proVanceTek Company Blog

proVanceTek recently released http://wonkatickets.com/ for Hilliard Bradley High School Theatre Department. The goal was to have a quickly launched, user-friendly website where patrons could purchase tickets. The site makes use of PayPal to process credit card transactions or patrons can even make their purchase using the available balance in their PayPal account.

In addition to the publicly available main section of the site, there's also a password protected area where staff can "sell" tickets to students for the in-school performance. This section collects the student's first name, last name, and student id and adds it to a database. From the database, the data will be exported as a CSV file for the school's attendance office for their record. We're also working on a system that will be used for admission to the in-school performance where each student's student id barcode will be scanned as they enter the performance and the data will be added to the database in context of whether or not the student who purchased a ticket actually showed up to the performance.

If you'd like more information about proVanceTek web development, please feel free to contact us today!

Today proVanceTek delivered fifty DVD copies of The Columbus Chorus of Sweet Adelines December 2009 concert. The concert was held in the Hilliard Davidson High School Performing Arts Center. proVanceTek was hired to record the concert in High Definition, master the DVD, and duplicate fifty copies for members of the organization.

proVanceTek offers video production services to small businesses and organizations in the Central Ohio area. We offer recording, mastering, and duplication services in both live-to-tape and post-production settings.

Our video production experience allows us to deliver a quality product to our customers no matter what the project is - engagement videos, wedding ceremony videos, wedding reception montage videos, anniversary videos, graduation videos, sports highlight videos, etc.

For more information about our video production services, feel free to contact us!

The owner of proVanceTek, Robert Nelson Vance, worked on this project himself. The customer needed some graphic design done for their Hilliard Idol vocal competition to be held at Hilliard Bradley High School in December 2009 - The premise was a spin off of American Idol. The job called for poster to be made that would be printed on 11"x17" posters and enlarged to 4'x6' vinyl banners to be displayed around the school and the community.

proVanceTek has a history in providing clients with top notch graphic design. We've had projects with clients including Hilliard Davidson Theatre, Hilliard City Schools, The Ohio Educational Theatre Association, East Carolina University, and Chili's Grill & Bar to name a few. Projects have ranged from direct mail materials to large scale banners such as this one.

Contact us to find out more about our graphic design services!

proVanceTek has always provided video, sound, and lighting support for individual components of an event, but it's only been recently that we decided: "Hey, why aren't we providing any all-inclusive solutions for people's events? Why are we just doing one thing or the other?"

proVanceTek works with a couple local vendors with whom we have had a positive relationship for years. Our company provides the creative design concepts that tie together all the technical elements of your event - sound, video, and lighting. We will work with your entertainer, caterer, event planner, and anyone else you've hired to perfect your event - We just happen to have the experience necessary to tie the technical finishing touches into your wedding, reception, gala, etc.

Contact proVanceTek today to find out how we can help make your event truely memorable using lighting, sound, and video!

Robert Nelson Vance, owner of proVanceTek, worked with Hilliard City Schools in an effort to open Hilliard Bradley High School Performing Arts Center at their new high school. This included ordering and installing equipment, inventorying items on construction specification sheets, creating cut sheets for contractors to complete work in the facility, etc.

The culmination of all this work was the Dedication Ceremony for the new school. The ceremony included instrumental and vocal performances by Bradley students and the guest speaker for the evening was our own Governor Ted Strickland who praised the community on their financial support of the facility and spoke of how the building is environmentally-friendly and technologically equipped for the 21st century.

Contact us today for more information about proVanceTek's Theatrical Support!

proVanceTek has been doing web design for small to medium sized organizations in the Central Ohio area and has the experience necessary to ensure an effective online campaign strategy for your group. You can simply sit back and relax while we provide a full service, turnkey package that suites your marketing needs.

proVanceTek's owner has been in the marketing industry since 2005 and has gained valuable experience in online, video, and print marketing. Robert Vance founded proVanceTek in 2007 to pursue his entrepreneurial itch to own his own marketing business. proVanceTek has since acquired customers all over the country and continues to slowly, but steadily grow.

The postcard seen in this post is an example of the marketing creativity employed at provancetek to provide a down-to-earth marketing style that proVanceTek customer's clients seem to connect to.

Contact proVanceTek today for a free, same-day quote!

"SubEthaEdit is a powerful and lean text editor. And it's the only collaborative one that is a joy to use. By combining the ease of Bonjour with the world's best text collaboration engine, it makes working together not only possible but even fun…"

SubEthaEdit is a text editor that allows you to edit all different types of files including TXT, HTML, PHP, C++, and more! Not only does it allow you to edit these files it also allows you to do collaborative editing with others over your local area network.

When coding you have the option of using the built in modes (or languages) and with each language there are different syntax colors. There's a growing number of mode releases that other users contribute. If needed you are able to create your own modes.

One of my favorite features included is the ability to auto complete functions and previously entered text. It also has a common feature that most other editors have where it recognizes that you have created a function or class and allows you to select them from a list, which is particularly nice when you have thousands of lines of code.

After using SubEthaEdit for the past year, I can honestly say that I do not know what I would do with out it. As a Computer Science Major I use it whenever I am programming. I use it for my PHP development, C++, JAVA, etc.

On July 3, 2008 Robert Nelson Vance, proVanceTek owner, displayed his personal video production skills in the presence of friends, family, and perfect strangers at the Columbus, Ohio Red White & Boom 4th of July fireworks celebration.

In the preceding weeks, Robert gathered video and audio clips, previously recorded voicemails, and photos that he had collected for the previous four years of his relationship with his girlfriend and was all set to music. Robert produced a ten minute video that highlighted all the memorable moments of the prior four years with Kaela and he had creatively integrated his proposal at the end of the video.

The video played on an X-Box and displayed on a LCD monitor with a Bose audio system that was all powered by a gasoline generator. Needless to say, all this commotion caused other people to wonder what was going on and complete strangers ended up gathering around and also watching the video.

Using video for special moments is becoming a common way of creating a bold, memorable moment that's remembered for a lifetime and proVanceTek has the experience to do just that!

Contact proVanceTek about your engagement or wedding video needs!

Google Latitude is a service you can subscribe to using a Google Account that allows you to share your location, in real-time, with others. It utilizes your cell phone or computer's internet connection to determine where you're located and will display it on a Google Map for your friends to see.

Location sharing starts only when both you and a friend agree. You can invite friends via email or easily add them from your Gmail contacts. You can share, set, hide your location - or turn off/sign out of Google Latitude - from a privacy menu. You can also hide your location or share only a city-level location with certain friends. Additionally, you can create a status message and upload photos. It also syncs directly with Google Talk. You can check your friends' status messages to see what your friends are up to and can quickly contact your friends with an SMS, IM, or phone call. You can also get directions to lead you to your friends.

Check out Google Latitude today!

First, who is this Plain City Auction we speak of? Well, for short, they're one of our clients and great friends of ours. We've been working with them for years. But, in more detail, they're an auction house located in Plain City, Ohio, which is just outside of Columbus. They usually sell antiques furniture and other various antiques.

What is a preferred partner? Well, we're still not sure either. Infact, we kind of wonder if they even know yet. All we really know about it at this point is that they're essentially looking to cross-promote other local vendors goods and services. They always have a large turnout at their auctions, so it's actually a surprise that this didn't happen sooner. But our understanding is that they're looking for other local or related businesses that would like to promote their company to a large number of people for little cost.

We've heard that they're having large-format print adverting produced for their preferred partners that they'll have prominently on display at the auctions. Since we do their website hosting, they've already approached us about providing similar online advertisements through their website and their auction newsletter emails. We're pretty sure that they'll also be printing advertisements in their snail-mail auction newsletter and that they're open to other suggestions if you're interested in becoming one of their preferred partners.

If this sounds like an advertising outlet you'd like to pursue, please visit http://plaincityauction.com/contact/ to get in touch with the auction's owners

What does the semantic web offer my site? This is a question I hear all to often. Much of the talk about the semantic web, one of the new hot buzz words, deals with its integration into popular tools such as drupal or the power it will provide when every one's doing it. As someone building sites for clients before the semantic web is in the mainstream it can be easy to dismiss the technology for the time being. Let's look into why it's good to embrace the semantic web now in some practical ways.

What The Semantic Web Means To Your Site Now

Metadata is a something that's been around for a long time. It's in our Microsoft word documents, we often store it in XML, and it helps us better describe what ever it is we are working on. What if your metadata and the metadata of others could work for you?

Imagine someone is viewing a piece of content on your site and you have related content based on the keywords used in the content but, you didn't have to fill in the keywords. They were provided by a smart engine that reads you text and finds them. Or, you have some content about a company and information about that company is displayed in a sidebar automatically based on information from other services. This is what we can do with the semantic web today.

On the flip side, when we have content about sites, companies, services, or other things we want to share them with others. Embracing the semantic web allows use to do that in a way that machines can read, something many websites struggle with. Remember that Google, Yahoo, and search engines are machines trying to read our sites.

proVanceTek just completed a wedding website project for Chris and Joellen Carpenter. The website is a elegant, simple, static HTML design. The website is media heavy, including hundreds of photos and various videos.

We also provided video production services for the client, by 1) creating a video montage from wedding photos set to licensed music and 2) taking video from two camera sources that the client provided from the wedding ceremony and cutting together a quick wedding ceremony video. The website, including the videos, was turned around within twenty four hours of the wedding so that non-local family and friends who were unable to attend could quickly have plenty of multimedia to view; much of the website and many of the photos were live within hours of the ceremony.

Regarding the website's video player technology, the client needed an inexpensive solution to include online video within the website. proVanceTek incorporated the videos into the website using the open source version of a Flash video player called Flowplayer. The solution was fast, free, and accomplished what the client wanted. The only real caveat is that free version watermarks the video when in full screen mode.

Contact us today for a free same day quotation for your new wedding website!

proVanceTek is proud to announce the release of a suite of new service offerings aimed at organizations who rely on critical Drupal websites. These new services include Disaster Recovery with Hot-Site capabilities and Off-site Backup and Restore. Both services are individually tailored to each client's specific requirements.

For clients who host their sites with another host:

Our disaster recovery with hot-site backup services provide a level of assurance that in the case of a catastrophic failure of your web server or core infrastructure, your website will return quickly to service the needs of your visitors. Leveraging our off-site backup tools, we will maintain an up-to-date version of your entire site, ready for production should the need arise.

Our backup and restore service provides the assurance that in the case of a major failure, your website and data are available off-site and packaged for a quick restore. Using our backup tools, you will have the ability to automatically backup your site based on your set schedule.

For clients who host their site with us:

While the data on our servers is protected by redundant hardware located in a secure, state-of-the-art data center - with multiple redundancy power sources for uninterrupted power, multiple redundancy internet connections for uninterrupted internet, halon fire-extinguishing systems, etc - we understand that the accessibility of your website is paramount when it comes to the success of your business. For this reason, we offer additional protection for the most sensitive of projects - hot-site backup services for our own hosting. If the one-in-a-million chance that an earthquake's epicenter is the location of our server's data center, rest assured that your important data is waiting off-site, ready to go live. Awesome!

Contact proVanceTek today for hot-site backup services!

proVanceTek recently released a new spiffily designed static HTML website for Dr. Mary Nyangweso Wangila of East Carolina University. Dr. Wangila is a Religious Studies professor at the Greenville, NC located university and has been the recipient of a number of prestigious recognitions.

proVanceTek collaborated with Mary to finalize a design that achieved her needs technically and met her goals esthetically. The color scheme and layout came in the form of suggestions directly from the client and from there proVanceTek delivered a professional, slick design that continues to impress the client.

Because we receive phone calls for estimates soo frequently, we finally decided to provide online pricing for a number of common requests that we receive. In the web development section of our website, you will find pricing for student resume pages and portfolio websites, faculty vitae pages and portfolio websites, and small business homepages and content managed websites.

Contact us today for a free same day quotation for your new website!

Yet another yummy website courtesy of the Drupal Content Management System - http://ifood.tv/

Drupal has been becoming the industry standard content management system and is now being used by corporate companies, universities, the government, etc.

Some high profile Drupal sites include: Sony, Sony Ericsson, Lifetime Television, Harvard Law School, MIT Media Lab, New York State Senate, President Obama, Warner Bros, Francesca Battistelli, Michael Jackson, Virgin Radio, and more.

There's soo many reasons that Drupal is awesome, but let's just name only a few: User Management, Page Titles and Meta Tags, Custom Content Types and Views, Revision Control, Taxonomy, Advanced URL Control, SEO Friendly, PHP Template, Hundreds of Community Contributed Modules, Hundreds of Community Contributed Themes, Stable and Reliable, Excellent Documentation, and Drupal the Large and Friendly Community, etc.

Let's briefly mention some awesome Drupal modules in no particular order: Views, CCK, Contemplate, Printer Friendly Pages, Pathauto, Date, Ecommerce, XML Sitemap, Captcha, Service Links, Token, Taxonomy Access Control, Fivestar, Google Analytics, Event, Panels, and there's many more.

Basically, Drupal is awesome. If you're interested in creating an awesome, easy-to-manage, feature-rich website, contact us today!

Robert Nelson Vance, proVanceTek owner, provided video production services at the 2009 DrupalCon held in Washington DC this week at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. Robert recorded all the sessions in one of the six main presentation rooms for the duration of the event; that worked out to be 20 of the roughly 100 sessions at the conference. The documentation of DrupalCon sessions will be extremely beneficial to the Dupalers who were unable to make it to the conference.

Some of the videos Robert shot were uploaded to the Internet Archive within minutes of the conclusion of the presentation, the others were available online within an hour of the presentation. One of the first videos uploaded had nearly 500 downloads within the first hour it was available online.

proVanceTek is already working on arrangements to provide a more extensive DrupalCon video production solution for the upcoming DrupalCon conference. Initial plans include proVanceTek providing complete video production services for the entire conference, multi camera live-to-tape production, and directly capturing video sent to presentation room projectors from the presenters laptops. The initial plans would essentially kick up a notch the next conference's documentation from a relatively consumer DrupalCon DC to a full-blown high definition professional video production for each session presented at the next conference.

For more information about Drupal, visit the content management system's website.

Find out more about our Video Production!

We've been working closely with the Greenville, NC Chili's Grill and Bar, East Carolina University Up 'til Dawn, and WRNS Radio on a St. Jude Children's Research Hospital fundraising event planned for 2 March 2009. The event basically entails no effort on the donor's behalf - simply show up at one of five Chili's in Eastern North Carolina on March 2nd, eat dinner as you normally would, and Chili's will donate 10% of the bill to St. Jude!

proVanceTek has been generating print media for the event to be distributed locally around Greenville in neighborhoods, at local businesses, on the campus of East Carolina University, etc. Here is one example of a flyer we designed to help promote the event.

Additionally, proVanceTek has been working with East Carolina University Up 'til Dawn on their similar, every Wednesday, events. It almost appears as if the idea was borrowed from ECU UTD, as they had been working with Chili's in Greenville on organizing their Wednesday events and had already hosted two before the WRNS event was even planned - great minds think alike! To help UTD raise money for St. Jude, simply visit their website, print their Chili's Fundraising Flyer, eat dinner as you normally would at the Greenville Chili's every Wednesday, present the flyer to your server, and Chili's will donate 10% of the bill to St. Jude!

To find out more about these events, please visit http://ecu-uptildawn.org/

To help do our part in energy conservation, we've previously committed our efforts of CarbonFund.org's Carbon Offsetting project and the American Forests Plant a Tree project. To continue our efforts, we're now committing to Earth Hour 2009 where we'll be turning off the power to our office.

What began as a campaign to get Sydneysiders to turn their lights off, has grown to become one of the world’s biggest climate change initiatives. In 2009, at 8.30pm on March 28, people around the world will turn their lights off for one hour – Earth Hour. We’re aiming to reach one billion people, more than 1000 cities, all joining together in a global effort to show that its possible to take action on global warming.

Earth Hour started in 2007 in Sydney, Australia with 2.2 million homes and businesses turning their lights off for one hour. Only a year later and this event had become a global sustainability movement with up to 50 million people across 35 countries participating. Global landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Rome’s Colosseum and the Coca Cola billboard in Times Square, all stood in darkness, as symbols of hope for a cause that grows more urgent by the hour.

Earth Hour 2009 is a global call to action to every individual, every business and every community. A call to stand up, to take responsibility and to get involved in working towards a sustainable future. Iconic buildings and landmarks from Europe to The Americas will stand in darkness. People across the world will turn off their lights and join together in creating the vital conversation about the future of our precious planet.

proVanceTek LLC is tentatively planning on providing video production services at the 2009 DrupalCon held in Washington DC this March. Good videographers are needed to help document over 100 seminar sessions at the conference. We thought "hey, what better way can we give back to the Drupal community?" The documentation of these sessions will be extremely beneficial to the Dupalers who are, for one of many possible reasons, unable to attend the conference.

Drupal is a wildly popular, open source content management system that powers websites for everyone from presidential candidates to pop stars to newspapers to neighborhood community groups. It's used by thousands of individuals and organizations around the world.

DrupalCon is the official Drupal unconference that attracts the most talented open source developers and innovative web shops in the world and brings them together to share knowledge, make decisions on the future of Drupal, and get to know each other in person. It's also the premiere opportunity for Drupal users to learn what they can do with Drupal, find partners for future projects, and meet the people behind the code.

proVanceTek's tentative plans, as they are still being worked out, are to provide video taping services for one of the five rooms for all three entire days of the conference.

Find out more about our Video Production!

You may recall that we worked with the Hilliard Davidson High School Symphony Orchestra in November of 2007 on a project that was to benefit concert for the children of Uganda, which are suffering from a twenty year war that has ravaged their country.

We were once again asked to assist Hilliard Davidson High School and Invisible Children with the audio design and engineering, along with the video production for their concert in the Hilliard Davidson High School Performing Arts Center.

Similar to the last benefit concert, we're also planning on producing a short video that will accompany the orchestra during their closing number. The montage-like video will feature still photos from Uganda, video recorder in Uganda, and artistic live video shots of the orchestra as they perform.

The concert is free of cost, but donations will be accepted to benefit the children through the care of Invisible Children Inc.

For information about theatrical or video production consultation, contact proVanceTek for a free, same-day quotation!

Knowing that these days time and money are short for everyone, we realized that we could save both ourselves and our potential clients a great deal of time by providing an online resource to some pretty basic and common website design and hosting packages we've provided previous clients. This saves us the time of creating an new individual quotation for each potential client, and save you the time of having to wait for a reply from us, even if until later the same day, as to what ballpark price your project might cost you.

We've found that there have been a considerable amount of quotations we've generated for leads that we've pursued that were virtually the exact same project. That's a lot of time wasted recreating paperwork that we've already generated once, twice, or several times before. After some brief studying, we discovered that most of these clients would have even preferred to have been able to simply go to our website and browse a simple, side-by-side pricing sheet. They're needs weren't soo customized that they needed us to create them a specific quote for their project.

In response to the desires of clients who are more internet savvy and fast browsing as ever, we have, with great thought, decided to finally release an online resource for web development pricing. We've provided a list of some pretty common website packages that our customers have desired in the past. We list the pricing, what's included, a projected turn around time, and even a PayPal link for you to go ahead and get things started by making your deposit payment right away!

Browse our web development packages today!

This week we launched the Greater Columbus Tennis Association's new website. We've been working with GCTA for the past couple months on creating a website that would allow them to more easily communicate with their members and share information with other site visitors.

The Greater Columbus Tennis Association is a non profit organization that "grew" out of the Upper Arlington Tennis Association. GCTA supports tennis in the central Ohio area and is comprised of volunteers.

The GCTA is the USTA Community Tennis Association for Central Ohio. The hierarchy of the USTA organization is: GCTA, Ohio Valley Tennis Association, USTA Midwest Section, and USTA. The GCTA has a long history of providing organized summer tennis for the Columbus area adults and juniors, as well as running events for the Ohio Valley Tennis Association. A fundamental part of the GCTA is its support of the Columbus Recreation and Parks Department tennis program.

We developed the GCTA website around the Drupal content management system. The website provides visitors with online resources including an online calendar, a forum, a blog, photo albums, and more.

Contact us today for a free same day quotation for your new Drupal website!

proVanceTek has been working with Project Battle Cry founder, Linda Cone, since before the new year. We had been working hard to release the website so that military and their families can benefit from the resources the project has to offer.

Project Battle Cry is a program to aide Soldiers, families, friends, and Clinic ions to understand the ramifications of the wounds of war: PTSD, PTS, TBI, and Secondary PTSD. Many of the most severe wounds will be invisible; the enemy within. In order to survive in battle and become victorious soldiers are catapulted far beyond the range of “normal” behavior.

We developed the Project Battle Cry website around the Drupal content management system. The website provides visitors with online resources including online discussions, blog entries, articles, videos, and more.

Contact us today for a free same day quotation for your new Drupal website!

Did you know about Google Profiles? I didn't. We encourage our employees to post regular contributions on websites. I spend most of my time photo archiving Greenville, NC on Google Maps using Google's Panoramio or relocating misplaced eye droppers on Google Maps; but that's another story.

But back to the main point, when we've posted comments on these blogs, usually you have to create an account and you're encouraged to setup a profile on their site. When I've been contributing to Google, however, who knew it was me? Nobody. Because I hadn't setup a Google Profile.

There's lots of great Drupal sites out there now, the CMS is quickly proving that it's quickly earning the title of the industry standard content management system.

There's lots of great, high profile non-profit organizations that are using Drupal. Drupal is working for humanity! Did you know that the United Nations is using Drupal for their Stand Against Poverty, Fight Against Hunger, and Millennium Development websites. Human Rights Watch is also using Drupal for their website.

There's some great US and foreign government websites that have recently been released. Take a look at the French Ministry for Health, Belgium government, Belgian government, and the New Zealand government websites. There's also our NASA website and Italy's ASI space program websites that are pretty hot!

Drupal is a great content management system for any organization of any size. You've now seen some awesome non-profit Drupal websites and some great government related Drupal websites. We'd like to also share a few corporate Drupal projects that you may have been unaware of. Here's some large corporations using Drupal: Sanyo, AOL, Yahoo, FedEX, Nike, Disney, Fox, and Universal, just to name a few.

There's lots of great, feature-rich Drupal sites out there. We can work with you to provide a solution that meets your organizations needs, is user-friendly, esthetically pleasing, increases your web prominence, and is cost-effective. Contact us today!