WhatsNextInYourLife.com is a retirement planning site unlike most others on the Web. Instead of focusing only on financial planning, WhatsNextInYourLife.com helps baby boomers think and strategize about day-to-day living after they leave the workforce.

When visits to the site were down, the entrepreneurs behind WhatsNextInYourLife.com couldn't determine why. So they turned to River City Studio to identify the problem and come up with solutions.

River City Studio's first step was to install Google Analytics on the website. This tool allowed a detailed look at important information, such as where users were going once they arrived at the site, where and when they were leaving the site and how visitors were finding WhatsNextInYourLife.com.

The results from Google Analytics were revealing. The River City Studio team could see that some sections of the site and available tools were more popular than others. The team also saw that many visitors didn't register or left during the registration process. And they found that most visitors came to the site directly or by typing the site name into a search engine. Hardly any users found WhatsNextInYourLife.com by typing in search terms.

River City Studio's team made some recommendations: (1) Favored sections and tools should be easier to get to. (2) Mandatory registration should be removed from many services on the site. (3) WhatsNextInYourLife.com should be optimized for search engines and strong, popular keywords should be inserted into the content.

The results came almost immediately. Time visitors spend on WhatsNextInYourLife.com has doubled. Search traffic has tripled. Overall traffic has almost quadrupled.

Now the WhatsNextInYourLife.com team receives weekly Google Analytics reports to monitor and track promotional efforts. It's a winning strategy to take the guesswork out of planning for a successful future.

River City Solutions provides hands-on professional technology training in a broad range of programs, from Adobe-based Dreamweaver, Flash and Illustrator to Microsoft-based Word, Excel and Publisher. To bring new students to its Learning Lab, River City Solutions decided to build a pay-per-click campaign on Google Adwords. River City Studio became River City Solutions' partner in developing the campaign.

Because River City Solutions serves a local market, geo-targeting was a priority. Ads would reach only people searching for training in the Midwest. Next, there would be two campaigns, one for Microsoft classes and the other for Adobe classes. But it was the third step — Adgroups — that really set the program apart.

An Adgroup lets the advertiser control the specific ads that appear, the keywords that bring those ads up and the price paid when someone clicks on the ad. Working with River City Studio, River City Solutions set up eight Adgroups for Adobe training and five Adgroups for Microsoft, covering the major programs the brands offer. Multiple ads were created for each Adgroup. Google would automatically display the ads that got the best response more frequently.

So what would happen when people clicked on an ad for, say, Adobe Dreamweaver training? They would be sent immediately to a landing page uniquely designed to be specific to their search, containing all the necessary information and linked to the River City Solutions website for sign-up.

Almost immediately the River City Solutions solution did its job. Classes grew, requiring more frequent scheduling. Adobe Illustrator classes surged 50 percent. Dreamweaver and Flash classes jumped 35 percent. Equally impressive is the cost of the advertising: less than $1.50 for each new visitor.

Blood transfusions can be complicated. If a patient needs blood, it's not just a matter of matching the type — O-, B+, AB+ — and moving on. The patient's blood needs to be tested for antibodies that might make it incompatible even with blood of the same type. Such incompatibility could lead to hemolysis, or destruction of red blood cells, which not only takes away the benefits of the transfusion but can cause serious illness and death.

Realizing the need for an antibody record that could follow patients from hospital to hospital, health-care provider to health-care provider and insurance carrier to insurance carrier, the Community Blood Center decided to create an Antibody Registry. The registry would make patients' antibody information readily available to all providers on a secure website that met HIPAA requirements.

To develop the site, the Community Blood Center sought the help of River City Studio and its team of Web designers and programmers. After a number of meetings with the CBC to sort out the requirements, River City's crew went to work.

The site they developed provided a password-protected solution with several levels of security. Only a limited number of personnel at the CBC could add or edit information on the site. Hospitals and other health-care users could only view or add information, and different levels of access were set up to protect sensitive information. Users received training on the system.

The system showed positive results immediately. On the registry's first day of activity, a hospital blood bank employee used it to check on a patient who needed a transfusion and discovered that the patient had an unusual and complex antibody. The employee would ordinarily have had to spend hours trying to identify the antibody, but the experts at the CBC had the answer far more quickly. The hospital saved valuable time, and the patient avoided a potentially devastating incompatibility.

After just three months online, the Antibody Registry has a database of 4,000 patients. It's future — and the future of thousands of injured and ill patients — looks bright.

In the spring of 2008, River City Studio caused a chain reaction in the McClatchy newspaper chain. The source of the domino effect was The Kansas City Star, a McClatchy paper, which decided to take the Star's participation in the Newspapers in Education (NIE) program to the Web.

A little background: NIE brings newspapers and local schools together to encourage use of the paper as an instructional and literacy promotion tool. Corporate and individual donations fund NIE for elementary, middle and high school students. Until 2008, the Star delivered printed copies of the newspaper to the schools. Star management, aided by a partnership with Olive Software, wanted to shift to an online e-Star edition.

The decision made a lot of sense. It would deliver the news in an environment students were used to — the Internet. The Star would also be able to serve more students in the NIE program by eliminating delivery costs. The change would be made for the Spring 2008 semester.

But there were a couple of hitches. The NIE sign-up deadline was less than six weeks away. The Star's personnel were committed to other projects. The automation task was complex and had to include an audit of delivery because of its dependence on donations. Teachers had to sign and return an affidavit confirming the number of days a paper was received and the number of students receiving it or call the Star to explain any discrepancies.

Enter River City Studio. Our development team automated and streamlined the teacher affidavit process with a system that tied teachers and their classes to individual school calendars. At the end of each semester, teachers would receive an automatic email detailing the number of classes, number of students and number of delivery days they had signed up for. All the teachers would have to do is click "Yes" to confirm the affidavit. They could click another button to email the Star if the affidavit didn't match their order.

The new system worked. Really worked. More than 1,250 teachers signed up their classes. More than 60,000 Kansas City-area students received the Star online. In fact, the system was so successful that it was quickly adopted by other McClatchy papers, including the Miami Herald, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Myrtle Beach Sun News, Augusta Chronicle, Macon Telegraph, Pioneer Press, Wichita Eagle, and Bradenton Herald.