Work / CorpDirect

About

CorpDirect was a registered agent in Tallahassee, Florida. They acted as an intermediary between law firms and the state, helping to register companies, file annual reports, and conduct searches on liens. I was their webmaster for three years and developed the Intranet their staff used to manage registered entities.

Full stack and more

Annual Report Compliance flyer — Our flyers were created as ornate print versions and light PDFs for e-mailing clients.

I was the webmaster at NRAI Corporate Services (formerly CorpDirect) from 2007 to 2011. We selected Adobe ColdFusion and built the site on the Fusebox MVC framework.

It used the YUI Framework for cross-browser compatibility with light jQuery for interactivity. The primary navigation tabs are built from one image, carefully positioned using CSS sprite sheet techniques. This was during the glory days of the CSS Zen Garden, and while the site wasn’t designed quite to that level of responsiveness, its cross-browser compatibility (IE6 and Firefox 3) was precise.

I created CorpDirect’s graphic design for flyers and brochures, and designed the site to resemble a manilla folder. Since this was a small business and funds were tight, we didn’t use stock images for our flyers and mailings. Most of our flyer images were employees in the office acting as hand models.

Now decommissioned, CorpDirect.com hid a powerful Intranet and CMS, all built from scratch. It was constantly user-tested and thoroughly tweaked, making existing employees happy and new hires easy to train.

Front of CorpDirect EMS flyer, touting its benefits

Back of CorpDirect EMS flyer, showing the services the company provides — I worked with the marketing department to design our direct mail marketing pieces and made adjustments to holiday photos in Adobe Photoshop.

Side by side images showing a spinning graphic that displays a link to a PDF when it finishes — CorpDirect LSR used AJAX to validate line items on the order summary page. There can be as many as 50 items on an order, so running these checks asynchronously keeps page load time down.

Staff perform searches against lien databases in all 50 states and thousands of counties. These lien search results are captured into CorpDirect LSR (Lien Search and Reporting), compared against historical data, then delivered to the client through PDF or Microsoft Word charts.

CorpDirect LSR is the result of hundreds of hours of user testing. Feedback on workflow, button placement, and terminology was collected and incorporated quickly, resulting in an application perfectly shaped to the staff’s workflow.

Law firms and corporations serviced by NRAI keep their entity information in CorpDirect EMS (Entity Management System), an online corporate kit. It tracks annual reports, calendar entries, and keeps a detailed history of service of process events.

CorpDirect EMS as it appeared on a MacBook Pro