A new pastor in town saw my portfolio and was impressed with all the major companies I had done work for. He then made a joke that I probably did the Alamo’s website. I kept a straight face and in a humble voice told him that I actually did design the Alamo website years ago.
I have been blessed to work on some pretty major sites for the city of San Antonio, but they were nowhere near as complicated as the website my team just worked on for the Convention and Visitors Bureau. The Atkins Group is one of the top agencies in town and they are the agency of record for Visit San Antonio. This is the site that all visitors go to when determining which activities and sites they want to go while in San Antonio.
The Atkins Group reached out to J 12 Designs to help them deliver a powerful website that not only looks good, but converts potential visitors into locals. We are happy to say we delivered an awesome site and as an added bonuses, we helped the The Atkins Group win a gold award for best website and best overall interactive award at the American Advertising Federation-San Antonio. James Howe, VP Creative Director for The Atkins Group, started the design of the site. Our job was to take the initial layout and design/build out the other interior pages, mobile structure, implement a complicated search function and Trip Advisor rankings into the site. I called on David Bolton from I-3 Media to lead the important work on this exciting search integration. We used a platform called Swiftype — giving the site a Google-like feel as you start to type a word and suggested results come up based on what you are looking for. The search is smart enough to know that if you type in “Alamo”, you are looking for the actual Alamo and not Alamo Cafe (which is not a bad destination either).
