The latest news from GuildQuality.

Yesterday evening, Rob and David rolled out the third and final round of system enhancements of the summer. The two most significant enhancements are:

Question Bundles. You can consolidate multiple questions together, and view performance averages and trends for only those bundled questions (thanks to Heather for coming up with the name “Bundles).

More Filters. Our “filters” enable you to put your customers into a number of different categories, and filter or compare the results by those different categories: project manager, neighborhood, division, project type, etc. You can now create up to 10 filters (the previous limit was six). This means that you now have 10 different ways to slice and dice you’re data.

Rob wrote a forum post explaining this round of enhancements in more detail. Thanks guys for the great work this summer!

Garden & Gun just listed its 50 Best People & Things of the New South. Earning the “Best Developer” spot was Vince Graham of the I’On Group. From the article:

I want to create more opportunities for people to choose from when considering where and how they live. The dominance of car culture has constrained our thinking and stifled our creativity. New technologies and building materials are part of the solution, but restoring a walkable, human scale to our neighborhoods is an essential first step.

Congratulations Vince!

From BusinessWeek:

A 2007 survey by Kelton Research for Autodesk (ADSK) found that when seven in 10 Americans recalled the last time they saw a product they just had to have, it was because of design. The survey found that among younger people (18 to 29 years old), the influence of design was even more pronounced.

Are you building and selling beautiful homes, buildings, communities, or additions? If you’re not, you should be. The embarrassment of the last 60 years of architecture is not passing muster with today’s buyers.

More from the article:

Unfortunately, most business managers are deaf, dumb, and blind when it comes to the creative process. They learned their chops by rote, through a bounded tradition of spreadsheet-based theory. As one MBA joked, in his world, the language of design is a sound only dogs can hear.”

For businesses to bottle the kind of experiences that rivet minds and run away with hearts, not just one time but over and over, they’ll need to do more than hire designers. They’ll need to be designers.

This afternoon, I was digging through our google analytics to see where our web traffic was coming from. A year ago, we would have seen no traffic from our members’ blogs. In the last thirty days, we’ve seen some traffic from a few: The I’On Group, Structures Building Company, and Bundoran Farm. I’On launched its blog in July 2007, the Structures blog launched in December 2007, and Bundoran Farm launched soon after in January 2008.

Apparently, we are the dorkiest earliest technology adopter. Our very first blog post (in which we describe one of the features of GuildQuality’s customer satisfaction surveying and reporting system) dates way back to October 2006.

I suspect more of our members are using blogs to share with the world what their company is all about. If you have a blog for your business, please let us know about it.

The Qualified Remodeler Master Design Awards competition was initiated 30 years ago to recognize remodelers, architects, builders, kitchen and bath specialists and other professionals for outstanding project design and construction.

This year, Curb Appeal Renovations took the bronze award in the Bathroom $30,000 to $50,000 category and the Silver award in the Bathroom Under $30,000 category. For their efforts, they will be featured in the September issue of Qualified Remodeler and on the Qualified Remodeler website.

Please join us in congratulating the team at Curb Appeal Renovations. We are proud to have quality minded building professionals such as Curb Appeal as representatives of our community of quality.