We're hiring! Element Fusion is continuing to grow even in the midst of a down economy.  We're looking for the best and the brightest to continue our solid history as one of the fastest growing companies in the OKC metro and country.  If you're amazing in sales or design and you're ready to work with customers all over the world, then we have a job for you!

• Web Designer.  We're looking for a design ninja with a solid portfolio and XHTML skills.
• Sales Representatives (2 positions open).   Our sales professionals partner with our customers and develop not only a successful Internet strategy, but a relationship that lasts year after year.

All positions are located in Oklahoma City, OK.

If you're interested, please read more details on our jobs page.

Oklahoma’s largest newspaper, The Oklahoman, featured an executive Q&A with one of Element Fusion's owners and founders, Ryan Whitaker, in its Sunday edition on January 24th. The article offers a bit of Element Fusion history and then dives into a personal question and answer session with Ryan on topics ranging from his business ideals to his hobbies.

If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, you can click here to read it at NewsOK.com. Check it out.

We’ve had a bit of bad weather here in Oklahoma and we know a lot of people have been preoccupied dealing with the elements. So, we wanted to extend the deadline for nominations for our Website Giveaway program for a couple of days. Nominations will now be accepted through this Thursday, February 4th. Click here to nominate an organization.

We’ve already received some great nominations and we’d love to have more. Remember that organizations nominated will be eligible for all four of our giveaways in 2010. The winning organization in each giveaway will receive a free custom website design from Element Fusion, as well as one year of free hosting on our own content management platform.

All registered non-profit organizations with operations based in Oklahoma are eligible to be nominated. And, you can even nominate your own organization.

Help us find the right organizations for our giveaway program by submitting a nomination today. Thanks for your help!

As part of our ten year anniversary celebration, we're ramping up our Website Giveaway program and giving away four websites to four non-profit organizations in 2010. Each giveaway winner will receive a free website donation valued at $5,000. This includes a free custom website design by Element Fusion's talented design team plus one year of free CMS hosting on our own content management system used by over 100,000 people worldwide. And, as usual, we're asking for your help to find and select the organizations that will receive these donations.

So, starting today, you can nominate a non-profit organization to receive the website donation. Any non-profit organization (even your own) with operations based in the State of Oklahoma is eligible for nomination. Won't you take a moment to fill out our nomination form and recommend an organization you think deserves a free website? We'll only be accepting nominations for this round through February 2nd, so submit your nominations today.

To make a nomination, please visit our Website Giveaway page.

Once the nominations have concluded, we'll select a group of finalists. Then, we'll hold a public vote to help select the winning organization from our finalist group. Of course, even after this first giveaway has ended, there are still three more giveaways to come. You only need to nominate an organization once and they will be eligible for all of our giveaways in 2010.

So, please take a moment to nominate your organization or an organization you know. Also, help us spread the word so that as many organizations as possible have the chance to participate. If you have any questions about the giveaways, you may contact us at giveaway@elementfusion.com.

Do you remember what the Internet was like ten years ago? Websites were far less common. Email was just taking hold. But excitement about this new medium was building.

At that time, three Oklahoma City entrepreneurs sat around a fold-out card table eating Papa John's pizza and looking ahead, envisioning a company that would bring world-class website development to Oklahoma City and beyond. Ten years ago, Element Fusion was born.

Ten years later, we are ready to celebrate this fantastic milestone. So, we created a little something we like to call “Element Fusion, ten years strong.” Why “ten years strong,” you ask? Because for us, it’s more than just being ten years old. For us, it’s about the strength of what’s been built – a solid, debt-free foundation coupled with rapid growth. As we always say, our company and our products are built to last.

So anyway, on to the celebrations. We’ve got a lot of great things in store that you’ll be hearing about throughout this coming year, but here’s a little overview to get you started.

The Anniversary Website

We’ve put up a little web page at 10.elementfusion.com to house information about the anniversary. You’ll also find links to this page in little badges we’ve added to the top, right corner of most of our marketing websites (including this site). Check out the anniversary site for a little bit about our history and more information about the anniversary.

The Anniversary Open House

Join us at the Element Fusion offices on March 5th, 2010 for this special party. We’ll have food, t-shirts, prizes (including an iPod Touch giveaway!), Rock Band tournaments and a whole lot more when you stop by between 1:30pm and 4:30pm. All are welcome to come and go as you please. Our whole team looks forward to meeting everyone and hanging out at the Anniversary Open House.

The Anniversary Giveaways

We’re ramping up our Website Giveaway program for 2010. We’ll be running the program four times through the year, giving away four separate website packages valued at $5,000 each to four separate non-profit organizations. As usual, we will implement a process of nominations and public voting to help select the winners so stay tuned for more information as these giveaways get going.

Stay tuned

We’ll be posting more information about all of these activities throughout the year, so stay tuned to our blog and Twitter feed for further information. As always, thank you for your support of Element Fusion over the past ten years. We look forward to serving you for the next ten years and beyond.

Last night, the Element Fusion team, spouses and guests had a grand party to kick off our ten year anniversary celebration. That’s right, Element Fusion has now been in business for ten years, and we’ve got some great things planned in 2010 to celebrate this milestone. Stay tuned for more in the weeks to come.

To get things started in style, we got together in the “Showroom” at Red Prime Steak in downtown Oklahoma City for an evening of food and fun. Great food, live jazz, an EF history trivia contest, Chad’s brilliant emcee efforts, and funny stories from EF’s past all made for a great evening. To cap it off, owners Ryan Whitaker and Justin Cowan shared their thoughts on the past ten years, our present team, and a look ahead to the next ten years and beyond.

I thought we’d share a little taste of last night’s event with you in some pics below. Enjoy!

Chad engages and dazzles the crowd as the evening’s emcee.

Owner, Justin Cowan, goes over some of his favorite Element Fusion memories.

Tim Thompson (bass) and Adam Ray (sax/keys) did a great job filling in as last minute emergency replacements for our scheduled band. Oh, and hey look, it’s me sitting in on keys for this one song.

One of our lovely tables of guests including (left to right) Neill and Amanda Harmer, Vivian Hoang, Matt Sanders, Matt Grimm, and Jordan Romero. For some reason, Matt Sanders is the only one with food.

Okay, so the title may be a little bit much, but seriously, let’s stop and think about how Twitter changed the way people across the world communicate. Twitter has enabled us to follow our favorite celebrities, connect with users across the globe, get updates on the Iranian Elections, receive instant responses to our customer service complaints, and so much more.

For those of us that use its service, Twitter has truly changed things. Search engines Bing and Google are even incorporating Tweets into their search results, validating their importance. It’s as if communication itself has evolved.

My own case in point

After reading the Sitepoint book “Online Marketing Inside Out,” I tweeted about my purchase and my opinions on the topics covered. I liked the book, so I basically said so. The authors of this book read my tweet, followed me, and even tweeted a thank you. I replied saying telling them they are welcome and that I’m looking forward to the second book.

This kind of interaction would have never happened without Twitter. A few years ago, there would have only been a microscopic chance of a major publishing entity communicating personally with a regular person like me, but now it happens all of the time. As a result, the consumer is more empowered than ever before.

It’s important for businesses to understand this and to try to reach out to their customers through these new communication channels. Businesses that fail to understand the importance of modern web interaction run the risk of becoming obsolete. Businesses that do understand increase their chances of survival and growing their operations.

But enough about my stories. We want to hear from you. How has Twitter changed the way you communicate? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.

We’re a little behind in keeping up with highlighting the sites Element Fusion has launched recently. So, we’ll be scheduling a few posts over the next few weeks to catch up. Here’s our first installment. Take a look at a few of the sites Element Fusion designed toward the end of 2009. Stay tuned for more to come.

Lamar Baptist Church

OK Wind Revolution

Calverts

Kansas Assemblies of God

The end of 2009 is upon us and, as is our custom, we'd like a take a quick look back at what has happened this year at Element Fusion. We're very blessed to have enjoyed a successful and prosperous year and we are grateful to all of you for your support of our company and our products.

Our amazing team

Our company's success has always been dependent on the quality people who work on our team. We close out 2009 with our team as strong as ever. Every one of our employees are innovators in their fields and every one of them go above and beyond to meet the needs of our customers.

Our team has also been quite productive personally with three pregnancies and three engagements for 2009. I should mention that none of the engagements are related to any of the pregnancies.

Solid growth

Element Fusion continued its pattern of solid growth throughout 2009. While maintaining our commitment to debt-free operations we achieved exciting growth numbers. For example, the number of paid websites across all of our CMS products doubled in 2009. Our growth was recognized nationally as Element Fusion was listed on the Inc. 5000 for the second consecutive year. Locally, we were honored as a part of the Oklahoma City Metro 50 for the fourth consecutive year.

We also received recognition at the 2009 Beacon Awards, presented by the Journal Record newspaper. This honor recognized Element Fusion's philanthropic efforts through our recently established website giveaway program.

Ten years strong

The end of this decade also means Element Fusion's 10th anniversary. Since we were founded at the end of 1999, we are closing out our first ten years in business. We're excited to reach this milestone and we have some fun things in store for 2010 to aid the celebration. So, stay tuned and be watching for more about Element Fusion, ten years strong.

Here's to the future

In closing, we'd just like to offer our sincere thanks to all of you who have supported us and continue to support us with your business. Your trust and confidence in us is something we don't take lightly and we look forward to working with you for years to come. Enjoy your New Year's celebrations and we'll see you right back here in 2010.

Well, it’s that time of year. Time for office holiday parties. This year at EF, we stayed up at the office for some great food, great fun, and a little dirty santa. No, not that kind of dirty santa, the kind also known as a white elephant gift exchange.

The food was great as always, but what really set this year’s celebration apart from all previous years, was the addition of Chad’s Christmas rap. For four years now, Chad has read a very special Christmas poem at each EF holiday gathering. It’s his own creation, though modeled quite heavily after “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.” But this year, as a suprise to most of us, Chad presented a fully-produced recording of the Christmas poem in rap form, featuring himself as the rapper (with production assistance from our own Matt Grimm). Naturally, we’d like for you to be able to share in this fun, so we’re including a free download of this audio treasure at the link below:

Download or play Chad’s EF Christmas Rap

And, in case that’s not enough to satisfy your curiosity about how EF celebrates Christmas, I’ve included a few more pics of the festivities below.

From all of us here at Element Fusion, we thank you for your continued support, and we wish you a very Merry Christmas and a happy new year!

Here’s a look at the dirty santa gifts brought by everyone. All wrapped up and ready for fun.

Natalie is opening her gift as everyone else looks on, curious to know what lies within.

While some of the gifts given were quite popular and susceptible to being stolen away throughout the game, others including Ben’s “basket of yarn” received little interest.