RamQuest Software
At RamQuest Software for almost 5 years now, I've been able to further sharpen my skills in the areas of branding, marketing, user interface design, web design, business development and more. You can get a little "live" sample of my branding and marketing at ramquest.com.
Since there are so many slides (and this is a scaled back summary of the work I've done here), I've provided a quick breakdown:
- Slides #1-8: Logo work
- Slides #1-15: Web Site Design
- Slides #16-23: Advertising Campaigns
- Slides #24-38: User Interface Design
- Slides #39-48: Marketing Materials
- Slides #49-54: RamQuest User Group Materials
- 01When I started working at RamQuest, the company logo had been in place for 3 years. Deciding not to change the logo, I worked the branding and product branding around it, starting with the core application, Complete Closing Enterprise™.
- 02I continued the theme of the arrows around the folder throughout the ancillary product branding, as in the FileScan Plus!™ logo shown here.
- 03PaperlessCloser™ kept the arrows, but I dropped the folder for this logo simply because of it's name.
- 04After many concepts for this hosted service of the core application, everyone chose the folder with "www" on it.
- 05Scheduler was a little different since it was a component of Complete Closing. Since the logo would primarily exist on product sheets and the site, I chose to add a bit more than normal to it.
- 06Screen Customizer™ was in the same boat as Scheduler, as the logo would only appear on product sheets and the site.
- 07Complete Title™ warranted a completely new look and feel since it would be distributed through affiliate channels. It will be provided to markets that most likely have never seen RamQuest before, so I updated the brand for this product.
- 08The brand for Closing Market™ is intentionally different than RamQuest's brand. This "digital marketplace" product goes beyond the enterprise solution by allowing markets outside of the Title Industry to connect with RamQuest's application suite. Since there is a possibility for competitors to use and integrate with this product and it's services, the brand was somewhat detached from RamQuest.
- 09The latest home page for RamQuest.com. Also, try a Google search for "title software". Through a bit of experimentation, I was personally able to out-perform the company they had signed for search engine optimization. As a result, RamQuest.com went from #54 to the #1 and #2 results for "title software" in Google since April 2003.
- 10Here's a shot of an interior page of RamQuest.com.
- 11This is the main page of the customer login area that we named the "Client Solutions Area"...
- 12...and this is one of many pages from an ASP application where I had to change the layout to conform to the style of the Client Solutions Area. In doing this, there are 4 separate applications that appear to be one solid site to the end user.
- 13Here is the current home page of Closing Market's public site at www.closingmarket.com. I am currently in the process of redesigning it in XHTML/CSS, and upgrading the brand a bit while I'm at it.
- 14A sample interior page of the Closing Market web site.
- 15PaperlessCloser.com is literally a one-page site that acts as a portal for the customers that we are hosting the application for. But, I was still able to get the site caught in Google's top 10 results for the keyword (a hot one in this industry).
- 16The very first advertisement that I created for RamQuest kicked off a "title software science" theme for the next 3 ads behind it.
- 17This was a centerfold in the most widely read publication of the industry at the time, which coincided with the publisher's biggest event every year: The ALTA Tech Forum. This ad prompted the question from them to our CEO of "This is the best ad to run in our publication, who is your ad agency?", to which he responded, "We do this in-house."
- 18The science theme continued to bring in floods of curious new business, and well exceeded the initial goal of brand awareness.
- 19With the publication running every two months, starting in January. I found a photo that I modified in Photoshop just in time for the July/August issue. It was a very nice ending to the science campaign.
- 20Over the next few years, competitors tried to mimic my campaigns in attempts to try and snag some of the success. With everything looking almost exactly the same, I released this campaign near the end of 2006 which reset the reader's expectation of an ad in the trade publications.
- 21The campaign was very simple and drove home the big questions of the market in general. Extremely easy to execute (a black vector box with text), I was able to produce several different versions for more targeted and localized advertising.
- 22This was the last ad with a single question headline...
- 23...before I wrapped up the campaign by including the previous questions with a final one to pump up the drama a bit. With the exception of 3 re-runs, I had produced a new ad every two months since 2003 on top of everything else that I was doing at RamQuest.
- 24PaperlessCloser is a web portal that our customers can deploy with their web site to allow their business partners to interface with secured, access-granted data and documents from the Complete Closing application. This is the "Lobby" page from my complete redesign for the 2.0 version.
- 25Here is a sample of an interior page of the same PaperlessCloser 2.0 application.
- 26Since I completely re-designed PaperlessCloser, and the previous version was difficult to customize, I decided to throw in a surprise for our customers. With styles and images, I could now brand the application very quickly with a "Branding Customization" service that I created. Here is a sample of that service.
- 27While Development had still hard coded image sizes and certain properties into the application, customers were still ecstatic to find that we could update the look and feel with their logo and colors.
- 28Now deployed with a slightly better XHTML/CSS layout, here's a sample shot of the ASP.net "portal" for Closing Market.
- 29Here's one more...
- 30...and another. These screen shots were taken at 1600 x 1200 resolution, but I designed them to scale down to 800 x 600.
- 31Here is a screen design for the "Home" tab of Complete Title.
- 32This is a mockup of an invoice screen in Complete Title...
- 33...and a sample that shows the bare-bones Delphi grid and forms. You'll also notice that I designed the data presentation to mimic Windows Explorer so "files" could appear to be manipulated with similar functionality instead of surfing a grid of records with enormous amounts of data.
- 34The idea of Complete Title was to simplify the enterprise product. In addition to this, I suggested modularizng the components of the application so they could be presented in a "tab" format across the top of the application while persisting any relevant data.
- 35The first C# application that RamQuest developed, RQ Administrator allowed me to mockup applications in Visio that would more accurately reflect the components and functionality that were available to the developers. This shot is of the Welcome Screen of the application.
- 36Here is a sample form for RQ Administrator.
- 37This is a sample grid screen.
- 38Here are 117 of the literally hundreds of icons that I designed or modified for RamQuest applications.
- 39Having only simple MS Word documents as product sheets prior to hiring me, I created branded product sheets that packed a bit more punch than their "Times New Roman" predecessors.
- 40I also created a number of info sheets for our component products and professional services offerings.
- 41At the big trade show that the American Land Title Association (ALTA) holds every year, we use the same rental booth from Freeman to keep costs down. I simply get the ad graphic panels updated every year as the product information is pretty summarized and generic enough to reuse year after year.
- 42As you can see, it still draws and holds a great deal of traffic.
- 43Since the end of 2003, I have designed and produced an e-newsletter for our customers. This is a sample of the HTML version that gets delivered to their inbox.
- 44Starting March 2007, we are now doing a bi-monthly e-newsletter to prospects as well.
- 45This is the cover to a white paper that I wrote titled, Increasing Profitability. It's available on RamQuest.com in the free resources section, and even got posted by ALTA on their web site at http://www.alta.org/technology/articles.cfm near the bottom in the "Online Feature Articles & White Papers" section.
- 46Here's a sample interior page. I used Adobe InDesign to design a white paper template so it would be download, email, and print friendly.
- 47We are just now starting to write white papers for Closing Market. Since I had designed the template in Adobe InDesign, flipping out the logo, changing the fonts, and tweaking colors was a snap.
- 48This is a sample interior page of the Closing Market template.
- 49The RamQuest User Group (RQUG) is a separate entity from RamQuest, run solely by its users. Well, all but the graphic and marketing stuff...LOL. I provided them with the same launch pads that I did for RamQuest, starting with the logo.
- 50Here is a screen shot of the home page when it launched in 2004. They have recently changed it as they finally found someone in the industry to handle their web site stuff (it was a huge relief to get such a large responsibility off of my plate!).
- 51And here's a shot of an interior page.
- 52I implemented the .Net forums for them as well with outside help from the same partner that implemented the .Net forums for my LifeSpace project.
- 53I styled it to match the colors of the site after my partner got the database stuff working.
- 54Here is a postcard front and back that we used to promote the Annual User Conference. I've done the marketing materials for them each year (postcards, e-newsletters, and conference signage), on top of my normal workload at RamQuest.
