Nashville Web Design, Graphic and Logo Design

Nashville Interactive recently launched a fresh website redesign for country music artist Amanda Nagurney. Amanda needed a website that reflected her maturing career and that could be updated easily. The solution was a self-hosted, open-source content management system. This means that Amanda controls her own website and doesn't have to worry about being locked-in to proprietary software which often involve fairly hefty fees for hosting, ongoing maintenance and licensing. We're very proud of this one turned out. A great example of a self-managed musician website design that is flexible and allows for easy content management. Check out Amanda's new site at amandanagurney.com

Nashville Interactive is proud to have been a part of GuardYourBuddy.com. The website is dedicated to helping our troops in the TN National Guard cope with the huge life changes that accompany their service. The primary goal of the website is suicide prevention while also providing resources to help manage the various aspects of life that can quickly become overwhelming these days. Nashville Interactive handled the design on this particular project. Check it out at www.guardyourbuddy.com

Alice Tan Ridley first made a name for herself singing in the subways of New York City. She also wowed judges on the popular TV show "America's Got Talent". Alice went from the subway to the big stage and needed a website to reflect the progression of her career. The website design draws inspiration from her days of singing in the subways, using fonts and design elements from the NY subway system signage but also reflects the new heights she's reached as well. The project included design and development of a full site built on a content management system for easy updates. Check out the new website at alicetanridley.com.

Nashville Interactive is proud to present elliotroot.com for your viewing pleasure. ER is a great up and coming group with "roots" (pun semi-intended) in Kenosha Wisconsin. These guys are not your typical Nashville artists. Great music so visit the site and have a listen (and check out the design while you're there).

Nashville Interactive is proud to have had the opportunity to venture into the horse farm website design world with a recent project for Rising Star Ranch. RSR is a Tennessee Walking Horse Breeding Farm located in Shelbyville, TN. The project entailed website design and development and a complete overhaul of their existing site. RSR needed a flexible way to easily manage content including keeping their stallions, news and classified ads up-t0-date. The solution was a WordPress website design. WordPress is a great Content Management System for small to mid-sized website development. You can check out the brand-new Rising Star Ranch website design here: www.attherisingstar.com

INBodied Living is a website dedicated to your well being. I could try to explain it but I thought I'd just let them do the talking. From inbodiedliving.com:

InBodied Living is a national collective of multi-disciplinary experts who have joined together to offer a range of integrative services, events, seminars and consulting engagements that help individuals, groups and organizations learn how to live and lead more consciously – or “InBodied.”

Nashville Interactive performed the website development on this project based on design comps provided by the client. The site has a ton of great information and many excellent resources with much more to come.

Nashville Interactive recently designed, developed and launched bebelmont.com. A website that helps students, alumni and faculty of Belmont University tell their real-world stories. The site has some really great features including ajax-based post sorting on the submissions page, a nice carousel of recent posts on the home page and a robust submission form allowing users to submit their stories, photos, videos and audio files. The website is one of the primary focal points of the beBELMONT campaign which will include TV, billboards, print and online advertising. Check it out at bebelmont.com.

A long time since the last post here at NI. Things have been very busy all spring and summer is shaping up to be just as great. Nashville Interactive has been lucky enough to work on a bunch of great music venue websites and a few fair and event websites as well during this time. These numerous, sub-contracted projects include The Orange Peel (Asheville, NC), Headliners (Louisville, KY), Hat Factory (Richmond, VA), State Fair of West Virginia (uhhh), Allegan Co. Fair (Allegan, MI), Flavor! Napa Valley (CA), Legendary Cherokee (NC), and a few others. Website design was done for all of these sites as well as key front-end development.

So back to the point… Arenas are dead. Going to see an artist in a smaller, more intimate setting is where it's at. The state (and county) fair is where it's at. Helping these people shine and achieve goals via websites is also where it's at.

Perhaps a bit late, but in light of the great year that has just passed, we thought that a short recap and a quick run down of Nashville Interactive's goals for 2011 is in order. First of all, thanks to all the great clients that helped Nashville Interactive have a great 2010. We had the opportunity to work on over three dozen web projects including websites for Diddy, Rajon Rondo, Kenny Perry, Justin McBride and too many more to list here. The Nashville Interactive website design portfolio was beefed up quite a bit in 2010 and we hope to have the same success in 2011. While not all of the goals that were set for 2010 were met, the large percentage were (but if you meet all of your goals, you're not setting your sights high enough).

We won't bore you with all of the company goals for 2011, but we can say that they include a website redesign of NashvilleInteractive.com, growing the business (of course) and providing a much more robust offering of website design services and marketing & advertising services for our new and existing clients.

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This week marks the launch of three websites which Nashville Interactive has played an integral role in. We were lucky enough to be involved in the development of NBA star Rajon Rondo's new website, as well as the design and development of TaiganFinds.com – a blog devoted to finding that great online boutique shopping deal – and design and development of SmartGrow.us – a site where users can purchase organic growing materials (made of human hair!).

While Nashville Interactive can't take credit for the sleek design on Rajon's new site, we're still proud to have been able to perform the build via an open-source content management system to help assist the record-breaking Star. The site has some great features for fans with more to come in the near future as well. Check it out at www.rajonrondo9.com.

Taigan Finds is a blog that features fashion news, style trends and great shopping finds at Taigan.com – an online shopping site with exclusive access to high-end boutique retailers. Nashville Interactive worked closely with the Taigan marketing department to produce TaiganFinds.com. A site that looks and feels as refined as the boutique shops which it features. The blog features some great social network integration to help aggregate content more effectively.

If you're into gardening, plants and Mother Earth, you'll want to check out SmartGrow.us. SmartGrow is a line of organic growing products made from human hair! I know, It may sound a bit icky at first but if you think about where most other traditional fertilizers come from (think cow pastures), it's really not bad at all. Plus the product is 100% all-natural and biodegradable. Nashville Interactive provided a much needed face lift to the SmartGrow site as well as a fully integrated online store to improve the buying experience. Ecommerce website design and development is almost essential these days as more and more users flock to their computers to handle their shopping needs.

So all-in-all a very busy week (and several weeks leading up to it). There's much more website design on the horizon so stay tuned by subscribing to the NI RSS feed or by signing up for email updates.

Internet Explorer's market share has been falling for several years now, while browsers like Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome are growing in popularity. From a web designer's perspective, This is a welcome migration. Internet Explorer (IE) has long been the bane of our existence due to its lack of support for web standards. For every site built, a designer or web developer must spend hours getting IE6 and IE7 to play nice with their code. IE8 has made many improvements but still doesn't natively allow for some of the simpler things like rounded corners or a decent drop shadow. Much of this is slated to change for IE with the introduction of IE9 which has decent HTML5 support and better support for CSS3 and other web standards.

Perhaps Microsoft is just finally waking up and smelling the reality of the web these days with their extensive enhancements to IE9. Or, perhaps this is all in an effort to gain back their dominating web browser market share, which was as high as 90%+ at it's peak.

In many situations, people will use what's readily available to them regardless of how well or how poorly it gets the job done. This is especially true in situations where users are less tech-savvy and don't feel comfortable, don't care or don't have the knowledge to change their browser's default search engine. I'm sure a very significant portion of web users fall into this category. All search engines are available in all browsers but some browsers come with a default search engine already set. Regardless of the reason for Internet Explorer's dominance in the past, that dominance is waning while Microsoft is taking part in a well-marketed battle with Google for a portion of the online search business. Could this desire to gain a foothold in the search market be the reason that Microsoft is implementing a bigger, bader (not bad meaning bad but bad meaning good) IE9? If Users migrate back to IE9, Microsoft's Bing search engine stands to cut into a significant portion of that valuable search business from Google. The great search wars are far from over but Google is obviously winning very big at this point. We'll have to wait and see over the next few years if Bing can hold it's own in a market where the other players are well embedded. Either way, at least we're getting some signs of a better IE.

The children are our future. Teach them well and let them… benefit from your volunteer activities. Nashville Interactive recently designed and performed a large portion of the front-end build for the newly launched schoolvolunteers.org. The site is a tool used by volunteers and coordinators to log and track hours as well as for posting and finding new volunteer opportunities. The target demographic for this particular website design dictated that the site have a very quick load time while retaining a professional and branded look. The site uses sparse and well optimized images and relies on web-safe fonts and css backgrounds for most of the design. The target users are also almost exclusively using various versions of Internet Explorer, including our old friend IE6. This meant that backward compatibility was a must for this project. The site is a great resource for a great cause and will be a great resource for users.

The summer of 2010 will go down as one crazy summer of web design. Nashville Interactive has been very busy with some great projects that will hit the web design portfolio soon. Being busy with nice, air-conditioned office work during a very hot and humid Middle Tennessee summer isn't a bad thing at all. Since the real heat started in June, Nashville Interactive has played an integral part in over one dozen website design projects including work for music mogul Diddy, professional golfer Kenny Perry, country music artist and professional bull rider Justin McBride and Nashville School Volunteers. There's plenty more on the horizon slated for the fall so hopefully we'll be able to find some time for football and leaf raking. Stay tuned for design portfolio updates in the near future…

If you're into professional golf, you're no doubt aware of the excellent play (and demeanor) of Kenny Perry. Mr Perry is a 14-time winner on the PGA tour and a really down-to-earth guy. Nashville Interactive was recently contracted to perform the development of Kenny's site, and we're very proud to have been awarded this opportunity. Working with the provided design, the site was built on an open-source content management system to allow for user update-able content. The site contains tons of great info about Kenny, his interests and what he's up to so stop by kennyperry.com and see why Mr. Perry is one of the most popular golfers on tour.