MCM-COM is proud to welcome The Care Guide to our roster of clients. 

http://www.thecareguide.com

The Care Guide Runs on the Agility Managed CMS Platform (www.agilitycms.com)

A little about The Care Guide:

The Care Guide is Canada’s most comprehensive guide to seniors’ housing and care services. 

Together with our award winning website TheCareGuide.com, we’ve been helping Canadian seniors make informed decisions about their housing and care service options since 1996, and have been consulting within the seniors’ housing industry since 1993. 

Backed by an experienced, caring and committed team that understands the sense of urgency and needs of our visitors, TheCareGuide.com helps caregivers, seniors, families and their advisors access the full spectrum of seniors’ housing and care solutions through trustworthy, accurate and easy-to-use information, support and community, and offers industry stakeholders an effective, results-based channel to reach a highly targeted audience at a key decision-making time.   Our printed directories and website include all retirement residences, long-term care homes, home health care and community support services, independent/supportive living, assisted living, Alzheimer care and hospice care across Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta, with the balance of the country coming soon. The Care Guide also provides valuable insights and guidance to help seniors and families make more informed decisions about their housing or care service needs, and information and resources about related issues such as caregiving, health and wellness, financial planning, legal concerns and estate planning.

“MCM-COM and M33 Inc. / Koda Media Group teamed up again to bring the BMO + Harris @Work online a fresh new look and some hot interactive features. “

In Q4 2009 we were gearing up to do something big with the Internal Communications Vehicles Group at BMO Financial Group.    The plan was to convert “@Work”, the static employee online publication to a more dynamic, interactive and easy to naviate site on the SharePoint intranet platform, which all BMO employees have access to.  

The site got an amazing new design (as you can see in the screenshots below) provided by the talented guys at M33 Inc. / Koda Media Group. Mike McKinnon and Julia Konovalova from MCM-COM built, bent, and pried SharePoint 2007 and a bank’s corporate network into something both beautiful and functional.  

The set up is a complete departure from anything usually done in SharePoint, and that was what got us hooked on the project in the first place.   We knew that our goal was to make people not even realize they were looking at a SharePoint site .   We wanted to prove to ourselves and others that SharePoint could be used to make a visually appealing website.    

Behind the scenes is an intricate set of workflows and customizations to the SharePoint back end that allows a bank employee, designated as an administrator – to create new issues, in both English and French and deploy them at the click of a button.

However, creating an issue of any publication, online or offline is never a simple exercise.   It requires a team approach and a lot of work.  We were able to leverage the built-in functionality that SharePoint offers naturally and template the content in their publication, we then provided a unified back end that allows for the creation and editing of that content.   Having this in place on their corporate intranet basically allows any group of designate employees to become “writers”, “editors”, and readers of the publication.

To make the site fun and exciting for the reader (or user as we like to say), the team employed a number of interactive features.  The inclusion of a number of surveys in each issue has received a great response.  We also a Flash-based audio, video, text viewer to feature the “Hot Topics” in each issue.    There is also a custom-built web part that ranks the top 5 articles and appears in a box in on the top right of the page.  We also built several other custom implementations that allow for quick user navigation.

Our team still works closely with the Internal Communications Vehicles Group to put together each issue and to provide advice and solutions for specific problems that may arise.   M33 Inc. / Koda Media Group also creates an email version of the publication that is sent out to all employees to announce the launch of a new issue.

With each issue new features and opportunities are being examined and tested.  One big change for the publication is the ability for readers to comments on articles.  This allows a new form of interaction between the readers and the writers by allowing any reader to post their comments for any article and spark discussion. 

This system has allowed the Internal Communications Vehicles at BMO Financial Group to cut the time it takes to create a publication by half and the new look and feel has been extremely well received.  Page views of  @Work went up by 76% for the first issue of the redesigned site.

BMO / Harris @Work Homepage

BMO / Harris @Work Article Page

Luminature.net is a new site geared at European and North American healthcare providers that provides information and training for advanced phototherapy techniques.  These techniques range from cessation therapys to wound healing.  

Headed by Anita Saltmarche (RN, BScN, MHSc) the Luminature.net site will bring information, training resources, online learning programs and projects to a single location on the internet.   At this early stage of it’s life it contains only the information relating to smoking cessation training and some general information about phototherapy – but soon it will be full of training activites and programs and much more information. 

Created with only javascript, images and code this minimal and beautiful site can be viewed on your computer or on your smart phone.

Visit http://www.luminature.net today.

K Promotions Ltd. is a promotional marketing agency who provides innovative and appealing promotional products to be used by their clients to promote marketing efforts and brand recognition in various campaigns and events.

K Promotion’s Nelson Do Vale contacted Mike McKinnon with a request to complete a massive custom website that was about 80% done.   The code of the site was well written and put together – but was still lacking in several areas such as product search anc categorization and admin functions, content updates, user management features, and more.  Add to that the fact that user testing had produced over 5 pages of bug reports that all needed to be fixed plus the client had no web vehicle to generate new leads (other than an email link on their contact page).

We immediately accepted the challenge and within a month had completed all the bug fixes and had proposed and implemented several feature additions that included a newsletter signup system and a flash based banner rotator on the home page that can drive clicks to key areas, and promotional items, featured on the site.

As the business relationship grew so did Nelson’s confidence in us.   This has resulted in the procurment of a web based email marketing system by K Promotions Ltd., which we operate on their behalf.  Now they have a solid and scalable email solution that they dont have to ever fix or maintain, we take care of all that for them.

The site re-launched on December 15th, 2009 to great user reviews and can be viewed at http://www.kpromo.com.

Cypheraudio.com is a sound design and production studio that makes sick, wicked, and nasty sound-bombs for videos, TV shows, art pieces, commercials, and more!

John D. Black, owner of Cypheraudio came to MCM-COM with a requirment to build a micro CMS system that will allow him to add videos and images along with descriptions for newly added projects.  MCM-COM built a PHP based Micro CMS system that allows John to add new work, edit existing work, enable or disable current proejects and sort them for display on the main page. 

The clean look and feel of the site was great to work with and the result is an easy to update site just chock full of great videos and music.

Go have a listen and enjoy the new Cypheraudio.com.

Up All Night is a Canadian Celtic band that Chris Patheiger from Redux Media is in.  Chris approached us with a request to modify his existing band site and make it a WordPress blog so they can update posts for upcoming shows, events, and information.   They also wanted a place to showcase their photos, videos and music.   We proposed a nice WordPress theme with some custom modifications to allow for static gallery pages, information about the band, and multi-media viewing and listening capabilities.

We also provided them with a custom Flash header that allows them to easily modify the upcoming show times and venues.   We also provide hosting services for the site.

Go check out http://www.upallnight.ca to see how it looks.

We were approached by Marc Moore of Koda Media Group in early July to see if we were interested in working on a BMO interactive web tool that was already launched but needed to be taken to the next level for v2.

We agreed and were put to work on making several changes and updates to an already existing (and extremely well put together) Flash application.  Over first two weeks of July we spent many an hour creating new volume sliders, pre-loaders, modifying animation sequences, upgrading graphics and copy and generally having a ball! (Did we say that this site was EXTREMELY well done to begin with?)

The tool is very much like a guided tour of things you need to think about to ensure you have a safe and prosperous retirement.  You are guided through it by several videos featuring Dr. Amy D’Aprix who is the BMO Life Transition Consultant.

The site was done in Flash and coded using ActionScript 3.0.  It loads data externally from XML and also uses external Flash Videos throughout.  It takes advantage of several new features found in ActionScript 3 and is an excellent example of the robust and scalable applications that can be created with Flash nowadays.

You can view the site here in English. 

http://www4.bmo.com/vgn/takecharge/bmofg_en.html?Wt.ac=E1610_hp1e_ryw

For French simply click the link at the top of the site page.

The C-Watch is a nifty Dick Tracy type watch that doubles as a cell phone.

Well when we saw that we literally threw our iPhones and Casios out the window and slapped these bad boys on. Then we were told that they needed to be sold so we went without phones for a while.

The C-Watch website was required for a special holiday push in North America and as such needed to be created and produced in a very short amount of time.

MCM-COM, charged with this task went across the office to Felix W. of Helios Design Labs and begged him to slap together a site slick enough for a watch that you talk into. (BTW it plays MP3’s too!) Not only did they put together a great site but they also put together a nifty 360 degree view of the watch and even added some nice reflections to it.

That coupled with re-branding work, lots of photography and after effects, and a couple sleepless nights and voila… you have http://www.cwatch.tv – go have a look now. But you can’t buy one because they are sold out. A new design is on it’s way!

Whether you want a custom wordpress theme or just need an existing one skinned and set up for you – we got you covered.  We can skin and configure a WP blog within 48 hours for you at a cost that won’t have you blogging about the economy!  Just take a look at some of the great blogs that wouldn’t be here if it were not for MCM-COM.

http://www.reduxmedia.com/blog

http://www.themediapath.com/

After seeing what we did with Pingo one of the affiliates for Saturn Bingo asked us if we could take a sketch they had and turn it into a marketable face for their new holding company Diamond Lil’s Place.  After taking the drawing and re-illustrating it we then went off and built them some nice nifty Vegas style logo’s and put together a nice simple site for them. 

If you have a sketch or drawing on a pumpkin top, garbage can lid, cocktail napkin, or piece of bread and you would like it taken to the next level please send us an email at contact@mustcodemore.com and be prepared to be amazed by our award winning designers.