Recently, I had the good fortune of meeting with the owner of one of the most admired and well-known brands within St. Louis (hint: they make pizza). The meeting was to present some new screen designs (which our amazing design team absolutely killed, by the way), but we were able to spend a little time talking about business philosophy and life in general.

Toward the end of the meeting she made it a point to share with us that one of the reasons she picked our firm for the website redesign was due to the fact we… well…had integrity. She was genuinely thankful in how we approached the relationship.

I like to tell clients “we try to work ourselves out of a job,” meaning we don’t purposefully lock ourselves into having any client rely on us for continued service/support (which seems to be a sales strategy for many firms). Instead, we work hard to empower our clients to better understand technology and then help them better leverage technology themselves to support their overall business objectives. Many of our projects actually end with our taking the time to train our clients to do a job we could easily charge a lot of money for. It’s like old proverb of teaching a man to fish… we want our clients to eat for a lifetime.

Somewhat surprisingly, a few of our clients have even questioned why we would be so unselfish in our approach.

The answer is simple.

We believe every project we do, and every client we have, is a reflection of us as a company. We strive to paint all our work with excellence, pride and, perhaps most importantly, by staying true to who we are.

We do business with Integrity. Do you?

In the beginning, Mohealthcareers.com was an informative website full of useful information about promoting healthcare professions in Missouri, helping people find schools, scholarships and places to work. Now, the newly rebranded Missourihealthcareers.com is… still all of those things—it’s just way, way more fun! To better connect with one of the core demographics (high schoolers), Integrity rebuilt the entire website from the ground up, tweaking language to make it more conversational and approachable, updating user flows to ensure they were simple and easy to navigation and overhauling the design to appeal to a more youthful audience. Mission accomplished.

The big business question we had to answer was, “What will get people interested in healthcare?” The answer was giving them a quick, entertaining glimpse into key elements of different healthcare jobs (money, how much gore is involved, how long are you in school, etc). We accomplished this by turning all that data into an “infographic” (yes, that’s a real term, or at least it should be).

While we were at it, we added an interactive hospital and college map, a blog featuring real life success stories from healthcare professionals and the centerpiece of the new site, an interactive flash quiz designed to help you identify which healthcare career is best suited for you. Go ahead and take it. You know you want to.

So basically, we transformed the site from a manila envelope into a bedazzled trapper keeper. A really, really rockin’ trapper keeper.

When not ideating new applications or reconsidering user experiences, I like to work in the yard – its quiet, peaceful and “outside.”

Yesterday (during some light tree maintenance), I noticed a mosquito circling me with a degree of interest. After a few failed attempts at swatting I refocused on my pruning. Then, my arm begin to itch. Yep – I was bit. I didn’t feel the bite itself (she was long gone) but I knew exactly where she had been. While focusing on my arm, my leg began to itch as well. My little friend had bit me again – but was nowhere to be found. I realized I was so distracted, I stopped gardening and had even stopped looking for the mosquito – I was too busy focusing on my discomforts.

With regard to competitive advantage, mosquitoes have it right. Keep the competition focusing on where you were, not where you are. Take their focus away from what they should be doing (ideating new features / building better service / delivering greater value) and lure them into a defensive role where they burn precious time/money making incremental improvements on your innovative ideas. Always a version or two behind. Always wondering where you might bite next.

This takes passion. Creativity. Risk. Innovation.

Innovation is no nicety. It is the singular road to growth, remarkability, competitive advantage, differentiation and (ultimately) survival.

So, is your competition following you – or do you find you’re the one scratching?

Once upon a time, there was an IT staffing firm called KellyMitchell…

They hungered for a website that would highlight their status as an award-winning organizations that employs hundreds of IT professionals, while also emphasizing their personal commitment to each client’s needs and every employee’s success.

In other words, they needed a new website that was not too proud, not too humble…but juuuuust right.

Integrity forged ahead like Goldilocks in search of the perfect porridge. We began by inspecting the site architecture, restructuring the navigation so all visitors would know exactly where to find the information relevant to them. We also integrated a convenient quick job search and revised the content to match KellyMitchell’s passion for performing amazing work.

With new site architecture in place, we set out to update KellyMitchell’s look, maintaining their unique brand while updating it with fresh lines and photography. The development team implemented the vision to perfection, and we topped it all off with a social media program to keep KellyMitchell hip to the times—and connected to the IT community.

In short, the new kellymitchell.com rewrites the book…and now one more client can live happily ever after.

The Missouri Hospital Association came to us looking for some touch-ups to their grassroots website…and we ended up completely remodeling. Their goal, in addition to gaining more traffic, was to educate Missourians about healthcare issues in their state. After some dreaming and drafting, Integrity found a way to really wow the neighbors.

Our content crew rolled up their sleeves to begin rebuilding from the ground up. They renamed the site and gave it some homey Missouri charm by adding relevant health articles on topics ranging from exercise and fitness to organ donation and legislation. In addition, they planned out a system that aggregates information about health-related events in Missouri, like health screenings, support groups and fundraisers.

Our design team spruced it up with fresh, inviting colors and a clean layout. Then our developers put it all together, building a searchable event database and seamlessly incorporating important structural elements from other MHA websites.

We topped everything off with a user-friendly content management system, and missourihealthmatters.com was ready for move in. Now we’re going to just sit back and enjoy that fresh paint smell!

Computer viruses aren’t the only reason to take your technology for a checkup-Enterprise Medical Services (EMS), a leading physician recruiting firm based in St. Louis, MO, came to Integrity for a website physical. After the healthcare gurus at Integrity took some family history and knocked on its knees with the little hammer thingy (yes, that’s the real name, hush), we discovered that EMS was in need of a design bypass and some major user flow surgery.

After the diagnosis was made, the content strategy team slipped into our scrubs (ok, they were sweats) and went to work creating a new user experience that allowed doctors to quickly and intuitively search and apply for jobs. Our team of precision designers opted for a clean, friendly layout and color scheme to keep the focus on the site goal-connecting top docs with top jobs. And none of it would have been possible without the steady hands of our development team, who worked round the clock (without the benefit of an on-call room!) to implement an easy-to-update content management system and flush out all the pesky browser bugs.

The website is up and running (although it’s not yet allowed to do stairs)-the surgery was a success! Thank you, doctors.

Our holiday website giveaway was a smashing, splashing, reindeer-are-dashing hit! More than 14,000 votes were cast to decide which of three St. Louis nonprofits—Annie’s Hope, Together We Can or Ready Readers—would win a shiny new website as part of our Give with Integrity holiday promotion. 14,000 votes. That’s, like, almost the population of Clayton!

Ready Readers, a reading program for students in low-income communities, won the contest with more than 7,000 votes, and we’re happy-and-we-know-it excited to build them a site as amazing as their work. Think we’re exaggerating? Check this: Each Ready Readers volunteer adopts a preschool class for the school year, visiting that class weekly to read aloud and give the students new books. Amazing, right? Yeah, that’s what we thought. Now clap your hands!

The website redesign is revving up with meetings and greetings, and Ready Readers has big plans for a more interactive, user-friendly approach. Friend us on Facebook to follow the makeover, and watch out—once the new site is up it will be impossible to resist donating time and books to this amazing cause!

With thousands of job openings and more than a hundred specialties, the healthcare employment process can be as confusing as a doctor’s scribble. So how do professionals and employers from across the country find each other? They go to PracticeLink, the nation’s leading physician recruitment service.

And where does PracticeLink go to punch up website usability and update its online brand?

Integrity, of course. After 15 years of massive growth and website additions, PracticeLink called us in to clean out the cobwebs and make sure all those physicians and employers aren’t getting lost in a maze of specialties, locations, CVs and alerts.

While we were rearranging and rebranding and pondering user-specific color palettes, we went ahead and increased SEO and improved usability as well. Perfectionists that we are, we just couldn’t help ourselves.

The result was a redesigned website that redefines the physician recruitment process—one that’s now faster, friendlier and way easier to understand than our doctor’s handwriting.

The wheels keep turning at Integrity as we roll out yet another brand new website. This time it’s for St. Louis gem, Geotechnology Inc. For over 20 years, Geotechnology has been doing the little things that help keep civilization as we know it running. Things like environmental sciences consulting, geotechnical engineering, materials testing, geophysics, drilling and construction observing. Things we had no idea existed until a few months ago.

Designs were drafted, code was crunched, user flows were fluffed-up, all in the name of a better, kinder online experience. Now when someone wants to find out about recovery well installation and decommissioning services, it’ll be as easy as pie! Hydrogeological pie…

Hold on to your boomerangs, people, because a new interactive designer has grapple-hooked her way through our office doors. Reshma Chattaram Chamberlin not only wins the prize for “most likely to wear a sweater in 90-degree weather,” but also takes the fruitcake for farthest distance to travel for Christmas. Originally from Bombay, India, Reshma came to the land of Stars and Stripes to study graphic design and small-town life at Principia College in Elsah, IL. We’re still looking for it on a map.

Upon graduating, the self-proclaimed city girl traded the pitchfork-and-overalls lifestyle for the glitz, glamour and air pollution of the Big Apple, where she carved her niche as an assistant designer for companies like Harper Collins Publishers, Euro RSCG and Finesse Embroideries, Inc.

With fond memories of naked, singing cowboys and subway terminals dancing through her head, Reshma bid adieu to the big city and followed her heart back to the Midwest. We mean that literally, as her longtime boyfriend-turned-husband is from St. Louis. The jury is still out, but we’re pretty sure he bribed her to come back to the land of toasted ravioli and thin crust pizza by buying her a cavapoo puppy named Leah.

Prior to gracing us with her ninja-like Adobe skills, ebullient demeanor and countless iPhone pics of her “baby,” Reshma worked for ALIVE magazine where she wore many different hats as an art director. Luckily, none of them were rubber with pointy bat ears…