Headstand Media

Headstand Media is pleased to announce the launch of the new Different Cremation Urn website found at www.differentcremationurn.com. The website design by Headstand Media, was created to work along side David Orth’s primary Orth Furniture business website. David’s custom urns are all one of a kind, beautiful pieces of art. Each bronze cremation urn is handcrafted with a hidden opening, various patina options and can be inscribed with a personal message.

“Cremation urns don’t have to be trinkets or oddities that someday you may wonder what to do with. An urn can be something beautiful and resonate, something that gathers and enfolds memories and personal loss, carrying them forward into the larger human prayer and struggle.” - designer/sculptor David Orth

Headstand Media not only created the user interface for Different Cremation Urn website, but also created a custom Order Request Process that allows a user to select the unique specifications they’d like for their urn, and then submit that request to David Orth. Lastly, Headstand Media provided valuable Search Engine Optimization services and web marketing expertise on this project. Please visit www.differentcremationurn.com today!

Headstand Media is pleased to announce the launch of a new Sunshine Gospel Ministries website found at www.sunshinegospel.org. The website design by Headstand Media, was integrated using the open source Drupal Content Management System and launched on March 24, 2008. Drupal is built upon open source PHP and MySQL technologies. It is also extremely search engine friendly and will enhance the Sunshine SEO rankings and traffic over time. Headstand provided customer training in the use of this powerful Web 2.0 CMS tool and once trained, this tool has allowed customer staff members to enter and keep the site content up to date using a standard web browser.

Also integrated into the new site was an updated and more contemporary Sunshine brand logo and tagline; “Seeking the Renewal of the City.” Headstand Media is also preparing multiple print materials using the new logo design and web design format, so that the ministry presents itself visually in a consistent and coordinated manner. The new print materials include: business cards, letterhead, envelopes, ministry logos, brochures, forms and other newsletters.

The site features multiple videos explaining various aspects of the ministry from mission and vision to program descriptions and the racial reconciliation philosophy. The videos were shot and edited by LifeFocus Productions, and converted into Flash Video format for integration on the website. Also included is a full site search tool, commenting, RSS feeds, event calendar and animated Flash photos.

Sunshine Gospel also uses eTapestry for its donor record and communication software and databases. Headstand Media worked with eTapestry to integrate several secure web forms that allow site visitors to set up online donations, or payments for classes or other event registrations.

The new website positions Sunshine Gospel Ministries with a new contemporary image and will enable it to perform much better in the search engines, as it connects with the community it serves, the surrounding Chicago area supporting churches, and a growing college student audience interested in their Bridge Builders urban ministry training program.

In the spring of 2005, Benjamin Nelson was engaged by the Chicago area headquarters of the Willow Creek Association to design a women’s conference website called “Breathe.”

This project involved working with the Willow Creek marketing and design teams to take their printed marketing materials and translate them into a strong online experience.

This website enabled the user to view the speaker and conference schedules, download critical resources, register online, send the website to a friend and more.

About Willow Creek

The Willow Creek Association was founded in 1992, and works to link like-minded, action-oriented churches with each other and with strategic vision, training, and resources. They are driven by a calling to serve Christ-following leaders as they build biblically functioning churches—authentic, Acts 2 communities of faith that reach increasing numbers of lost people and grow them into fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ.

The WCA is a not-for-profit ministry, with more than 12,000 Member Churches from 90 denominations and 45 countries. These churches, and others they serve, represent a wide variety of sizes, denominations, and backgrounds, and are ministering in literally every corner of the world.

Richard Thieme is a writer, thinker, author and speaker who Randal Birkey met some years ago through a mutual friend - Harvey Tillis - President of the Association for Multimedia Communications. Richard has maintained a website at www.thiemeworks.com for many years, which Randal has had the privilege of helping him with.

Richard regularly posts articles under his blog: The Missing Link, a section called An Imaginary Garden, another section called Islands in the Clickstream, and a new section called The Second Edition.

Headstand Media welcomes Richard as a new Chicago web design client, focused on ongoing web 2.0 design and development of thiemeworks.com as well as his Movable Type powered blog site.

Headstand Media welcomes American Mobile Shredding and The Shredding Store as a new client. AMS was referred to Headstand Media through our long-standing professional relationship with Mark Goeke. Owner Joe Cesarini has been consistently impressed with the business-building search engine performance of his website in the past, and looks forward to seeing this trend increase under Headstand Media’s search engine optimization services and creative web design direction.

American Mobile Shredding focuses on servicing businesses in the larger Chicago metropolitan area. The Shredding Store services retail customers in and around Oak Park, Illinois, a near west suburb.

The site is undergoing a design face-lift plus conversion to a LINUX hosting platform using open-source PHP and MySQL. In the process, additional search engine optimization features will be added and integrated by Headstand Media, as well as Flash based audio files and graphics.

Caterpillar, Inc. desired to explore moving a portion of their extensive parts catalog from a paper only, to an interactive CD-ROM computer-based solution back in the early 1990’s. Randal Birkey worked with Lou Morelli in producing an interactive CD-ROM demo for Caterpillar, Inc. to evaluate. The graphics were done in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, then moved into Macromedia Director for sequencing and interactivity programming. Morelli provided the programming for the “hooks” into the parts database.

The final installment in this retrospective was in 2006, as the BIRKEY.COM website was relaunched with a version 4.0 redesign, as can currently be viewed online. The interface and logo was designed in by Corey Wilkinson, Creative Director at BIRKEY.COM. It is a database-driven site managed by the Birkey Backstage, a custom Content Management System (CMS), built in classic Microsoft .ASP and MS SQL Server.

This is the final and last Chicago web design for the BIRKEY.COM website used as a web design business. Future websites by MIS will have a different name and brand. The BIRKEY.COM domain will become a Randal Birkey personal illustration portfolio website… full circle from its beginnings in 1996.

Continuing the retrospective on the history of BIRKEY.COM, we are posting below the third major redesign of the site since it was founded by Randal Birkey in 1996. This version (3.0) was done a collaboration with the Creative Director of BIRKEY.COM, Corey Wilkinson. This was he first design that communicated the merge of BIRKEY.COM with Midwest Information Systems, Inc.

We used a “retro” look and colors, and built the site in Microsoft ASP, with a SQL Server database Backstage. When you rolled over the navigation items on the left, the TV screen displayed different images… kinda fun. The “circle B” logo was animated using the .GIF format. We also hosted the site ourselves on a Windows 2000 server, running IIS.

Back in 1998, I had some friends in Oak Park named Lee & Margie Fay, who started an in home business called Cottage Classics. Margie was very resourceful, and would take old “junk” or found items and turn them into interesting, one-of-a-kind vintage home furnishings. She made pillows out of antique cloth, Umbrella holders our of old architectural tin, and much more.

Based upon my Chicago web design work as BIRKEY.COM, they asked me to design a website for the business. Here is their home page design, which eventually became an e-commerce shopping online website.

In December of 1998, this was the main web interface page for the Chicago based Jones Lang LaSalle real estate development company. This Chicago web design is based upon a high-rise office building interface and navigation system, as well as the icons for each floor as you navigated from the home page deeper into the site.

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