Washington County's Best Kept Secret

Working with Citizen Advocacy for a second time, we produced another documentary this year called "Washington County's Best Kept Secret." In it you will learn about how Citizen Advocacy has affected the lives of Sandy and Jenny.

Love Freely Given

As scheduled, back in April we unveiled the full length release of a documentary for Citizen Advocacy of Washington County entitled "Love Freely Given." We are posting the full unabridged version here for your viewing. If you are interested in learning more about this organization, you may visit their website.

Citizen Advocacy

Last month we started working on a promotional video for Citizen Advocacy of Washington County. The project is scheduled to be completed next year, but yesterday we threw together a short "teaser" for them to show at their annual dinner. This will give you a glimpse of what we have been working on.

Online Photos

Marked by the advent of our first photography customers, we started out on a mission to find a professional lab to order our prints from. After evaluating over a dozen different companies, and ordering some sample prints from the top four, Mpix clearly earned our highest admiration.



With the upcoming need of frequently providing customers with professional print products, we have also invested in the offerings of an online photography hosting service called "Zenfolio." Using their services our customers will be able to quickly and easily view, download, and order prints of all their pictures.



In the last several months we have thought about different ways we could provide our customers with online ordering and downloading, and recent needs have prompted us to complete that research. Zenfolio clearly stood out in terms of features, customer support, and content presentation (which was the immediate death of many other reputable companies we had considered). In addition to all this, Zenfolio uses Mpix as their back-end supplier for selling prints.

Our client galleries are password protected, but you can browse the "Canon SD600" folder if you want to test drive these new Northpine Studio services provided by Zenfolio:

http://photos.northpinestudio.com/

P.S. If you ever want a Zenfolio account of your own, use the promotional code "Y1H-9GT-1ZU" when making your purchase and you will receive a $5.00 (USD) discount.

School Portraits

We have started broadening our portfolio by venturing into several new areas for our company. During this week only, we have agreed to offer student portraits for homeschool famlies. Because we do not offer studio services, we had to set up a temporary location to accomadate this project. Below are the very first two portraits ever taken by Northpine Studio.

Return

On Friday, August 10, I returned from my position this summer as a volunteer camp counselor. After a two week expedition planned for the end of August, I will come back and post a more detailed entry about Northpine Studio's emerging business plan.

Volunteering

As the summer approaches I am intentionally pulling back on the reins. In July I will be volunteering as a camp counselor for about five weeks. It has been my decision, therefore, to postpone my marketing strategy (and full blown business operations) until I have adequate availability to responsibly manage it. When I return in early August we will be firing once again on all pistons. Between then and now this journal will be mostly unattended.

Website

Our workload over the last two weeks has been surprisingly healthy. As a resulted, the scheduled website release yesterday needed to be postponed a few days until we could dedicate the necessary resources. If you mark your calendars for May 21, 2007, you will have a front row seat of the official unveiling; although an early release is possible.

Within the last two weeks we discovered the need for a adaptable order template to use whenever dealing with significant volumes of customers. Modeling the basic format after our previously engineered invoice template, the resulting document will serve our purposes very elegantly. The one difficulty we encountered was attempting to implement a system for customers to calculate their own sales tax. Without realizing it, my attempt at innovation and simplification resulted in confusion. Instead of having the sales tax calculated separately and then added to the subtotal, I merged those two steps into one:

Grand Total: [subtotal] x 1.056 (sales tax) = _______

By multiplying by 1 and 5.6% at the same time, you keep your original number (the subtotal) and efficiently add an appropriate percentage to it (the sales tax) in one simple step. However, what I learned is that simple does not always equal easy. While the formula is in fact simple and quick, because of it's uncommon nature, people are required to stop and think before using it. There is not anything wrong with thinking, but the goal of an order form should be receiving the necessary information from your customers as quickly and accurately as possible. Thinking can either slow down that process or result in errors.