SOS Employment Group Responsive Website

Desktop? Check. Mobile? Check. Tablet? Check.

We recently launched a fully-responsive website for SOS Employment Group.  Using the same code base, the site looks and behaves slightly differently on desktop, mobile and tablet devices.

We’ve built a few fully-responsive sites now, and I honestly think this will be something that almost every site we build will have in it now. These are some of my favorite responsive solutions on this project: 

Tablet orientation change

When turning from portrait to landscape on a tablet the following things happen on the homepage:

• The menu on the images (Staffing Services, Professional Placement, Reemployment Services, Engineering & Technology, Skilled Trades) shows/hides.
• The logo changes from the full name to just the crescents + SOS.
• The footer automatically closes.

The mobile version

The Find a Position page also shows a reflowed version:

View permanent link in our portfolio ›

SOS Employment Group Logo + Style Guide

We were brought in to help our long-time client SOS Staffing update their name and consolidate their brands under one new entity—SOS Employment Group.

During the course of the web project we helped them create a style guide to help keep everything better aligned. We discovered during that process that two logos were about to be released for different purposes. To help pull everything back in line we were asked to create one logo that would rule them all.

Here is the new logo:

We were asked to keep the crescents, so we rounded them a bit to take the edge off. We also introduced a new typeface that would look solid, but have just a little bit of character.

This consolidates all these old logos:

The style guide was pretty simple, but outlined everything needed to work with the new logo and to help keep stock photos stylized and on-brand.

View permanent link in our portfolio ›

Chow Truck Refresh + Mobile Site

We’ve been huge fans of the Chow Truck for a while. It’s been more than a year since I called SuAn Chow “the godmother of Salt Lake City food trucks” on our blog… which she found (hello Google Alerts and smart business owners!) and was so gracious to tell us who designed her logo and original site. So we were super excited when our friend Traci O’Very Covey mentioned us to SuAn Chow when she was looking to revise her website.

We revamped the design  and redeveloped WordPress from the ground up to fix a host of small issues. We also made a mobile site so that people who are out and about can find some chow.

We also made a custom WordPress plugin to make populating the ‘Find the Truck’ every week much easier.

Check out the site (be sure to hit it on a mobile device as well) and find out when the Chow Truck will be in your area (get whatever is on special or a calamari taco—everything they make is AMAZING).

Visit the permanent link in our portfolio ›

How to Manage a Business Facebook Page

ARRRRGH! Why can’t I comment as myself on a client’s Facebook Page? Why can’t I post this picture with my phone on my business Facebook Page?

Yeah, I’ve been there. For a while we had another account to manage our business Facebook pages. As an agency we help admin a handful of Facebook Pages — but just because I liked something one of our clients does (Age Performance in this case) doesn’t mean I want to post “Great interview, guys!” as Age Performance.

I don't want to make it look like they are congratulating themselves.

I want to congratulate them as a client and friend, as Amber Sawaya.

Facebook finally released a way to better manage everything from your personal account. If you have created two accounts (a business and a personal account) you should know that this violates Facebook Terms of Service and can cause accounts to be shut down and access denied.

5 Things to Know About Managing a Facebook Fan Page from a Personal Account

Make sure you understand the difference between a profile (your personal Facebook account, in my case the one that lists my name, Amber Sawaya) and a page (your business’ fan page, in my case Sawaya Consulting or Age Performance).

1.Choose the correct persona.

In the top right corner there is a drop down to choose to “Use Facebook As”. If you are already using it as a page and want to switch back to your regular profile, choose your name from the list.

2. Make sure to check the voice if you are commenting on a page.

Choose if you are the page or the profile, this shows at the top of the page.

3. You need a separate app on your phone to post as a business.

The Facebook app your have on your phone is for your personal profile only. There isn’t a way around this in the app that I’ve seen. You need a separate app to do think (post, add photos, etc) as a page.

We recommend Facebook Pages Manager on the iPhone and Mobile Page Manager on Android.

4. You can add new admins and specify privileges in the Admin Section

This is an update if you have been doing the old “find the user and make them an admin” game. Just go straight to the admin section and add an email address. Then choose what this new admin can do:

Different roles for admins.

5. Double check to make sure the icon you are posting as is the correct one.

With all these different tools you just need to be careful. Check the icon as you post and make sure it’s the right one—no one wants to see the social media faux pas of posting the wrong thing as the wrong page.

Get going!

Do you need to take a minute and close down any alternate accounts you’ve been using? While you’re at it, make sure your profile picture and cover photo are up to date and look great.

What a crazy summer it’s been!

We have been the busiest we’ve ever been this summer—both personally and with the business.

We’ll post up the projects we’ve been working on in the coming days:

• SOS Employment Group Responsive Website
• SOS Employment Group Logo + Style Guide
• Boart Longyear’s Drillers Connect Responsive Web App
• Boart Longyear Style Guide
• Chow Truck Website Refresh + Mobile Site

• Plus two more in the works:
• An iOS App to help you write better speeches by SmartMouth Communications
• A new website for Knome—the human genome company.

In the meantime, this is what we’ve been up to:

My best friend and partner-designer Kira spent a month with us. We did some Antigravity Yoga, we made some cheesecakes, we threw some parties. My sister got married and we moved her and her new husband from Utah to Kansas.