Wood Street, Fantail help Fort Detrick office overhaul website
Technology is always changing, so Christine Demas wants to make sure companies that want to work with Fort Detrick in Frederick have easy access to contracting opportunities. And two companies, Wood Street and Fantail Consulting & Technologies, have used their website expertise to help her achieve that. Demas, director of the Fort Detrick Business Development Office, is helping potential contractors after relaunching her office's website in December. Since its inception in 2005, Demas' office has helped more than 2,600 companies connect with Fort Detrick for potential opportunities, she said. Organizations at Fort Detrick create or support nearly 120,000 jobs and generate a total of $1.7 billion in economic activity in Maryland, according to a state study released last year.
The previous version of the development office's website was "not a dynamic site," Demas said, and was hard to update with new information. Now, through the efforts of Wood Street Inc., a Web design and development company in Frederick, Demas' office can post updates as soon as they are received. Jon Bailey, Wood Street's president, described the Fort Detrick project as a "total rebrand" of its website and said the site was moved to a platform that would enable it to be more easily managed. "The navigation is not dramatically different," Bailey said, although the registration process for companies was simplified and a "Client of the Month" feature was added. Bailey said the website — at fdbdo.com — has been "rebuilt as a tool" and that he and his employees "moved [the site] from a static business site to an actual resource of information." "It will really empower the [development office] to use the web effectively," said Bailey, whose company has six full-time employees.
The new website also has a client portal where prospective Fort Detrick contractors can customize their profile and search a database to find important information, according to Demas. "There is so much information out there," she said, and it is important for a company seeking to do business with Fort Detrick "to be compliant and compelling." The new portal can reach out to vendors by specialty and offers automation services so that potential contractors need not continually re-enter their data, said Pat Pathade, CEO and co-founder of Fantail Consulting & Technologies of Columbia, which put together the portal for the redesigned website. Pathade started the company in 2009 at a cost of $30,000 and said the decision to implement a portal for the Fort Detrick website came out of a desire to modernize how businesses registered with the office. "The prior process was very paper-based," said Pathade, whose eight-employee company is a tenant of Howard County's NeoTech business incubator. Pathade said he hopes his company's collaboration with Demas' office is "just the beginning" of similar projects. "Small companies like us are very capable."
The Fort Detrick website also offers a series of webinars designed to help companies learn how to read and respond to proposals. Both live webinars and access to an archive are available. Services for the webinars came from TargetGov of Elkridge, which has offered similar services to groups such as the Howard County Economic Development Authority and Women Impacting Public Policy, a national organization for women business owners who want to do business with the federal government, said TargetGov President Gloria Larkin. "It's critical to offer contractors concise information on how they can be successful in doing work with Fort Detrick," Larkin said. "If they have on-demand webinar access they can use anytime ... then they can continue helping to build the local economy."
Contracting with small companies to overhaul the website helps her office practice what it preaches, Demas said, which is that small business is the backbone of the economy. "They also tend to care more about your business," Demas said of small businesses. "They're not just vendors – they become partners. We're getting a better product."