Last year was a great year for Three Stream.  We went from a couple of guys doing consulting and web development on the side, to a real live company with an office and everything (those of you who have seen our pathetic office are probably laughing).  We feel good about this because we are growing for the same reasons that many of the great companies have grown in history – we focused on doing great work, providing great customer service, and not settling for anything but excellence in our products (which also happen to be our client’s products).  So, this year we are making some changes that you might find interesting

First off, after getting a slew of new customers in late 2008, we found the need to hire a new team member.  We thought his name was simply Mike Lee when we hired him, but little did we know his name is actually George Michael Lee, which led to a new company policy (regarding the mandatory use of middle names for those whose full names coincide with 80’s rock stars).  Anyhoo, George Michael Lee will be doing graphic design and also heading up our new email marketing service 3mail.  It is always a difficult thing hiring the first employee, but we just decided that we’ve gotta have faith.

Along with adding staff, we will be adding a few services that might be of interest to our customers.  Here is a brief list:

1. We are now offering ongoing maintenance & support packages for our clients’ websites.  In the past we were so intent on enabling our clients to manage their own websites that we failed to really offer them the option of letting us fully maintain the site for them.  We build every website on a content management system allowing clients to edit and update content on their own, but some of our clients would rather leave it all up to us.  Let us know if you are among the crowd.
2. We will be extending our marketing strategy services to include pay-per-click.  One of our strengths at Three Stream is our focus on organic (non-paid) search engine optimization.  While organic seo is a tremendous asset to a business trying to grow virally on the web, it really doesn’t entirely replace the need for paid search engine marketing – especially for e-commerce stores.  Thus, we will now be offering consulting on setup of a pay-per-click campaign, as well as fully managing your account.
3. We are adding a full range of email marketing services.  Online businesses, especially e-commerce stores, are quickly learning that email marketing is the only free lunch for businesses on the web.  It is an opportunity to connect with your customers directly and provide them with relevant news about your products or services.  Because of this, we are launching 3mail: Email marketing made simple.  It gives you the ability to send, manage, and track email campaigns through our online user interface.  This will enable smaller businesses to act like bigger ones in terms of customer engagement.  We will also be offering fully-managed email marketing campaigns as well.
4. Finally, we will be offering a wider range of print services in conjunction with our web design services.  Print design is a service that we really fell into.  Without question our core competency is web design/development; however, it has been all too convenient for our customers to rely on us to manage their print collateral needs as well.  A website is not something that magically brings customers into the door without a conjunctive marketing strategy.  Print collateral is a necessity to almost any business, but is something that can be obtained online for a fraction of the cost of most brick-and-mortar printers.  This brings us to the best part of our print services: our customers pay only for the labor to design and order their printing needs online –we don’t markup the costs.  Thus, we can offer everything from business cards to signs by utilizing low-cost online printers such as vistaprint and uprinting.

Well, that’s all for the shameless self advertising of our blog.  From now on we will be providing information for all our fellow small fish out there working to compete in this giant pond called the web.  Sign up to receive email updates or our feed in order to keep in the loop with the Three Stream blog.

1. New Platform – many of you know that we love open source, and use it wherever possible.  For a while we used open office just to stick it to Msoft (but that had to end as all of our clients were using the big bad giant).  Anyhoo, our old site was built on the Joomla content management system, but we decided to make the change to Wordpress.  The result… we love Wordpress.  It is cleaner, better code, easier to optimize for search engines, and just plain better.
2. A weblog – we will be making periodical updates for our customers, and anyone else who wants to listen in, about search engine optimization, web strategy, web standards, design, small business, and the list goes on and on.
3. Valid xhtml/css – This was actually included in our old site, but it is important so I thought I would mention it.  We build according to web standards wherever possible and we support the use of web standards across the internet.  Find out more at w3c.org.
4. Automatic Syncing with LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter – Interaction with the social web is vital for any business that is on the web.  It is impossible to keep up with all of them, so we make all of them automatically keep up with us.  Check us out on each.
5. Jquery display on the home page – along with loving web standards, we are not big fans of flash for web content.  It has its uses and is great for specific areas of the web, but it is often overused.  Flash is to communicating on the web as Marcel Marceau is to communicating in real life.  Looks interesting, but it doesn’t have a very loud voice.  We prefer technologies like Jquery and AJAX for UI and dynamic content because they are search engine friendly and are more usable with a wide array of technology.

Well that is about all for now, but stay tuned as we will be using this blog to talk about ways in which our clients and others can engage the web, share their message/brand on the web, and use the web to make the world a better place.