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Site of the Week
SeanTracey.com

What exactly makes a web site "classy" I cannot say. But I know classy when I see it, and it’s rare on the blinking, spinning, information carnival that we call the Web. So just go see the Sean Tracey Associates (STA) site and you will know.

I ran my own video production company in this town for almost 15 years, so I know when I’ve been bested. Sean Tracey’s name was a synonym for high-quality video and film production. Translating that regional reputation into a site for a national first-time audience on the Web is no easy task. But I’ll be dipped if STA hasn’t pulled it off.

Firstly, the company has honed its message, The Portsmouth-based production company makes TV commercials—clean and simple. Their web site is brimful of evidence that their work is as good as anything you can find on the tube. The samples pop right to life, thanks to Quick Time’s Fast Start. In seconds visitors learn that the company has mastered fine lighting, camera movement, rich audio, excellent casting. This is a true video portfolio on the Web, unencumbered by patter and clutter and blather and bluster. You are only as good as your last commercial in this dog-eat-dog business, and for STA that inevitably means prime rib.

What gets you is the homepage. Webmaster RJ Balch says the group spent fully two months just talking about what the homepage had to accomplish. The debate paid off. In a superb bit of Flash artistry, the color face of a girl appears against a gray backdrop. She opens her eyes and smiles Mona-Lisa-like as the company name and a miniature navigation bar assemble onscreen. Then the camera freezes as the portrait goes grayscale. That’s it! But in five or six seconds the opening animation says volumes about the quality of the company’s work in the time-challenged industry of TV commercials.

The STA credit list adds up to one web developer per second. Besides the boss and webmaster RJ, Dartmouth grad Zhan Xaio programmed the homepage spot while interning at STA. Brenda Dziadzio designed the sequence and Scot Villeneuve orchestrated the Flash action, smooth and watchable and – well – classy.

Rather than name drop the company’s client list, I’ll let you go and see. The five person team now works from a classy location on Bow Street. And we should be glad for that. The Seacoast has an increasingly big reputation to uphold as a web design capital and an artistic destination point. Web sites like this, emanating from this little spot, can only enhance our image to companies that might otherwise spend their clean non-polluting dollars in Boston or New York. While they are here, they spend more of that green in our restaurants and hotels. In a city that doesn’t do much economic development on its own – well crafted web sites like this make us all look classy.