when it’s time to change

by Susan RissoverAug 2, 2020ModLife0 comments

Whenever someone asks us for advice on a home design project, we always advise consulting an architect. You don’t know what you don’t know. Architects see things on a different level than we mere mortals do. The re-design our our website was no different. We may be really good at researching and selling houses, but I’m no web designer. And we didn’t know it, but we needed professionals who could see our website from the inside out, and see what it needed to not only look better, but to be better. Welcome to the new and improved cincinnatimodern.com (or as we call it, cincinnatimodern 3.0)!

Technology has come a long way since I started cincinnatimodern 1.0 in 2003 (on my broker’s rudimentary web builder), and so has the cincinnatimodern team! This new website has truly been a labor of love. Emphasis on labor. And another one of my strange coincidence stories. I have known Pam Roberts as long as I can remember. She was my neighbor in our hometown of Sylvania, OH, her dad was my pediatrician and we worked together at Tam-O-Shanter, our small town ice rink. When we were tweens, we made up a goofy dance to Grand Funk Railroad’s “The Loco-Motion.” A year older than me, she headed off to the University of Cincinnati and I went to visit her there when I was a senior in high school. I was hooked on the city and the big school campus and we ended up living on the same floor in Siddall Hall the next year.

me (top center), pam (top right) and our other friends in my parent’s family room circa summer 1980.

Pam has always been a creative type, with real artistic skills. She was one of the cool DAAP kids, while I was getting a psychology/economics degree. We didn’t see much of each other after college when she moved away, but we got together occasionally when we were both in Sylvania, and kept in touch mostly through our parents, who are still close friends to this day. Facebook put us back in contact more directly, and a message from Pam a couple of years ago while we were looking for tech help to migrate our website off of the old Squarespace platform seemed like kismet.

Pam and her partner Geoff Weigand, avid outdoors people, are the founders of Zero-Gravity Solutions https://www.zero-g-solutions.com a consulting and design firm in Salt Lake City, UT. Pam’s artistic skills have been translated into very talented web design chops. Pam and Geoff spent countless hours digging deep about the purpose of our business & the mechanics of our website: what we wanted it to do, what it could do, and perhaps most importantly, how to earn clients for life from it, not just people looking for information after they buy a modern house. We have always taken a risk by putting so much information out there and trusting that clients would want to work with ‘the source,’ but our passion for architecture was not always enough. As the popularity and appreciation of Midcentury Modern architecture has grown, we felt like we were at risk of losing touch with our peeps if we didn’t change with the times and evolve the website into a more interactive and definitive resource. To this end, with direction from Pam & Geoff, we have worked to create a community of buyers, sellers AND homeowners who love design and architecture like we do. Who realize they are part of something bigger.

Our old site was on a very basic platform, and packed with way more content than it could handle as I just kept adding modern projects and research. Silly me, I thought we could just easily migrate the content to a more modern platform, kind of like setting up a new iPhone from your iCloud backup. Nothing could have been further from the truth! That may have made the website look better, but it would not make it work better. Since we were working with professionals, Geoff and Pam knew the right questions to ask and the right plug-ins to use to actually integrate the Cincinnati Multiple Listing Service (MLS) info and status feeds into our site. I don’t know of another agent owned site that does this. Most agents use brokerage web builders that put their branding on a standard website. This site was built completely from scratch on a wordpress platform with you, our community, in mind. We are giving you access to:

the complete Cincinnati MLS
our curated real-time list of ‘moderns on the market’ properties. Publishing and highlighting this list is seen as a controversial move because they are not all our listings, but it’s a risk we take to earn your business and to elevate the Cincinnati modern market.
the very popular cincinnatimodern blog, now titled midmodtalk (might also be a podcast one day?). Archives of the blog go back to the beginning of cincinnatimodern 2.0 in 2009.
our portfolio – highlights of the properties we have had the pleasure to represent and sell over the years. These project posts also include architect info, ephemera, and other research information.
resources for buyers, sellers and homeowners
research, research and research! info we have compiled over the years on the influencers who have shaped our built environment.
real time FB & Instagram feed on the homepage
links to all kinds of fun modern stuff and so much more!

So please, take a few minutes to poke around. Come back often as we continue to work out the bugs, add new research pages and transfer content from the old site. And as always, if you like what you see here, please support our small business and let us know how WE can help YOU! We think Pam & Geoff nailed it. We hope you do too, and we are so happy you are on this adventure with us!