TechStars is an organization that accepts 10 startup companies every summer and offers seed funding, mentorship, and great connections. Slice of Lime is a 2008 TechStars sponsor and we will be offering our time to each of the accepted companies to talk about their web strategy, design, and development. Additionally, we were brought on to create a new website for TechStars.

We started the project by sitting down with David Cohen, the founder of TechStars, and discussing the overall strategy and target demographic of the website. It was clear that a strong call to action to apply was the most important. Featuring the amazing TechStars mentors and organization details were a close second. We also felt it was important to use pictures from the previous year to help show what the summer is really like. We decided to stay away from polished photos and leaned towards photos showing the 2007 TechStars in action.

We established a simple information architecture and spent time refining the homepage wireframe, the most important page of this site.

Since one of David’s requirements was to manage the content on most of the pages, we agreed that WordPress would be the best tool for the job.

Slice of Lime configured WordPress so that David could manage mentors, for example, in one place. The website would then instantly create an individual mentor page, a page that listed ALL of the mentors, and a scrollable mentor list on the homepage.

Leveraging the same features of WordPress that we used for mentors, Slice of Lime configured WordPress so that David could also manage previous TechStars companies. With a few clicks, company descriptions, images, Flickr photos, graduation year, RSS feeds, and even Slice of Lime’s job listing application, TopShelf, can be added to the site.

The site was fun to work on and reinforced our appreciation for WordPress as more than just a blogging tool. We’re looking forward to getting to know the new 2008 TechStars!

Slice of Lime is proud to announce its first internally-built web-application, TopShelf. TopShelf makes it easy to manage your job openings and to place a widget on any website.

We decided to build the app for two reasons.

1. A client needed it: A new client, TechStars.org (new site will be launching soon), needed a tool that allowed multiple companies to manage jobs in one site. The TopShelf application and widget makes it easy to do this and to customize the job listings using a local stylsheet.
2. We’re moving towards Agile Development: More and more of our projects are falling into the “web application” category and have much larger scopes than projects we did 3 or 4 years ago. As such, we’re finding that an Agile Development approach may be more appropriate in these cases (building websites in several iterations vs. all at once). TopShelf launches today with a very simple set of features and is fully functional. From design to final code, it took 8 hours. However, we have a large laundry list of ideas that we will be rolling out in the following weeks and months. This gets the application out to the public faster and allows us to incorporate real feedback into our iteration decisions.

TopShelf allows you to manage a list of your job openings.

Job Details are simple and include Job Title, Location, Description, and Contact Email.

The most useful function of TopShelf is the Widget. Any user can copy this code into their corporate website or blog (or both!) and their job listings will be presented as a bulleted list. This list can be styled using a local stylesheet so that it matches the look and feel of any website it is placed on.

Stay tuned for more enhancements to our TopShelf application as time goes on. There’s a lot that we have planned. For now, please sign up and send us your feedback!

Application Experts is a professional consultancy providing technology and process improvement services. They combine expertise in Salesforce.com with a thorough understanding of their clients’ business processes to deliver high-quality, on-demand solutions designed to achieve lasting results.Slice of Lime delivered the strategy, design, and development of the website. We focused on communicating Application Experts’ wide range of services and solutions and providing easy ways for visitors to request more information.

Slice of Lime created a Flash demo for Wynn Resorts that pitched an exclusive podcasting solution for their premier customers. This rich demo includes embedded video, voice overs, and animation to help drive the concept home.

Slice of Lime provided the strategy, design, and development for the Taligen Therapeutics website. Taligen Therapeutics is a development stage biotechnology company with novel technology to modulate and regulate activation of the “complement system”. Complement is a critical component in the initiation of inflammation. Although complement activation and inflammation are a normal part of the body’s defense against infection and injury, inappropriate complement activation leading to inflammation is a major contributor to a large number of human diseases. Because the product is still in development, the website is designed to highlight the technology behind the product as well as the credentials of the people involved in the project. Additionally, Slice of Lime developed a content management system that allows non-technical staff at Taligen Therapeutics to easily add, modify, and delete news, press releases, and announcements.

Slice of Lime provided the strategy, design, and development for the new Valtus website. Valtus removes the traditional steps required to find, access, display and use aerial and satellite imagery. Whether you are new to imagery or a seasoned professional, Valtus can provide you with the tools to manage and distribute imagery throughout your team or your entire company. The website showcases Valtus’ products, services, and partnerships and serves as a launching point for the Valtus store and image search features. In addition to the front-end design, Slice of Lime also build a content management system that allows non-technical staff members at Valtus to easily add, modify, and delete press, news, and upcoming events.

Slice of Lime designed the new Return Path ISP advertisement. The goal is to educate financial decision makers about the importance of email reputation and to build familiarity with Return Path’s Sender Score service. The target audience is the 49,000 senior level executives in financial industries such as banking, investing, and insurance.

This ad encourages people to visit a custom landing page for a free Reputation Monitor report. Information collected through the landing page is then stored in SalesForce. The custom landing page can be viewed here.

Slice of Lime strategized, designed and developed the new concept3D website. concept3D Inc. is the leading authority in the creation and implementation of high quality, cost effective 3-D designs. Leveraging its extensive background in SketchUp™ modeling and global team of in-house designers, concept3D offers the best value in 3-D modeling services on the planet.The web site is coded using web-standards, making it fast-loading, simple to update, and easy to find via search engines. The gallery section uses DHTML that shows the larger image for each thumbnail without leaving the page.

Slice of Lime strategized, designed, and developed the new Collective Intellect website. Collective Intellect specializes in comprehensively tracking, filtering and ranking media content for the Fortune 500. The founders have worked in Business Intelligence for years, creating tools to solve the problem of filtering unstructured information. Customers use their technology to track information related to stocks and investing, support public and investor relations, and facilitate customer support programs.In this second iteration of the website, Slice of Lime updated the look and feel and added an easy to use blog with constantly updated information to keep customers coming back to the site.

Slice of Lime designed and developed the new Feld Thoughts blog, one of the recent recipients of Business Week’s “Best of the Web” awards. This regularly updated blog is authored by Brad Feld, Managing Director of Mobius Venture Capital, and has close to 75,000 regular readers.

When he’s not trying to run a marathon in every state, Brad serves on the boards of a number of private companies, including ePartners, FeedBurner, Gold Systems, Judy’s Book, NewsGator, Rally Software, and StillSecure. In addition, he is on the board of The National Center for Women & Information Technology, The Community Foundation Serving Boulder County, and The Colorado Conservation Trust.The blog touches on a variety of topics, but mainly focuses on his experience in the Venture Capital world. The new design helps focus the eye on Brad’s posts while continuing to offer supplemental content and links in the two sidebars to the right.

Slice of Lime designed and animated the new SkyeTek website. A recent recipient of the Boulder County Business Report’s IQ award, SkyeTek develops reader technology that allows customers to embed Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) as a feature into their products, applications and solutions enabling increased security, safety, productivity and competitive differentiation.

Slice of Lime was asked to create a design and interactive Flash animation that helped highlight the different markets in which SkyeTek’s technology can be utilized. SkyeTek then implemented those designs into their DotNetNuke content management system.

Phiar’s low cost, nano-scale devices take performance beyond the physical limits of semiconductors.

Slice of Lime re-thought the existing Phiar site and chose to communicate their business through three different perspectives- products, applications, and technology- each of which speaks to a distinct group of customers. Now, no one is left out of the amazing Phiar story.The website serves as a source of information as well as a lead-generation tool for Phiar. Slice of Lime worked on the strategy, design, and development of the website.

Click here to see a larger versionSlice of Lime designed the NewsGator product logos to represent NewsGator Online, NewsGator Inbox, NewsGator Private Label Solutions, NewsGator Enterprise Server, NewsGator Media Center, FeedStation, and NewsGator Mobile.The project brings a common design theme to all of their various offerings. Now, it’s easy to identify one of NewsGator’s products as part of a larger family.

Slice of Lime designed and developed the Sender Score website. Since 2002, Return Path’s Sender Score platform, the industry’s pioneering delivery assurance service, has helped thousands of mailers increase their email delivery success.

Slice of Lime designed the site to be clean and simple to navigate. Coding was done using CSS so that colors, copy, and navigation can quickly be modified moving forward.

Slice of Lime designed and developed the “Ignite for Oracle” demo for Confio Software. A user may view the demo slides linearly or jump to a specific chapter that interests them. To make the demo as flexible and as easy to maintain as possible, the demo was coded using DHTML and CSS. This will make it easy to add chapters and slides to the demo in the future.

Slice of Lime developed the website for the Ultimate Electronics “Ultimate Ride” website. This work included all of the Flash animation, video implementation, and coding. Slice of Lime created a custom back-end content management system, making it easy for Ultimate Electronics stores to upload pictures of car audio installs and for Ultimate Electronics administrators to approve, decline, or modify those image uploads. Slice of Lime also created a custom slideshow that displays the approved car audio installs and images.

Slice of Lime designed and developed the new Collective Intellect website in one week - just in time for their presentation at Venture Capital in the Rockies. Collective Intellect enables its customers to quickly and easily collect, filter, analyze and trade on data that can enhance absolute trading returns.

The website was coded using web standards. This makes the site faster, easier to find on search engines, and a breeze to update both its design and content.

Slice of Lime designed NetNewsWire’s 21st Annual Editors’ Choice Award poster for display in the Macworld booth at the upcoming Macworld Expo. Since tradeshows can be overwhelming, our approach was to make this poster as easy to read as possible with the minimum amount of text. The poster clearly states the product name, the fact that it just “grabbed an Eddy”, and its affiliation with NewsGator.Congratulations to NetNewsWire for winning the Eddy for a second time!

Slice of Lime developed the Ultimate Electronics Intechxication Website just in time for the holidays. Slice of Lime was responsible for all Flash animation and Flash/PHP coding. The site features games, surveys and other fun areas that all use dynamically driven content.

Slice of Lime created a custom, back-end content management tool so that the staff at Ultimate Electronics can manage story and image submissions from their customers, survey questions and answers, hangman game words, and other items without needing to touch the Flash file.

Are YOU Intechxicated?

Slice of Lime redesigned the Return Path website to serve as their “corporate blog”. Slice of Lime customized the web log authoring tool, Movable Type, to keep the integrity of the Return Path brand while opening up powerful RSS publishing tools to their staff.Their homepage is now an ever-evolving source of data on the email space. This achieves their primary goal of being known as the industry leader in research and information in their field.

Slice of Lime created an integrated marketing campaign for Return Path for use in DIRECT and B2B magazine. A full-page advertisement directed people to a specific landing page on the Return Path business site which collected leads and tracked the success of the campaign.

Slice of Lime designed the print advertisement and web landing page. Slice of Lime also coded the web landing page, back-end tracking and integration with Sales Force.

Slice of Lime designed the News Hound Logo for The Denver Post. This project, in cooperation with Slice of Lime’s client, NewsGator, put a friendly face on a consumer-oriented RSS reader. The goal was to introduce RSS aggregation to The Denver Post’s readers without intimidating them with complicated words and acronyms. The News Hound was our way of communicating the idea of “fetching” stories based on reader preferences.

Slice of Lime developed a print campaign for Return Path to use at tradeshows that incorporated a scratch-off game and directed people towards a web splash page. The splash page then captured leads through Sales Force.

Slice of Lime designed and developed the print piece and web splash page, including the integration with Sales Force. The campaign proved to be a huge success, boasting a 25% conversion rate.

Slice of Lime designed and developed the new Survey Direct website. Since 1996, the market research community has relied on Survey Direct for responsive and dependable solutions for their online sample and programming and hosting needs. Slice of Lime designed the site to be clean and simple to navigate. Coding was done using CSS so that colors, copy, and navigation can quickly be modified moving forward.

Slice of Lime updated the NewsGator website to better reflect their growing list of products. The new site is more consumer-friendly, offering some insight into what RSS is all about. It also speaks to business professionals and those looking for enterprise level solutions.In the first week of this design launch, the website subscription rate jumped up by 200%.

Slice of Lime redesigned the Windward Reports logo. The goal of this project was to create a professional looking, yet “light and friendly” logo that represented the ease-of-use of the Windward Reports application as well as the CEO’s personal connection to sailing.

Slice of Lime designed and developed the new SketchUp website for @Last Software. SketchUp makes 3D modeling easy for everyone. The goal of the new website was to target a broader range of industries while staying loyal to their existing user-base of architects. A secondary goal was to organize a huge amount of information (product descriptions, training, downloads, support, events, education, etc.) into a clean and simple user experience. With a website that was easy to navigate, users were more convinced that the product would be easy to use as well. The strategy worked and @Last experienced a 23% increase in sales for their SketchUp product after launch.

Slice of Lime designed the Umbria Election 2004 website, which was featured on CNN. The site tracks 3.5 million weblogs to better understand what people are talking about and the characteristics of the people doing the talking. Opinions on various hot button issues between Bush and Kerry are reported on using Umbria’s amazing technology.

Slice of Lime designed and developed the Newmerix website. The goal of this project was to communicate Newmerix’s range of products, gather leads through SalesForce, and to give the Newmerix staff a way to easily update pages moving forward. Slice of Lime designed the “look and feel” of the website and built a custom back-end content management tool. Through this tool, non-technical employees at Newmerix can update news, press releases, and upload whitepapers. Slice of Lime then tied all data collection into Newmerix’s existing SalesForce account.