Online Community Builders

Design and Development - In the early 1990's online community design and development was most often referred to as electronic frontier community building. Today's visionaries see online community design as one of the most significant trends toward successful integration of Internet technologies into our daily lives.

Westward Connections was among the first Electronic Frontier Community Builders on record. What is an Electronic Frontier community? Our company president, Barb Tomlin, defines it as a friendly association of people, loosely connected through the Internet and proprietary interactive networks with the purpose of communicating for social or economic advantage. Today, this type of association is also recognized as a virtual or online community.

Since the 300 baud modem days, several members of our team have played significant roles in the building of such communities on private electronic bulletin board services and major proprietary networks such as Prodigy®, America Online® and CompuServe®. In recent years, however, we have concentrated our virtual community building efforts on Internet venues, including e-mail, chat and the World Wide Web.

Web Site Architects

Westward Connections offers full-service web site architectural, design, and management expertise. We will help you make the right connections with your target audience as well as the technology necessary to be successful online. We believe a web site should be more than a global advertisement for your organization. It should be your primary marketing toolbox for the new millennium. Working within your mission and branding guidelines, we develop sophisticated web sites with a memorable presence. Westward consultants go beyond coding HTML pages and designing web eye candy. As website architects, our people work on projects from concept to completion. We help clients create strategic plans for the development, construction, maintenance, and expansion of their web projects, organize the teams and resources to implement those plans, manage and perform the site construction, and insure all systems are running smoothly upon completion.

Online Researchers

Our online research division was formed as a result of our president's ability to sniff out the news before it became news and clients willing to pay her to do it. We have been called cybersleuths, detectives, and snoops. The bottom line is we enjoy performing research tasks for our clients and have fun doing it. One of the primary online research services we provide is Web site auditing. Working closely with our Web site architects, our researchers perform thorough analyses of the success potential and current effectiveness for your website. We offer over 40 years combined marketing research, online communications and marketing experience.

Web Content Producers

Westward content producers are veteran writers and editors. They have an astute understanding of how people read online content and how to organize content for online consumption. They are able to competently write news stories and other content for web sites within realistic deadlines. Our producers are able to perform first or secondary marketing research to support their content production and to accomplish complex HTML tasks to get their content published. Most are also accomplished digital photographers who are able to provide complementing photographs for any content they produce.

Software Solution Providers

We are constantly searching for and testing new software applications to make your online experience worthwhile. So far we have made alliances with vendors producing award winning software, enabling our clients to:

Desktop Marketing Specialists

One of the fastest ways to reduce marketing costs without sacrificing results is by implementing desktop marketing strategies. What is desktop marketing? We define it as the development and implementation of cost effective strategies to generate revenue via the use of computer and telephony technologies.

We are specialists at creating low cost, effective marketing programs that can be implemented from our desktop or yours. From Web site promotion to full-fledged techno-savvy marketing campaigns, we welcome the opportunity to show you how to make the most of your marketing resources.

Online Information Technology Trainers

As an employer of information technology specialists (most of whom have been telecommuters) since 1993, we draw from real-world experience in our offering of several custom training programs integrating computer and telephony technologies. Our trainers welcome the opportunity to show you how to gain the most productivity from your workforce by combining their skills sets with the use of telephones, computers, software, modems, alpha-numeric pagers and facsimile machines. We invite you to visit our online training center today to learn more about our latest programs.