Who We Are

C&A was established out of our desire to provide high-quality website design to the under-served farm and ranch, non-profit, and small-business communities. We've worked with the web since before it was the web. We'll bring the value of our experience to you and your business.

We work with a network of incredibly talented web professionals, but our C&A principles are:

• Greg Croasdill
• Kara Heinrichs

What We've Done - Experience and Technical Skills

C&A specializes in creating eBusiness solutions, not just websites. We address your business and your customers, we don't design pages. If the whole site is not useful, useable or understandable - creating “cool” pages or flashy graphics just won’t matter.

We at C&A have created award-winning web sites including many of the biggest names in electronic commerce, like Godiva Chocolatier, 1-800-FLOWERS, HoMEdics and Eddie Bauer, and some of the most popular corporate identity sites on the Web, like Ragú and Dominos Pizza. In the last few years we have brought our talents to bear smaller sites, bringing our experience to educational sites, non-profit organizations and agricultural businesses.

We pride ourselves on our ability to integrate creativity and technology to produce Web sites that really meet the need of the intended audiences and make our clients look outstanding. As a result, our Web sites are easy to use, visually appealing, and engaging.

Our strength is our ability to create easily navigable sites with a strong graphical look and feel without the site looking like a thin layer on top of a database or a unappealing 2-dimensional, “flat” page that does little to enhance the image of your business.

How We Work – The Site Design Process

The task of Web designers is to find ways to bridge old and new ways of doing business using the technological tools available. Technology should never drive design. Needs, goals, and audience should drive design. Technology should then be used to implement that vision.

This process creates a framework that ensures we assess goals and existing business processes first, before we move to specify solutions and specific technologies. These analysis and design phases are highly collaborative between C&A and our clients. This ensures that it is the business model that’s being addressed not just technology. In addition, the maintenance phase (often neglected by many formalized design processes) turns out to be the majority of a Web site’s lifespan and must be designed and planned for as well.

C&A staff has experience developing Web sites for a wide range of clients, from small businesses to multinational corporations. Regardless of the client’s size, or ultimate goals, building a successful Web site requires more than programming expertise, creative inspiration, and marketing savvy. It requires a frequent, open dialogue between the client and the Web developer about current objectives, and future goals. The needs assessment and information design phases should involve collective brainstorming.

How We Do It – Business, Creative, Technical & Analytical Resources

First, we understand your business. Every company is unique with its own expectations and needs. We at C&A are adept at both listening and business analysis. We try to understand your business and make every effort to match our solutions to your business needs. Since we’re helping to solve your problem, we don’t ask you to bend over to adapt to our solutions.

Our creative process works with your business and its existing assets (logos, business colors, pamphlets, etc.) to create a look that is appealing and useable. We can create a presence that is professional and will work with your message and products.

We pride ourselves on being exceptionally flexible technically. For instance, over the previous five years, we’ve developed and maintained systems for clients using Macintosh, NT, and UNIX operating systems. We have adequate resources for developing websites using any technology and the expertise to deliver your site where it’s needed.

We can work with you to help define your hosting needs and select a suitable web hosting firm or set up the connectivity to you location if you want to host the system yourself. We will work with the hosting facility to get the web site and supporting information up and running smoothly. At C&A we have strong technical knowledge of both NT and Unix hosting systems and can move mountains when needed to get things working for you.

We also are advocates of open source software platforms. We help you decrease your long-term costs by using well-supported open source systems. These systems allow the developers and site owners to customize the tools as needed for their needs and not to be pigeon holed into the original developers vision for the product. We also turn all source code over to you so that you can work with your own resources or ours in the future for further site upgrades.

C&A will also register your site on the best of the search engines. We will also work with you on extending your sites’ visibility by researching keyword, banner placement and other marketing campaigns.

We also have an excellent understanding of web site traffic analysis. It is important to correctly analyze this often-misunderstood data. Understanding the nuances of your website’s traffic patterns are the key to finding out how users are reacting to and using your site, how well search engines have you placed, and who’s using the site. We can work with the reports and help you develop new strategies for your site and fix any website problems that could be effecting how the world perceives your company.