We are rebuilding. Join us.

We are rebuilding our site—live at building.seesparkbox.com. Join us, real-time, as the site evolves. It will be ugly at times. Sometimes it will be downright broken. But it will always be transparent and real. You can even check under the hood of the public repo on Github and share your ideas. Crazy, are we? Read why we're doing this.

Posts About the Rebuild

  1. Our New Build Process
  2. Content And Style Prototyping the Rebuild
  3. Planning To Rebuild: Part 2
  4. Planning To Rebuild: Part 1
  5. Rebuilding In Public
  6. Rebranding Sparkbox

Rebuild Deliverables

  1. project-init Repo
  2. Content Prototype
  3. Style Prototype
  4. Initial Sitemap
  5. Working Taxonomy
Go to the new site rebuild Go to our current live site
Let’s be more than friends.

The proof is
in the pudding

We could talk all day long about how great our work is, but we’d rather you take a look and make the call.

Browse

Tunnel Vision Laboratories

Tunnel Vision Labs Website

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Sam Harwell is Owner and Lead Developer of Tunnel Vision Labs, a development shop that focuses on one thing — and they do it really, really well. Tunnel Vision builds integrated development environments for proprietary and emerging development languages. In other words, they develop tools for developers, and they do it really well and really efficiently. Sam came to us to build an efficient and fluid website, and he needed it on a deadline. The result is a site that is as clean, beautiful, and durable as Tunnel Vision's code. Check it out. And if you're looking for some custom IDE work, give Sam a call.

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The College of Mount St. Joseph

MSJ.edu Website

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The College of Mount St. Joseph has the distinction of having one of the first fully responsive collegiate websites in the country, and we had a great time doing it. They came to us with the opportunity to rework the nearly 1,600-page site, top-to-bottom, including planning, content strategy, design, and new CMS. After a complete rework of site audience, goals, and architecture, the original site's page volume was reduced, reprioritized, and restructured. We had a unique opportunity to create navigation that would accommodate a site that, though smaller in size than when we started, was still vast. The result? Check it out for yourselves. And should you or your kids decide to apply with the good folks in admissions, tell them Sparkbox sent you (they promised us a tasty discount in their dining hall).

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Stry

Stry.us Long-form News Website

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Working with Stry on a ground-up brand and website overhaul was one of those rare occasions where the client hands over near complete creative control. The direction from Stry founder, Dan Oshinsky, was pretty much, "Make the most beautiful news website ever made." Stop by Stry.us for a look around. Be sure to set aside some time, however, because even if the beautiful, responsive design eventually loses your attention, the rich long-form articles will keep you there for hours.

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Dayton Power & Light

DP&L Website & Responsive Retrofit

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Dayton Power & Light came to Sparkbox to rebuild their website, and do it right. They were looking for a firm that could not only make it look better, but that had the technical expertise to make it secure and more user-friendly. The commitment with which DP&L approached the process made this a successful project. From research, information architecture, and wireframes through design, development, and security audits, the DP&L team was a great partner. 

The project was such a success that, over a year later, we were able to provide a responsive retrofit for the site. A feat made possible because of the original solid site architecture, markup, and a great working relationship with DP&L.

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White Lotus Aromatics

White Lotus Aromatics Website

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White Lotus Aromatics knew that the future of their e-commerce business would rely heavily on mobile customers. In order to meet that demand and prepare for the next phase of their business, White Lotus engaged with Sparkbox to create a fully responsive e-commerce site. We're proud of the elegant design and the flexible layout. White Lotus customers are rather impressed with the new look and feel, also.

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The Passion Center for Children

Passion Center for Children Website

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Sparkbox is proud to have partnered with The Passion Center for Children to build their new brand and website. In their own words, "The Passion Center for Children serves children orphaned by the AIDS epidemic in Malawi. We seek to rescue those children at greatest risk, providing food, comfort, medical care, and a safe place to live in the name of Jesus Christ." We were pleased to be able to serve The Passion Center by opening up new possibilities through online donation, internally managed web content, and an opportunity to move away from their costly monthly newsletter mailings.

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University System of Maine

Think.Maine Campaign Website

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While working on the Think.Maine campaign for the University System of Maine, their marketing partner, Mindpower, reached out to Sparkbox to develop a website that was as forward-thinking as the proud people of Maine. The website is responsive, allowing for every Mainer—as well as the rest of the country—to access the encouraging content, regardless of web browsing device. The people of Maine are looking toward a brighter future, and we are proud to have played our part.

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DPL Energy Resources

DPL Energy Website

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DPL Energy Resources is a competitive retail supplier of electricity and is wholly owned by DPL Inc. The company approached Sparkbox to help design a new site in record time. Never one to back down from a challenge, we agreed and got started immediately, working after-hours for most of the project. It's only because of our extremely detailed project managers and experience working together that we were able to meet the deadline. Shortly after launch, the statistics on the site showed significant improvements in every area including unique views, time on site, bounce rates, and pages per visit. While we certainly don't chose to work on deadlines this short, it is great to know that our team can meet the challenge if necessary.

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Homefull

Homefull Website

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The website we created for Homefull was part of our FORGE Your Dot Org 2010 program. The site needed to carry their new identity to the web and provide a place for individuals to learn about and contribute to the Homefull vision: to eradicate homelessness in Dayton. It includes a full content management system based on the popular open source platform, WordPress, with the ability to accept donations and (eventually) sell products. We wanted to clearly communicate the homelessness problem and explain how Homefull helps because we wholeheartedly believe in their mission and want them to keep improving people's lives.

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Panstoria

Panstoria Website

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The guys at Panstoria have been great clients and great friends. After their company rebranded in 2009, we helped with a new set of icons for their Artisan software and most recently, redesigned their corporate website, www.panstoria.com. This was a two-phase project the first of which launched a small, fairly static site with a fully-functional content management system integrated. This phase provided basic content about their organization and their flagship product as well as recruiting beta-testers for that product. The second phase is a customized e-commerce section of the site which ties into their back-end for product licensing and key generation. This phase extended the first with the addition of an integrated shopping cart and the flexibility to add more products as they are developed.

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Dayton Power & Light

DP&L Outage Map

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After a successful launch of the Dayton Power & Light corporate website, DP&L enlisted Sparkbox to help communicate outage information to their customers. This required us to work with DP&L engineers to interface with their Outage Reporting System and display the data in an easy-to-understand format. The resulting outage map complements the design of their new website, was built with web standards, and provides an accessible view of the underlying data.

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Dayton Power & Light

Solar Array Kiosk

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After the construction of a nine-acre solar array south of town, Dayton Power & Light wanted to give the public access to key information about the Yankee Solar Array’s power generation. Sparkbox was brought in to provide real-time data visualization at DP&L’s Solar Array Kiosk. The end result was a beautiful representation of the energy being produced by the array, all built with standards compliant HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Sparkbox recognized that this is the kind of data DP&L may like to showcase in places other than the kiosk itself––perhaps on their website someday––so we decided early in the process to use accessible technologies and build with portability in mind. DP&L’s dedication of the solar array, and unveiling of the solar array kiosk, was attended by Ohio’s Governor and (of course) the Sparkbox crew.

 

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Connect with Us Want to work together? Email Us or give us a call at 937.401.0915.