Client News
MEK scored a regional (multi-state) Diamond Award for its 2018 digital project for client Smithville. 
Details from the award application and the work performed appear below:
Improving the Digital Customer Experience for Smithville
How does a top tech company react when their online brand imagery doesn’t match market reputation? Known as a leading technology innovator, Smithville’s main website didn’t match its reputation. Visitors complained about Smithville’s web presence as a painfully slow-load with an old look that hadn’t been fully updated in years. The old site led to online brand-bruising, as Smithville held a strong reputation for outstanding customer service and early adoption to new tech like Gigabit-speed fiber broadband in south central Indiana. The challenge? More than a decade ago, former internal employees of the company developed a Drupal-based website and inexplicably incorporated certain features that rendered the website difficult to update. MEK was directed to transform the existing platform and create a foundation for an enhanced and improved online customer experience.
Research – MEK successfully secured a budget for internal and external research that included both primary and secondary research, and also an intense competitive analysis. The interview research included internal employee and key personnel focus groups, where customer-facing staff was able to articulate both what they didn’t like and what they would like to see in a new website. Over the past three years, MEK had developed workaround service-specific web properties as Smithville dealt with internal technology issues to lay the foundation for an all-new Smithville.com. MEK also created a pop-up research tool on the Drupal site (and other Smithville web properties) to determine external perceptions and needs, as well as using Google Analytics and other data sources for user analysis. MEK then provided separate presentations of the completed research to senior management. The research showed a major need for a new responsive and mobile-friendly website with specific improvements for an enhanced customer experience (E.g., smoother log-in for bill pays and other services, an improved capacity to determine service availability, better communication access, and other items). The internal research yielded more functionality requests than were available in a Phase I development, but the research process did positively better manage internal expectations and produced guidelines for a proposed Phase II.
Planning – Smithville had previously standardized with MEK and its web development partner Rare Bird for a WordPress platform for its other websites. That would continue with the new Smithville.com. Driven by the research, a formal Creative work plan was developed and objectives for the new site included: improvement of prior load-times, an attractive and more intuitive web design (clean and less cluttered parallax format), easier log-ins for various customer services, enhanced mapping functionality for service availability, a new capacity for visitors to solve their own problems with extended FAQs and new chat functionality, and the capacity to serve as a central portal for all existing Smithville web service properties (business, security, retail store, etc.). The scope was divided into phases, with Phase I to provide the firm foundation for later enhanced functionality after the abandonment of the old Drupal-based site and the creation of an all-new customized WordPress-driven site. A budget for Phase I development was secured.
Implementation – MEK assembled a team to develop the new WordPress platform and implemented an in-depth process to port over existing content from the old site, now edited and revised with key words and alt phrases to maximize SEO optimization. MEK creative guided the process. Concepts of the new site were regularly presented during development to senior management (and on occasion external contacts) to drive positive development. The GDPR implementation in Q2 was accommodated in the new site. Development was smooth.
Evaluation – The completion of Phase I met or exceeded all objectives. See the new website here.
WASHINGTON, Indiana – A countywide initiative is now underway to help identify local assets and possible projects to improve quality of place, workforce development and attraction, and local amenities, according to Bryant Niehoff, executive director of the Daviess County Economic Development Corporation and Foundation. Similar to what is taking place in the 11 counties served by the Regional Opportunities Initiative (ROI) in Bloomington, a $50,000 grant has been approved to help the county develop a strategic plan specifically to help address issues associated with quality of place, workforce development and attraction, and improving attributes and amenities. The plan will feature local input, including two public Town Halls, that will include critical data and identify possible projects to advance the county and region in those targeted applications.
“Daviess County already has a lot going for it 
like a high rate of median income growth, an expanding population, and other significant advantages,” said Niehoff. “This ROI Ready Communities grant gives us the capacity to go to leaders and residents to formally determine the quality of place, workforce attraction, and workforce development needs of the county so we can continue to move the needle.”
For the county to continue growth, it must address issues like talent attraction and retention, improving amenities like housing and supporting services, and continuing to make Daviess County an attractive place to live, work and raise a family, the executive director continued. “These are competitive issues that every county in the ROI region currently faces,” said Niehoff. “So, we’re grateful that we have these resources from ROI to begin to formally address them in a unique way.”
Battling a local infant mortality rate (IMR) that exceeds the national average by some 150 percent, medical professionals, hospitals, clinics and trained facilitators in Daviess, Dubois, Greene and Martin counties will now “collaborate closely together” to aggressively reduce the local IMR rate and increase overall infant and family health, according to Don Kelso, executive director of the Indiana Rural Health Association (IRHA).
These four counties have a combined infant mortality rate of nine deaths per 1,000 live births (as measured 2013-2015), one of highest rates in Indiana. Uniquely, rural Martin County (like several other counties in Indiana) has no obstetricians and no dedicated labor and delivery medical facilities. Expecting mothers there are referred to facilities in Daviess and Dubois where these services are available. Ironically, Daviess County stands out with 10.79 deaths per 1,000 live births, which places it among communities with the highest IMR in Indiana, and indeed the nation, despite appropriate services being available in this specific county.
UPDATED — Following a courageous battle with illness, John Layden skydived one final time off of this mortal coil on March 26, 2020.
Requiescat in pace, old friend. Many — including everyone at MEK — will miss your sharp intellect and keen wit, but we’ll look forward to seeing you again.
Here are details of John’s remarkable life in the Indianapolis Star: https://legcy.co/2V2a6D4
John Morris has been appointed COO of Time Compression Strategies and the company has launched a new SaaS Cloud version of the remarkable technology as the company continues to move forward.
INDIANAPOLIS—Long-time CEO John Layden of Time Compression Strategies (TCS), a manufacturing, supply chain, business processes and technology firm, is retiring effective May 31, 2019. The search for a new CEO is ongoing to replace Layden, a nationally recognized supply chain expert who formerly also was a SAP executive prior to forming TCS.
When he retires at the end of May as CEO, Layden will end a three-decade-long technology collaboration with his brother, David Layden. David Layden and John served together as the primary intellectual drivers for a variety of technological innovations now actively deployed in major manufacturing operations in the United States and abroad.
In the past 15 years, the Layden brothers’ partnership effectively concepted, developed and patented the Ancelus database platform, which is recognized as a major breakthrough in data management that ranks in importance to the first introduction of the relational database a half century ago.
BLOOMFIELD, Indiana – Leveraging secure connectivity with medical professionals and high-tech diagnostic equipment, students in the Bloomfield School District can now benefit from an expansion of innovative telehealth technology here. As an active participant in the Indiana Rural School Clinic Network (IRSCN), the Bloomfield Schools K-12 students now have a fully functional telehealth clinic available to them, according to Jeff Gibboney, Superintendent of the Bloomfield School District (BSD).
The new telehealth clinic is being supported by the Greene County General Hospital (GCGH).
JASPER (Indiana) – Smithville Fiber made a unique decision to design and build a 100-gigabit core network node in Dubois County (a rural county in southern Indiana that is home to global manufacturing) as part of its $15 million fiber build in Jasper, according to Paul Quick, Smithville president. The outcome of that decision to build the high-capacity core node gives Jasper and the county a “major strategic advantage in attracting Big Data-related industry in an economic development outreach,” Quick said.
Customer access to these core transport nodes usually is found only in larger urban areas such as Louisville and Indianapolis, said Jason Dauby, Smithville Chief Technology Officer (CTO). “Because of the cost, companies don’t typically locate core nodes with port availability in rural areas, but Smithville recognizes the growth potential of Dubois county, and the city of Jasper in particular,” Dauby noted.
WESTGATE@CRANE TECHNOLOGY PARK, (Odon) Indiana – A new multi-county and state agency Alliance has assembled to aggressively support long-term economic growth and military value associated with the nearly 100-square-mile Naval Support Activity Crane (NSA Crane).
The group, called the White River Military Coordination Alliance (WRMCA), expects to support joint strategies that will help capture new economic development opportunities that mutually benefit the military facility, the 3rd largest U.S. Navy base. These are made possible by the expansion of I-69 in the region and related commercial defense potential growth, according to Gene McCracken, who was elected to serve as the Alliance’s first chair.
A major task for the new Alliance, which includes economic development engagement from five counties in southern Indiana – Daviess, Greene, Lawrence, Martin and Sullivan, will be to provide positive and practical support for putting into action the recent NSA Crane Joint Land Use Study. This now-completed study, which helps provide a pathway for positive development that is compatible with the Military missions of NSA Crane, was commissioned by the Indiana Office of Community and Rural Affairs (OCRA), Radius Indiana, and the Indiana Office of Defense Development (IODD).
ARLINGTON, Virginia–Smithville Communications has been recognized by NTCA–The Rural Broadband Association as a Certified Gig-Capable Provider for delivering gigabit broadband speeds and enabling technological innovation in the Ellettsville, French Lick, Jasper, Smithville, Gosport, Lizton, and Griffin rural communities of Indiana.
“Professional peer recognition of Smithville’s capacity to deliver highly reliable, high-speed broadband in rural communities represents a credit to our outstanding employees for their commitment to legendary service and to our company’s leadership—Darby and Cullen McCarty—for their willingness to make strategic investments in Indiana’s broadband future,” said Paul Quick, Smithville President. “We are grateful for the national recognition of our technology innovations and achievements and look forward to raising the standard of excellence even further.”