With a friendly smile and a tech-savvy mind, Clay Burnett is giving Newbury Township a helping hand into the 21st Century.

Last year Clay, founder and creative director of Inventure, based at the Cross Creek Industrial Parkway in Newbury, offered his design services to Newbury through Trustee Jan Blair. They worked with a team to develop the township logo.


Recently he has been designing the modern Newbury Township Web page and training Administrative Specialist Ann Wishart to fill its 10 empty pages.

Clay’s philosophy is that a website should fit the client and the client’s customers, suppliers and business network, and provide a comfortable environment for any visitor.

“When somebody comes to your website it should feel like they are stepping into your office,” Clay said while he was designing the Newbury site in April.

With more than 50 clients to his name, Clay has been working his way into the highly-competitive website design industry since college. As a student in the School of Visual Communication at Ohio University in Athens, his early customers wanted him to design business cards, brochures and logos. As he built a clientele and a reputation, more business came his way.
 
His academic career gave him some background in website construction. When the university asked if he could build an OU site, he was happy to accept, but knew it would be a challenge.

“I had no idea how to do it,” Clay admits now. Fortunately he had “buddies” who had expertise on the technical side and got a lot of help, sharing the experience and the rewards.

Since he graduated from OU in 2004 with a degree in Visual Communication, he has progressed from basic website design to developing content management systems (CMS) where his clients are able to update and make changes to their sites, once he builds them.

Those clients range from higher education to small business to non-profits to mid-sized government entities. Besides OU he has contracts with Scripps College of Education, the Great Lakes Financial Group and numerous “Mom and Pop” shops. He also sub-contracts with a number of larger technology firms to supply design services for larger projects. One project he designed, which is due to launch in June, is the School Employees’ Retirement System of Ohio.

Web communication is a fast-growing part of our society. Clay attends conferences to stay current in the industry but there are parts of website development that require specialized knowledge. He works with industry experts in fields such as e-commerce and video solutions. “I have guys to call for services outside of my standard offering. They’re part of my team,” Clay said.

No matter how simple or complicated your website is, once it is launched, Clay concentrates on personal service.

“When you call Inventure, you’re not going to get China – you’re going to get me every time,” he said.

For more information you can send an email to clay@inventure.com, visit his portfolio at www.inventure.com or call him at 440-225-9689.