belt in Tae Kwon Do!

Welcome Michael. We are so looking forward to working with you.

Welcome David Powers, Senior Interactive Web Developer - the newest addition to the Sandstorm Design user experience and technology team! We are so excited to have David driving our interactive web development with his unique skill set of flash and flex application development, database development, php, ajax and his X factor – SEO optimization! And even better than that – David is a professional piano player and musical genius.

Welcome David. We can’t wait to work with you.

Hello world! Sandstorm Design is starting the year off right and our Chicago office is hiring! Our ideal candidate is a senior level interactive web developer with flash, flex, php, jquery, ajax, and database skills. After you have all that, we want to hear about what else you have up your sleeve? Do you dabble in facebook applications? Mobile apps? Are you interested in what Adobe is doing with Cold Fusion? Or do you prefer to edit video in your spare time?

At Sandstorm, you have the job you are hired for, and then you have your X factor.Whatever your X factor is, we want to hear about it! The senior interactive web developer we are looking for must be brilliant, innovative and fearless. I know it may seem like we’re asking for the world, but we’re asking the world to find us our senior developer.

Interested in applying? Contact us and send us your resume, sample urls, and your X factor.

The Client: National Association of REALTORS, Real Estate Buyer’s Agent Council (REBAC)
The Goal: Create a user-friendly web site that addresses the needs of multiple user groups.
The Solution: After conducting usability testing, user research, and establishing personas, we identified what type of information the different user groups required, and what features and functionality they were looking for. We designed a clean web site design and navigation that organized information by user group, and tested the navigation to ensure key tasks could be completed with ease. Important information and tasks were called to attention in the form of graphic callouts to engage users and ensure that they found what they were looking for. Cool blues and greens were added to round out their color palette, and subtle textures were incorporated throughout the design to add dimension. A coordinating advertising campaign, brochure, and tradeshow were launched in conjunction with the new site to drive traffic to the site and brand REBAC consistently across all mediums.

Welcome Zachary Schneider! Or what we now say, Zak squared. It is such a great summer for us here at Sandstorm… Each week we’re bringing in lunch to celebrate something great! And today it was my personal fav, Potbelly’s, to welcome Zachary to the Sandstorm team. Who would have thought with a staff of 10 that we would have 2 Lisa’s and 2 Zach/Zak’s – but we do – and we couldn’t be more excited.

Zachary is a web developing whiz with a ton of front-end, back-end, and government experience. And he has this insane inner desire to constantly learn something new, which runs in the Sandstorm family. Our web design firm is having a great past few weeks.

We are having way too much fun with our newest web design and development project – traveling Broadway shows like Wicked, Stomp, Annie, etc. brought to smaller cities across America and in Canada. We are creating this amazing, theatrical user experience on the web utilizing almost everyone on staff from usability experience and message development, to information architecture, creative execution, web development and of course – project management. Stay tuned for our web site launch date for city #1 coming in July.

(Our web design company so excited we can hardly resist showing you the web design comps!)

We’re so honored! Our web design firm won a web design award for the National Association of Realtors Green Designation web site. It’s a green industry site, an association and in real estate – three of our favorite industries to work in. As Holly would say, we heart winning!

Today Bryan hosted a “Food for Thought” for the Sandstorm Staff. One way that we exchange knowledge here is by selecting (or in this case Bryan volunteered) one person on staff to put together an educational course on a topic that they have expertise in that they feel would benefit everyone. This is done at noon, and the presenter gets to select their lunch of choice (potbelly’s today – my personal favorite – thanks Bryan!)

Through his wit and humor, Bryan took our staff through the various web site development and database programming languages we use, what they do and how we use them to create standard compliant, technically effective, and cross-browser compatible data-driven web sites. Everyone at our web design company attended, from the creative team of designers and writers, to sales and research. Bryan took the sometimes intimidating acronyms of programming languages and unlocked the secrets to our web site development. And I learned what css sprites are.