Martino and Binzer / Bluespire Inc.

I started at a small advertising agency called Martino and Binzer in 2005. My college degree was in Graphic Information Design, and I briefly worked part time as a designer for a company called Creative Energy. While working at Creative Energy, I also did some development work and found that I was way more suited to be a developer than I was a designer.

Martino and Binzer was traditionally a print advertising agency. They specialized in senior marketing and most of thier clients were retirement communities. David Martino and Gavin Binzer were the owners. I was hired by Dylan Pattenaude and Fran Palma, the heads of the Interactive Department. Dylan and Fran's job was to grow the interactive department so that Martino and Binzer could move more into online marketing as well as print marketing. Previously they had a couple guys who had some small coding experience, but I was thier first full time developer.

I gained a lot of experience in my time at M&B. Since most of our websites were for retirement communities there were a lot of specific rules we had to follow. Our websites both had follow W3C guidlines and meet ADA accesiblity standards. During this time I became very accustomed to following WCAG accessibillity standards. They also had to be cross browser compatible. So there was a lot of testing done even after a website launched, to make sure our websites met all the rules and standards. Over the years we had some fairly large clients. Covenant Living, Five Star Senior Living, and National Church Residences, which had hundreds of communities all across the country.

Over the years out Interactive Department grew. The company hired new web designers, more developers, and new project managers. The company also hired an employee specializing in SEO and some content writers and editors. When I started at M&B we built our websites on a Windows server in classical ASP, and using MS Access databases. There became a time when classical ASP became antiquated and was no longer supported by most hosting companies. At this point we had to make a decision on how to proceed. At this time there were 2 other developers on staff and they were pushing to switch our development to PHP. I was the senior developer at the time, so the deparment left the decision to me. I did a lot of coding research and built 3 sites in separate languages. One in PHP, one in ASP.NET, and one in Python. I was new to these languages to this took me some time. In the end, I agreed with the other developers, PHP was the easiest to transition to, and was well supported. We started to build all new websites in PHP on linux servers, with MySQL databases.

As Martino and Binzer continued to grow we eventually outgrew our office space. The company which originally was located in Avon Connecticut, moved to a new office in Farmington Connecticut. After a hurricane hit, knocking down a tree that hit the building, and flooding the Farmington Office, we moved again to West Hartford.

Community Center

Initially, since M&B was new to web development, our sites were mostly static with small backend system to make some small edits and a contact form for collecting leads. As we gained more clients and thier needs grew we started developing more and more back end tools to allow our clients the ability to manage leads and update content. After the switch to PHP was made we started development on a single, large scale, content management system. This system was given the name "Community Center". It was designed a bit like Wordpress where a user could login and see a list of pages on thier website. The user could then make content edits or add a "call to action" or plugin to a pages. It also had a section of installable plugins for specialized content, such as calendars, events lists, or FAQs. The big difference between Community Center and Wordpress was that it could host multiple sites on one installation. Client accounts could only access the specific websites that they were given access to, while Admin accounts could access all of the sites on system. Having hundreds of sites on one platform was both a positive and a negative. If we made an update to the system, all our clients hosted would get that update immediately; although if an error came up that broke a plugin, it would break on all our clients websites until fixed. This meant that we had to be extra careful before putting any updates live.

In 2013 after 8 years at Martino and Binzer, I had a major life decision to make. My partner had finished up her PHD at Uconn Connecticut and had gotten post doctoral research position at UC Davis in California. She was moving and wanted me to move with her. It was a big and difficult decision to make since all of my friends, family and job were in Connecitcut. While M&B didn't have the ability to have outside employees, they assured me that if I did decide to move I could stay on as an independent contractor, and work remotely. That offer helped me make the desicion and in March of 2013 I moved to California.

I continued to work full time as a remote independent contractor at Martino and Binzer for another 5 years. It was nice for me, because I felt I was way more efficient working from home. I continued to make updates to "Community Center", and even trained some new employees on how to add website templates and add content to the sytem. During this time the company continued to grow and eventually it merged with another company called Bluespire Inc. Bluepsire was based in Minneapolis, and specialized more in finance than senior marketing, but the two are strongly related since most people will sell thier homes or take out loans to buy a place in a retirement community. During this time Dylan took a less active role in managing the team and David Benoit, one of the developers at the company, moved more into a management position. Even though I technically worked for Bluespire now, I was still working with all the same team and using the same system we had developed at M&B. In 2018 Bluesipre offered me an amazing opportunity, they offered to re-hire me as a remote employee. This meant that I could continue to work from home in California, but as an employee I could get a 401K, health insurance, and paid time off from the company. I took this opportunity and was re-hired as an employee in 2018.

In addition to websites, M&B/Bluespire also built a lot of landing pages. When one of our retirement communitites wanted to have an event would could advertise it with a direct mail piece or flyer that led to the landing page with a contact form. We had built a tracking pixel that contained a lot of data about the users device, and web browser, and how they reached our website or landing page. We could narrow down the link a user clicked on, the term they searched, or even (using call tracking) the phone number they called to get a hold of someone at the community. Then we would analyze this data to see which forms of marketing were generating the most leads, and the best leads. Building landing pages for events was one Bluespire's top methods of gaining recurring income after a website was completed. In 2020, the corona virus pandemic was hitting the country. Everyone stopped having and attending events. Being a remote employee, I thought my job would be safe. However Bluepire's revenue dropped significantly, and they couldn't afford to keep everyone. I was furloughed along with approximately 20 other employees. Eventually a stuggling Bluespire was bought by GlynnDevins, who had been one of Martino and Binzer's biggest competitiors in the senior marketing space.

I actually did a little research into the GlynnDevins recently and it appears that they also didn't survive the pandemic. At one point they changed thier name to Attane, but eventually closed as well due to loss of revenue caused by the corona virus pandemic.