Tag Archives: Web design

Horses, Chupacabras and QVC

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Horses, Chupacabras and QVC don’t often get mentioned in the same breath, but together they’ve been keeping us pretty busy. This week we launched three great projects – Sun River Equine Ranch, Goats R Delicious and a QVC commercial.

Sun River is a Treasure Valley non-profit that uses horses as therapy tools for kids. We spent many hours with the Sun River staff getting to know them, their needs and understanding the life-changing events that can take place at the ranch.

Goats R Delicious has been in multiple stages of design and development for the better part of 15 months. The project includes four 3D animated shorts, three websites, multiple viral videos and a Unity-powered video game for the iPhone and iPad.

The QVC project included 3D animation and special FX for a hair treatment product.

 

Expression Engine and Ecommerce

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We recently had the opportunity to work on a small ecommerce project for a company in eastern Idaho. We don’t do a lot of these and whenever we’re approached about them we go into research mode trying to find a good cart solution.

Our biggest issue though is that we use Expression Engine as our CMS and want something that integrates nicely. The idea of sending the client to two different CPs to update the site and the store isn’t ideal. This obviously limits the number choices out there to three that we’re aware of. They consist of Foxy Cart with Foxee, brilliantretail and CartThrob. At the time the project was starting we weren’t aware of brilliantretail, so the choice was between Foxee and CartThrob. After doing some research we decided to go with CartThrob because they appeared to be closer to their EE 2.0 compatible cart. Not that this was a deal breaker, but it showed us that the CartThrob team was still actively engaged.

What we found was that CartThrob is extremely flexible. Just as Expression Engine doesn’t tell you how to design, CartThrob doesn’t tell you how to structure your cart. They give some examples and advice, but it really falls on the developer to use the CartThrob tags and mold the store to the client’s liking. CartThrob supports all major payment gateways, looks seamless with the rest of the site and building custom plugins isn’t too difficult (as we found). Plus there is one control panel to rule them all which meets one of our most important criteria.

CartThrob isn’t for everyone as some knowledge of Expression Engine is recommended, but the forums and the tech support team are second to none if you get stuck. Should another ecommerce project come up, we’ll definitely look at CartThrob again.

A Website. What a Terrible Thing To Waste

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The days of developing a small business website, throwing it up on a server and forgetting about it are long gone. Today’s websites need to be living and breathing creatures that require care and attention. Forget or neglect them, and they can quickly become as useless as that portable rotating grill you from that infomercial.

So then why don’t more small business owners take an active role in keeping their websites current? From the business owner’s point of view, there are multiple reasons:

  1. Blogging – they don’t feel like they have anything interesting to say
  2. They simply don’t have the time
  3. They don’t understand the importance of fresh content
  4. They don’t care

1. Blogging – they don’t feel like they have anything interesting to say – What’s interesting is in the eye of the beholder. While most may not find fertilizers or building standards interesting, your customers do. What may be a news blip on the radar for the the average person is extremely important to your customers and followers of your industry.

While blogs can mean great rewards for search engine optimization and content, they aren’t for everyone. They require a certain amount of dedication that not every company can set aside.

2. They simply don’t have the time – A lot of small business owners already feel overwhelmed with the day-to-day tasks of personnel management, client relations, ongoing projects, budgeting… the list goes on. Telling them they have to find some extra time to write a blog article, post something on Facebook or add a new portfolio piece quickly becomes that task that gets the “I’ll do it tomorrow” treatment.

If you have to, find someone else in your office or hire an agency or PR firm to take care of the posts, new photos, Tweets or Facebook updates. It’s not the best solution, but it’s most likely better than letting you content go stale.

3. They don’t understand the importance of updating content – This reason really falls on the web developer and/or agency. We can’t expect the business owner that sells muffins or car accessories to understand the importance of blogging or website updates. It falls on us to educate our clients so that they understand a dynamic website is a better website.

4. They don’t care - Yes they are out there and unfortunately there’s not much that can be done about this.  For them it’s not an issue of cost or time. They simply don’t care.

So for you small business owners, understand that your websites need attention, fresh content and nurturing. Your bottom line just may thank you for it.

Flash Trashin’ – Get Over It

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Adobe FlashMuch has been made over the past several months about how Flash is finished, HTML5 and jQuery will take over the world, blah blah blah.  The Flash haters and knee-jerk reactions are in no short supply as some on Twitter wish Flash would just go away. Don’t like it? Fine, but publicly stating death to Flash is short-sighted.

At the the very least Flash has made the online world a better place by encouraging innovation and competition. Just as the emergence of jQuery, HTML5 and Unity will force Adobe to rethink what Flash should be.

As a company we make all of our decisions based on the client’s needs. Sometimes Flash is the answer, sometimes it isn’t. In the end, they’re all just tools that allow us to do our job. It’s nothing to get emotional about.