It is always a highlight for our team when we get to go see one of our events in action, and this Wednesday we drove across town to visit our very first Saffire client, Rodeo Austin!

First, we got to go on a tour of their newly remodeled office and the fairgrounds.  Our tour guides were wonderful and we enjoyed learning even more about their event.

Next, we enjoyed a yummy dinner in the Founders Club.  If you ever have the chance to enjoy dinner there, we highly recommend the friend pickles and homemade peach cobbler.

We headed down to our seats and watched an exciting rodeo.  As a former intern at Rodeo Austin, Cassie got to see a lot of her old friends, including the one and only Rusty Rodeo!

But we would lying if we said that most of our excitement came from getting to see Josh Turner in concert!  He is definitely a favorite around the Austin office, so we sang along to every song he played.

After the rodeo and concert, we headed over to spend some time at the 100X club for drinks and dancing.  We enjoyed some live music from Clayton Gardner before we left the grounds.

Overall, it was a fantastic experience and we can’t thank the staff at Rodeo Austin enough for their hospitality.  We are proud to be your partner!

Saffire Events is proud to announce that one of our clients, Rodeo Austin, has won a 2011 W³ Gold Award!

The W3 is the first major web competition to honor innovation and creative excellence for everyone from the smallest agencies to Fortune 500 companies.  Check out the Winners Gallery to see other projects recognized by W3.

The W3 is sanctioned and judged by the International Academy of the Visual Arts.  IAVA members include executives from organizations like Disney, Coach, The Ellen Degeneres Show, Microsoft, MTV Networks, Yahoo! and more.

The  Saffire Events team is very excited about this achievement.  We want to thank Rodeo Austin for trusting our award-winning software to create their website and congratulate them on this accomplishment!

Mobile Event Website

We couldn’t help ourselves. We simply had to release a new mobile site for Rodeo Austin.

We spent years telling clients “not yet” when they asked about mobile sites, but now that the stars have aligned so that the time is right, we were excited to help them get on the mobile bandwagon!

The Rodeo Austin mobile event website released today. We’re super proud of it. From this site, you can:

• See a calendar of events by date, event type or location
• Get directions
• Buy tickets
• Sign up for updates

Please visit this new mobile event website from your smartphone at http://m.rodeoaustin.com.

We just launched several updates to the Rodeo Austin website for this event season, all of which are now in Saffire Event Websites.

As you can see from the slideshow, we kept all that was great about the site and just made it better.

We added a “Locations” page so you can view all events taking place at a particular location.

We also added a lot of options for Rodeo Austin to control an event page, including all the new tabs in the Admin Site view above like specific event sponsors, important PDFs, URLs, Results and even the order in which all these new features appear on the page.

We also added a way for you to associate particular “Items” with an event.  This can be used in several ways, including selling tickets from various price levels, different times of an event and even different dates of an event.  This allows Rodeo Austin to give their customers even more specific information about an event.

The 2011 Austin ADDY Awards were also Saturday night, and we were so excited to hear the Rodeo Austin website had been nominated for an ADDY!  We did a little party-hopping so we could attend the Rodeo Austin Gala and then run over to hear the ADDY Award announcements.

We were excited to finally take a look inside Moody Theater, the new home of Austin City Limits and the location of the ADDY’s.

There it is!  Our award-winning website.

Kendra and Jessica showing off our entry!

Jeremy was excited when they announced our award with Rodeo Austin:  Silver ADDY Award Website, Consumer Flash, Service.

The view of the stage from our seats on the front row.

Our team was excited to be among such great company at the ADDY”s including Shiner Beers, Whole Food Market, Frost Bank and many more.  Congratulations to all of the 2011 ADDY Award winners.  Check out the complete list of winners here.

Our team had lots of fun at the Rodeo Austin Gala Saturday night!  We were so glad Jeremy and his wife, Shelly, came to Austin to join us.

Kendra and Jeremy are excited to get going to the Gala!

The Palmer Events Center was the perfect location for the evening.

Our table and cute centerpiece

The guys were all smiles when having their picture made with the Rodeo Austin Princess!

Vince Gill did a great job entertaining the crowd.

Jeremy and Shelly danced the night away to Vince Gill and Jack Ingram.

A Wright Strategies team picture (We missed you Aaron, Justin, Chris and Mike!)

These cupcakes were delicious!

The Austin Office Girls

Lauren and Shane

Thanks for a great evening Rodeo Austin!  We’re already looking forward to next year.