Welcome to our site

We’ve been busy and quiet on this blog and doing a poor job of self-promotion. Looking through what we’ve done over the last few months, we’re pretty proud of our latest work. So it at least warrants a brief post and a shout out to our fabulous clients for letting us restyle and re-engineer their sites.

Our sites continue to improve in functionality and design. Take a look:

• Altura Credit Union in Riverside, CA
• General Mills Federal Credit Union in Minnetonka, MN
• CTCE Federal Credit Union in Reading, PA
• Industrial Credit Union in Bellingham, WA (Launching today at ~ 9 a.m. Eastern Time)

As our sites continue to improve so does our content management system – exciting changes are on the horizon this fall/winter.

We spend a lot of time tooting and…um…the opposite of tooting…the horns of various and sundry credit union marketing efforts – particularly if they involve social media.

This time we’re going to toot Third Degree Advertising, out of Oklahoma City, and Trabian’s horns at the same time. It seems Third Degree went and won itself an Addy with the Buck the Norm online campaign. The site won several, actually, including Best Interactive and the prestigious Best in Show. Third Degree designed it and Trabian built the CMS and generally created the Internet magic.

Interestingly enough, this isn’t the first award Trabian has won recently – our work with A-Plus Federal Credit Union landed A-Plus and us a first place in the Lone Star Awards from the Texas Credit Union League Marketing Council in the fall.

Toot.

Around a year ago, due to the writer’s strike, there was nothing on TV.

Now, between nine and eleven months later, our favorite shows are out of reruns and, Matt, Derrick, myself and our respective wives are all in the parenting business. Which is a business of blood and tears and feces, and, when lightning strikes, hugs and kisses and sleep. It’s rarely glamorous, as we are learning more every day, but it has it’s fulfilling, sweet moments. Like when we all miraculously get an actual night’s rest and get to spend a Saturday morning with our family all piled in bed, cooing and being in love with each other.

We have the blessing of getting to work from home where we can enjoy several little belly-raspberry breaks through the day. Little Gracie Dean and Wesley Spell and Julie Trotter are getting to sit in their daddy’s lap every day watching him do what he’s best at: Development, Development and Booger Jokes, respectively.

So we are pleased to properly announce the arrival of our precious, fat-cheeked, screaming little bundles of tax deductions from youngest to oldest.

Update: Mark brought up some interesting points in his comment (see below), and while the overarching message of this post still stands, I didn’t intend to discourage the use of open source software throughout a credit union. Mark and I will be discussing this issue tomorrow (Friday the 27th) from 3 to 5 EST in the chat with the ceo chat room if you’d like to drop by!

For the past six months our team has been hard at work rewriting the content management system that runs all of the websites we produce. While we still have quite a few improvements in store for our CMS, we’ve launched several sites on it in the past couple of months and are finally ready to wean ourselves off of the Red Bull.

Unfortunately, during the rewrite it became clear that we’re not ready to open source the CMS as we had promised earlier. A few of our clients have raised legitimate concerns about the vulnerability of a system whose source code is exposed to the public, particularly one without the developer base of software such as Linux or MySQL, and we certainly don’t want to put those clients at risk in any way.

While we have decided not to release our source code, we do plan to share snippets of code that we’ve found helpful and perhaps release some plugins that other developers can use in their Rails projects. We’re also happy to answer any Rails questions you may have, either via email at development@trabian.com or in a Campfire chat with your development team.

If you have any questions about this decision, please feel free to email me at matt@trabian.com or meet me in my daily Campfire chat between 3 and 4 pm EST on weekdays.

Thanks for your understanding!

I’m long overdue on this post. Apologies to our new friends in central Ohio.

Hopewell Federal Credit Union has recently deployed GiveWith.Us. The site, http://hopewellfcu.givewith.us will connect the Heath and Newark, Ohio communities with the credit union and provide a resource for non-profits and local groups to connect with volunteers.

We’ve been working with SELCO Community Credit Union in Eugene, Oregon, to complete the feature set for GWU to make it more user-friendly and easier to navigate. The final changes are near completion and will be rolled out soon.

Hopewell FCU, née Heath Federal Credit Union, then Newark Aerospace Federal Credit Union, serves Licking County, Ohio, east of Columbus. A little trivia for you from Hopewell’s website:

Just a stone’s throw from our main office you can visit the Newark Earthworks Complex of prehistoric Indian earthworks – better known to locals in the area as the mounds. These earthly mounds are unique and some say you can still find arrowheads around the surrounding mounds. The mounds form geometric shapes and some rise to impressive heights. Pretty impressive, considering the Hopewell mound building era began around 300 B.C. to 1500 A.D. There’s still debate as to what the Hopewell Indians used them for, but most historians believe they were created for burial and religious rites.

So, to Cammie and all the staff at Hopewell FCU: Welcome!