Cibolo Arts Council Showcases New High-end Web Site Just in Time for the Boerne Festival of Art & Music

Nature's Local Caretakers Poised to Release Their Own Much-improved Web Site

Boerne Businessman Believes "Cultural" Investments Will Reap Rewards  

BOERNE, TX - In anticipation of a third consecutive annual increase in attendance at their annual Boerne Festival of Art & Music in October, the Cibolo Arts Council whipped out a new tool from their marketing toolbox.  Saying goodbye to a stale and outdated web site, the local arts group launched a new site that features a beautiful, eye-catching visual design as well as a hip apparatus for making fast and easy updates to the content.

Meanwhile, staff and directors of the Cibolo Nature Center, Kendall County's only public natural area, look forward to impending big improvements in their own web marketing program.

"We've seen and approved the design already.  We can't wait to show the public," said Kim Abernethy, Development Director for the Cibolo Nature Center, referring to their new web site.  The new site is slated to "go live" to the public sometime in October. 

What do the Cibolo Arts Council and the Cibolo Nature Center have in common?  In addition to similarities in their names, they both have clenched sponsorship deals with Digett, a Boerne-based new media and marketing firm, which ultimately provide these organizations with high-dollar online marketing programs with a minimal cash outlay.

Back at Digett headquarters, each member of the five-person web team seems lost in a world of their own.  As the tunes of John Mayer and Norah Jones float from the reception area, Roger Lopez, a.k.a. "Code Guru", stares intently and stoicly at the cryptic text on a computer monitor, only his fingers moving to make calculated keystrokes every ten or fifteen seconds.

Diagonally across the same darkened room comes the glow of another monitor, where Digett Creative Director Trevor Dodd re-arranges pixels in the quest of a design for a new web site that will be operated by a national autism research group. 

In the front office Digett President Mark Figart holds a phone to his head, and seems to be somewhere in the middle of an explaining what a blog is.  Blogs, he says, are pretty popular these days.

In the midst of such a flurry of activity, with an alleged backlog of new work and a barrage of requests coming from an ever-expanding clientele, one might wonder why and how this small company came to become a major contributor to local non-profit interests.

"First of all," says Figart, "it's not any non-profit interests.  We are focusing our efforts on groups that promote interests that we believe are critical to the community."  Indeed, the list of community-related web sites built by Digett is growing.  Organizations such as the Boerne Chamber of Commerce, the Boerne Convention & Visitors Bureau, the Kendall County United Way, the Boerne Rotary Club, the Boerne Area Community Foundation, the Majestic Ranch Arts Foundation and Leadership Boerne all have Digett web sites.  Many of these were pro-bono efforts or were designed and built at discounted rates. 

Like the Cibolo Nature Center, the Boerne Public Library has also engaged Digett to build a new site, and hopes to have their new site up and running in October.

"There is, of course, a tremendous sense of satisfaction to be had on the part of our whole team that comes from doing work that benefits the community," says Figart.  "But we think the real return hasn't been felt yet.  By building this network of attractive and effective web sites, we expect that we'll have some impact, at least, on the direction and nature of growth in Kendall County.  Perception is reality, so by promoting carefully-chosen causes we are, through the most effective means we have at our disposal, being politically active."

Figart also seems to believe in a more tangible, short-term return in the form of bottom-line revenue. 

"There's no question that our investments have paid some handsome dividends in the form of recognition," he says.  "And the fact is, the more people that see our work, the more likely we are to sell more work.  Our work for non-profits can have a special appeal, as it tends to paint us in a positive light with other potential customers.  I don't think there's anything wrong with that, since staying profitable means we can keep doing good things."

If community impact is any measure of a company's success, then Digett may indeed have cause to celebrate in the years to come.  And with a record of five straight years of revenue growth from both local and nationwide accounts, the local web firm might be planning more than just one party.