Northstar Productions

Web portal and intranet design and development

Northstar Productions, Nashville, Tennessee

Northstar Productions is one of the best kept secrets in the television production business. Located just north of Nashville, Tennessee, Northstar boasts a campus that includes the absolute state-of-the-art in studio production capabilities, as well as live broadcast origination via satellite uplink.

Obviously, a web site for a company with the technology and production street cred that Northstar boasts had to exceed even the highest expectations.

When we began our initial discovery process with Northstar's marketing team, we quickly learned that one of their unique product offerings was the emerging HDTV market. To position them at the bleeding edge of this exciting technology, we pitched the idea of a web design that mimicked the look and feel of a slick, black HD television.

In addition, since Northstar is in essence a broadcast production studio, the delivery of streaming video was the most important aspect of the site's marketing purpose.

Also, because much of Northstar's business comes from clients like the NFL's Tennessee Titans and A-list music performers, the site needed to have a "wow factor" that can best be accomplished with a liberal use of Flash animations, rich Photoshop art elements, and buttons with fast-loading rollover effects.

As we got closer to launch, other folks in the Northstar marketing team began to come up with ways to expand the site to meet their department's needs. Among other things, we added an intranet that collected employee profile data, which enabled the personnel department to post internal news, benefits information and even emails directed only to internal staff. And best of all, it dramatically cut down on paperwork and provided a way to file sensitive employee data in a secure manner.

Finally, from the very beginning, Northstar president Grant Barbre stressed how ruthlessly competitive nature of his business. That's one of the reasons we put their new site on a modern content management system that featured the very best Search Engine Optimization tools. As a result, when someone searches for television production services, Northstar almost always shows up on Google's first page — and when someone is searching for Northstar by name, they show up No. 1.

In all, Northstar's three month process ended with a web portal that is state-of-the-art in every way, and is expandable as the company moves forward with expanded production services.

Launch the Northstar site