My name is Josh and I like making awesome stuff, working with super smart people, and playing outside.

I have loved design since I first painted a self-portrait of myself as a fighter jet pilot in kindergarten (What can I say? Top Gun was a really influential movie for a 4 year old).  My parents are to blame really, for never calling my bluff when I would say, “I am going to draw cartoons when I grow up.” In hindsight, maybe I should have shot for fighter jet pilot… In any case, Mom and Dad had no objections and the rest is history.

After putting in the man-hours in art school at NBCC Miramichi, I built a diverse resume including work on film, documentaries, and cartoons. A chance meeting with an old friend springboarded my transition into video games at a Nova Scotia studio, where I worked for 8 years and shipped a few millions units.

Fast forward to winter (and let’s be clear CANADIAN WINTER) 2012 – a job posting for Bump Networks in Maui pops up. I say to my wife Lisa, “We should move to Maui.” Lisa says, “Heck yes! It would be so nice to surf without wetsuits!” I applied for the position with, of course, an info-graphic (picture) resume. Not long after, I was taking up residence on the island looking for my first real shark fistfight.

Now I get to live and work in beautiful Maui with a team of absolute stars.  I am super excited to be part of the Bump family, making cool products and helping people bring their ideas to life.  I will also make sure that we have a lot of fun in the process.  Lock up your whiteboards and hide the markers cause I’m coming for them.

My name is Jared and I’m originally from Oregon. I grew up in a small town and eventually moved to Portland, where I’ve spent most of my adult life. I went to school at Pacific University where I majored in film production and graphic design. I spent several years working as a graphic designer whilst building websites on the side as passion projects.

I loved living in Portland. From great coffee and fantastic food—to an always exciting design scene and great outdoor activities—only the perfect job in Hawaii could draw me away. By offering me creative opportunities to work on websites, apps, and all sorts of other projects—for the first time in my life, I feel creatively content.

It’s not uncommon for people in the design field to feel like the creative well dries up sometimes. And in the past, the only way I’ve found to fight that was to push forward with learning new technologies, or rehashing a design for my personal website for the hundredth time. This was primarily done when I should have been focusing on my actual job.

The work I do at Bump gives me passion. We collaborate in a way where everyone’s ideas are valued and ideas are made better because of it. The goal of every project is to create something awesome and unique—not only to impress clients—but to challenge them to think outside the box and achieve the best results for their brands. I love working here and can’t wait to create more great stuff.

If you’ve ever been to Uncle’s Fish Market & Grill, you know that this restaurant is the place to get delicious fresh fish in Honolulu. Even with its rave reviews from foodies and media outlets, the company website was looking a little green around the gills — so we gave it an update. Here’s what it looked like before:

The design was a bit outdated and the back-end was difficult for staff to use. Additionally, the old site was built before  social media and mobile surges, so it wasn’t developed to leverage newer technology.

We wanted to showcase the restaurant’s best asset – its food. The food is delicious and it looks good too. The staff at Uncle’s Fish Market & Grill has this excellent habit of capturing beautiful photos of their culinary creations so the new site takes advantage of this media.

The site is fully functional for patrons using desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones. This makes it easy to view the menu, make reservations, buy a gift card, get directions, and check out all media using the website – no matter where a person is or what device they are using.

The restaurant is built in honor of founder Bruce Johnson’s mentors and heroes, “da Uncles” who were fisherman in the early 20th century. We wanted to highlight this rich history so we made it more accessible on the homepage and accentuated the story using videos on the about page.

We made it easy for the busy staff members to update the blog by moving it to Tumblr. Using the service IFTTT, we set up social media so that the company’s Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter accounts were all connected. IFTTT simplifies steps for the staff — so if an awesome photo is taken with Instagram, it will be automatically posted on Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter as well.

Finally, we created a better representation of the parent company’s brand, Fresh Island Fish so users understand the association between the two companies. Make sure and check out their site and, if you can, visit them in the Fishing Village at Pier 38 in Honolulu. We recommend you try their infamous Poke Tower.; you won’t regret the trip.

We made the cut! We are excited to announce that we’re one of the Top 25 Women-Owned Businesses in the 15^th Annual Pacific Business News 2013 Women Who Mean Business Awards. The awards will be presented on April 25 in Honolulu.

Crystal Johnson, you mean business and so does Bump Networks!

Other categories include: Businesswoman of the Year and Women-To-Watch.  View all of the winners.

Congrats to all of the amazing women-owned businesses we share this award with. It’s an honor!

The Maui Kai Resort is located right on Ka’anapali beach providing their patrons oceanfront rooms, full amenities, and beautiful sunsets. We wanted to capture all of Maui Kai’s strengths by updating their web presence. Here’s what the site looked like before:

And here it is now!

In addition to the aesthetic updates, we implemented new site features  in order to improve the user experience for both the customer and resort staff. We created two ways for customers to check out: Best Rate or Pick Your Condo. Customers can either reserve a junior suite, 1-bedroom, 1-bedroom corner, or 2-bedroom at its “Best Rate” or they can pay a little extra to “Pick Their Condo” and rent the exact condo of their choice. We’re the first company to implement a booking feature that offers two ways to book real-time. Our system automatically reconciles all availability across a block of units within a room type (i.e. Junior Suite, 1 bedroom, 2 bedrooms etc) and presents one availability calendar for each room type. This means that users can make a reservation for a “Best Rate” condo based on the type of room they want and the system automatically selects a unit for them.

The website also offers a full availability calendar for “Pick Your Condos” so that customers can easily make “unit” specific bookings. Booking data for both types of reservations is passed directly into the property management software, V12, created by Home Away.

We also provided Maui Kai with a “Specials” page where customers can use a promotional code to automatically receive a discount. We did this on top of the ISI Link. Check out mauikai.com to see all of its new features in action.

Caitlin joins Bump Networks as our marketing director in our new Venice, CA office. Say hi on Twitter: @caitlinmags

As a native Virginian and a Brooklynite at heart, I always wondered what it would be like to live on the west coast. Songs like Katy Perry’s “California Girls” and TV shows like Entourage made me feel as if I was missing out on something that I could only find in California.

Although I absolutely loved my job as the head of marketing at Mediabistro in NYC, I found myself craving sunshine, palm trees, and nature. I decided it was time to leave my little Park Slope apartment, the MTA subway system, and my beloved MusicocityNYC choir behind, and experience the storied wonders of Los Angeles for myself.

When Bump Networks was first introduced to me, I knew I had met my match. Working with the most creative and innovative minds in technology is proving to be a wonderful learning experience. My colleagues are passionate about, and proud of, every piece of work they produce, creating an amazing work environment full of bright ideas and well-developed projects. The bar has been set high and I’m excited to be challenged each day to stay up-to-date with the cutting-edge developments in the technology industry.

Managing your social accounts can take up a lot of your time, but there are many ways you can get organized to optimize your social media marketing. Check this infographic from pardot.com on how to

This info graphic from visual.ly offers some interesting insights into why most startups fail.

Everything about Maui Babe – from their world famous browning lotion, to the story of how the company was created – is amazing. So of course, Maui Babe’s founder Joe Rossi, wanted a web presence as amazing as his line of browning and skin care products. However, before we began constructing a prototype, we took a good look at his existing site.

The Old Maui Babe Website

Even though the design needs to be updated, the website generated a constant flow of orders. We would need to preserve the order history and customer base. Link mapping and incorporating all existing copy would help us retain SEO ranking. However, in order make sure we made the right improvements, we needed to place various types of tracking code so we could observed how users interacted with the Maui Babe website. This process helped us identify what was and wasn’t performing.

The New Maui Babe Website

We discovered that the bounce rate for the checkout page could be reduced. Maui Babe lost potential sales because a percentage of their users would take one look at the checkout page and leave the site. To lower the bounce rate and create more conversions we need more Maui Babe users to trust the website. First, we implemented a simple checkout process. Then, we increased the level of security by installing the highest assurance SSL certificate available at Comodo.com. These next generation SSL certificates are backed by business verification and have a high bit encryption rate. Users feel at ease because they see official badges and a HTTPS in a green address bar during checkout. The end result is a friendly checkout page with undeniable legitimacy.

Beside improving their cart, we added functionality to their shop, created a mobile ready website, installed a blog, connected their social media presence and wrapped it all in slick design. For a complete tour of the feature list, please visit the Maui Babe blog.

We are very excited to announce the release of our latest iPhone app: Air Advocate.

This little app packs some serious punch for any person who travels by plane — be one of the first to know about delays and cancellations, search for alternate flights, and click to check in!  We really pushed the boundaries with our experience in the travel industry to build this app.  It’s the only one that sends you a notification if your flight is full, and it even provides information about your rights as a flyer and what you can expect if you encounter tarmac delays.

For more information, check out www.airadvocate.com.
Here are a few screen shots that show the beautiful design work by our design team!