Need a an extra fistful of benjamins? Our good friends over at VSAG are sponsoring the Name a Restaurant Contest where you get to be the star and take home the cash, $2500 to be exact. Think hip, bold, Asian influenced with an American style appeal. On-the-go or sit down, this restaurant will be LA’s place to eat and be seen eating. Take a chance, who knows, when it’s shown on Food Network, you can smile and take a bow.

And remember, thats bighouse graphix, 219 West Bryan Street, Savannah GA 31401.  Fine imported beers, cold hard cash or just a simple thanks will do. Tell your friends, tell your neighbors, anyone can enter.  Contest ends October 31st.

www.namearestaurant.com

Bess Chappas currently travels the country promoting her children’s books. Since her retirements, she has been telling stories professionally to both children and adult groups across the country.  She has won Honorable Mention for an article in the Writer’s Digest contest and has authored the  CD, “Savannah Ghost Stories” and the children’s book, “Kiki and the Red Shoes.”

She wanted a simple website that would allow her to sell her CDs and books along with the ability to post upcoming events and articles. Building on a wordpress platform, we were able to achieve both goals fairly simple by incorporating a simple blog into the site. This allows Bess to easily make updates, add new pages, post new articles and add new items to her store.

www.savannahstoryspinners.com

When our longtime friends at VSAG contacted us about being part of the Founding Farmers restaurant project back in July, we were more than excited.  Founding Farmers is unique in that their model is to provide Farm to Table serves fresh Farm-to-Table American-inspired true food and drink, sourcing locally and regionally whenever possible. It’s the first restaurant in Washington, DC to meet the LEED Gold Standard design criteria, and the Green Restaurant Association deemed it a Certified Green Restaurant. This $6 million, 2-story, 8,500 square foot restaurant serves up family farm favorites like fresh-baked biscuits, breads and pastries, omelettes, pancakes, and all the breakfast trimmings, big, hearty rustic farm sandwiches and soups, big, colorful green salads with just-picked vegetables, a variety of pot pies, prime cuts, pot roast, roasted chicken, and rich, delectable pies and desserts from the pastry bar, supplied by the in-house bakery.

The restaurant has even invested in the state-of-the-art Natura® water system to provide guests with fresh-filtered, purified, mineral-filled, chilled sparkling and still water served in glass carafes to eliminate truck deliveries, carbon emissions and to reduce tons of plastic and glass waste.

Other LEED criteria design elements and energy-efficient moves include the use of day lighting to illuminate the restaurant, increased ventilation, green-sourced power and low-VOC emitting paints.  Founding farmers officially opened its doors this spring.

bighouse graphix was honored to do the website build for Founding Farmers, and gives props to Allison at Seth Design for the website design.  Other credits go to VSAG (Developers), CORE (Architecture) and SPIN (amazing PR work).

SEE THE VIDEO: Founding Farmers on US News

www.wearefoundingfarmers.com

Cooked slow and served hot. That’s the Wild Hog way.  Based out of Richmond Hill, Georgia, Wildhog Barbecue and Caterers specializes in fundraising for churches, auxiliary groups, non-profits, you name it.  Their programs make it easy to bring home the bacon while folks eat some of the best barbecue in the lowcountry.

Logo, menu design and website development were done by bighouse graphix.

www.wildhogbarbecue.com

Duncan Commercial Real Estate specializes in commercial sales and lease transactions, serving the  Central and Western Maryland area, including the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C.  We were more than excited when Ken contacted us about designing his website and would like to thank the folks at Costar for the kind referral.

For this site, keeping it simple and to the point was very important. Browns and beiges help lend to that corporate look and feel, while simple and limited navigation makes the site easy to use.

www.duncancommercialproperties.com

Through the recent design and launch of Harrison Development’s newest website, www.harrisonspotlight.com, we are proud to have formed a strategic partnership with Agent Shield.  The problem with many land development and community sites is that real estate agents are often hesitant to direct leads to a website for fear of losing valuable leads. Makes sense right?  In comes Agent Shield, their Web 2.0 patented pending technology allows realtors and land developers to utilize a new development’s website as a marketing and sales tool while maintaining control of their prospects and leads.

Lets see an example, first visit the site, harrisonspotlight.com. As you can see, all contact information such as phone number and address are located on the home page as well as on the contact page here.

Now, lets go to a realtor’s page where the Harrison Community is being advertised,for example here. Scroll down about half way and click on the “view details” for the Harrison Development link, which will then take you back to the Harrison home page.  See the difference?   That’s right, the site has now been masked to show only the realtors information on the contact page.   The user’s computer is also cookied in the event that he or she goes back to visit the homepage, even if they don’t go through the realtor site.  Seller gets the credit for the lead, both parties are happy.

NOTE: Use this link to clear out your cache.

Read more about Agent Shield at www.agentshield.com

In these times of economic want and woe, it’s more important than ever to stick together. Chances are pretty good you’re feeling the economic pinch — especially if you are a small business owner — making the 2009 Small Business Summit here in Effingham County all the more important. Finding out what some of our area’s most successful business owners and entrepreneurs are doing to find new clients and customers, lower their operating costs, adapt to changing markets and succeed in today’s economic climate seems like a no-brainer. We’ll be there.

When Ken Stoner of  Effingham County Chamber of Commerce, contacted us about developing a logo for this chamber-sponsored event, we were honored.  We worked out several idea sketches and ended up going with a light bulb illustration, with a red-and-white on black color scheme. The DIN 1451 font family was applied. It is a realist sans-serif typeface that is used as a standard typeface for traffic, administration and business applications making it a perfect fit for the summit logo. On the vertical version, Futura was also used. The logo will be used on print products and advertising for the event.

The Summit is April 4, 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., at the Savannah Tech Effingham Campus. Reservations are limited. Reservations are free for Effingham Chamber members. (Non-members $49). Includes admission to keynote address, class sessions, course materials, trade show and business roundtable discussion groups. Call 912-754-3301. See you there!

What can we say, good design makes for good neighbors.  Our next door neighbor Cindy Barnett Interior Design needed a website presence and well, we felt we had to.  Heaven forbid good interior design be show through bad website design right? All website design, build and content development was done by bighouse.

Most of the photography on the site was done through Azelle Photography.   Our longtime friends at Azelle have a great eye for good photography and composition which really came together on the final site design.  More of their work can be seen at their site here or take a look at a few of the thumbnails below.

This site is a CMS site with a mix of flash and PHP thrown in. Look for their online storefront this summer.

www.cindybarnettinteriors.com

Bighouse is proud to have helped launch yet another restaurant with our good friends at VSAG. All branding to include logo development, signage, menu boards, and take out menus was done by bighouse.

Located at Cross Creek Mall in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Kobi’s Fast Wraps  is a fresh food fast concept, specializing in sandwich wraps and grilled paninis. Unlike the usual food court offerings of deep fried and the other not-so-good-for-you selections, Kobi’s prides itself in using only the freshest ingredients and roasts their sandwich meats daily.

We are proud to announce our newest site launch, Hernandez Construction Services based out of Akron, Ohio. All copywriting, design and build was done by bighouse.

This site was built on a Content Management System (CMS) platform, allowing ease of use for their administrative staff when it comes to making edits and updates in-house.  No need to contact tech support or learn new software for this one.  Bold colors and large easy navigation buttons present the info in an easy to read format.  A neat little feature we built into the site is a Project Locator found here.  This nifty little flash application gives visitors a quick visual map highlighting project locations through the use of rollovers.

www.hernandezcorporation.com