Our 2020 in Review

We can all agree that 2020 has been quite the year, it feels almost too obvious to state, especially with the great loss many have experienced. It’s been challenging in ways we never could have imagined, and it’s been a powerful force for change and progress. Perhaps the best part of 2020 was our collective resiliency, and determination to continue to foster meaningful connections with our community despite distance and hardships.

We are proud of our Harrisonburg community, for our perseverance, our courage, and our compassion. We always strive to facilitate the unparalleled community of the Friendly City. We hope that our work helps your business succeed, helps you communicate with your customer base, and helps you achieve your goals.

In the spirit of reflection and gratitude we took some time to jot down some of the work we did this year that fills us with pride. We hope that you too can find something to be proud of during this tumultuous year, even if it’s just that we made it through.
While 2020 was a year of struggle and resilience, we hope that 2021 will be a year of healing and peace. So let’s cheers to that!

COVID-19 Response Work

Keeping Our Clients Connected

We wrote articles consistently in order to keep customers updated on new Google My Business features, and how to help them adapt to our increasingly online world. This allowed our clients to alter their online presence to their evolving needs, and to better communicate with their own customers.

MBU Admissions Goes Virtual

We have always enjoyed our long standing relationship with Mary Baldwin University. This year their admissions push had to look a little different given the online capacity rather than in-person tours and events. We partnered with them to efficiently create an admissions microsite and virtual tour. This way, their admissions team doesn’t skip a beat.

COVID Banners Galore

We’ve all seen the banners that appear on sites that say “click here for our COVID-19 announcement and safety information.” Well someone has to make all of those. And that’s us! We’ve spent a good amount of time whipping these up for clients and we are happy to support them in communicating these important announcements effectively with their customers. 

NonProfit and Charity Work

Pale Fire Helps

In collaboration with Pale Fire, Sysco and Harrisonburg Downtown Renaissance, we launched palefirehelps.com, a pop-up food bank that supported restaurant workers in a time of great need. For this incredible project we designed, developed, hosted and maintained the website. The other downtown organizations involved also graciously donated their time and skills. We were inspired by Pale Fire’s drive to help the community, and we could not have been more proud to be involved. The pop-up food bank was such a hit that several other local breweries in VA and NC created their own spin-offs, and we were ecstatic to continue to donate our services to the cause for Ardent Helps, Bear Chase Helps, The Catering Outfit Helps, Apocalypse Ale Works Helps, Eight Bridges Helps and Trophy Brewing Helps.

Harrisonburg Downtown Renaissance Bricks and Clicks

Harrisonburg Downtown Renaissance (HDR) created Brick and Clicks as a small business recovery plan to assist downtown businesses during this time. Our involvement in this multifaceted program was to provide web assistance, web updates and overall web advice for some local businesses that needed to improve their online presence and could take advantage of this grant.

Sites for Local Nonprofits

We also pride ourselves in our amazing client base, we love the people we get to work with and we admire the things they accomplish. This year we were thrilled to make sites for two local nonprofits that do wonderful work for the community: On the Road Collaborative, that strives to close the education gap experienced by low income families, and Heifetz International Music Institute, a summer institute for gifted young musicians, that became the only major summer institute to still operate this summer by adopting a successful online model.

Some Cool Things We Are Proud Of

Site Migration

We also migrated a couple sites into an easier content management and page building system in order to upgrade and modernize the sites. This also enables clients to navigate and edit the back-end of their own site far easier. In completing these migrations we maintain the original look and vision of the original site, and only make small design updates as necessary, all of the hard work is mostly invisible on the front end! In this project we migrated Pale Fire and Neider Chiropractic.

Live Streams

2020 was the year of live streams, wasn’t it? When one of our clients, Pale Fire, wanted to host a popular live stream on their site, we were up for the challenge. We facilitated the technical aspect of the virtual event and monitored it while it was live, to ensure everything ran smoothly. The live stream was a whopping success with about __ visitors, this extreme spike in site traffic required a surprising amount of work on the back end.

Cool Sites

Of course we made a lot of new websites in 2020, and we are quite pleased with them! We love getting to see client’s visions brought to life. Here are just a couple of the cool sites we did this year:

We Turned 2!

In September of 2020 Digital Minerva turned 2 years old! We could not be filled with more joy or pride with how our journey has unfolded. We are overflowing with gratitude for our client base and community support, especially this year. Thank you!