We’ll be attending DrupalCamp Colorado this month, taking place on June 26–27.  If you’ll be in attendance, let us know and we’ll meet up.

Dakota Farms is a cooperative of family-owned bison and beef ranchers in several midwestern states in the US, along with several provinces in Canada. They hired us to build a consumer-facing website with information about the families on the ranches that produce their meat products, along with recipe and cooking information for bison and beef. We built the new website in the Drupal content management system. With this new site, Dakota Farms can create a page with a biography and photo collage for each of their participating ranch families, accessible to end users through a menu page listing all the participating ranch families.

A page for one of the participating ranch families

In addition, we also created a section of the website for listing various bison and beef recipes, along with cooking tips and instructions.  The recipe pages are entirely jQuery-powered, with an accordion menu in the left-side dynamically updating the recipe displayed on the page, all without needing a page refresh. Since these pages are also powered by the Drupal platform, Dakota Farms can add, edit and manage recipes, images and cooking tips as easily as they can manage the pages for their participating ranch families.

The Bison Info & Recipes page

We launched the website in April. You can find the newly-launched website here: www.YourRancher.com. Come check it out!

If you’re interested in our help in building a website for your own company or organization, contact us and we will be happy to talk with you.

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Steamers coffeehouse & Wine Bar is a for-profit coffeehouse and wine bar in Arvada, Colorado, dedicated to hiring people with developmental disabilities.  They are expanding their facilities and operations and wanted to update their website as well.  We worked with Steamers to rethink, redesign and rebuild their website from the ground up.

Steamers Coffeehouse's previous website

We started out re-organizing the site’s information architecture.  The original site was flat — that is, the page hierarchy was only one level deep.  Since we were expanding the website and adding additional content, we couldn’t continue to use this site structure.  So we changed it to a two-level page hierarchy, with all the site sub-pages still easily accessible through drop-down menus and sidebar menus.  We consolidated the breakfast, lunch and coffee menus under a “Menu” tab, we expanded the content listed under “Services” to multiple pages, we added an “About Us” tab for content such as a staff gallery, company history, and company partners, and expanded the Location page into a “Contact Us” page, with sub-pages holding contact forms, address info and embedded Google maps.  We kept “In the News” as its own tab on the main bar.

The Steamers Coffeehouse facilities have wonderful interior design, utilizing a bright red/orange/green color scheme on the walls, natural materials for the furniture, and extensive framed pictures on the walls.  When we were building the website, we wanted to emulate the colors and textures of the coffeehouse itself.  Thus, you can see a similar bright-yet-mellow color scheme in the website’s visual design, along with extensive visual textures to add interest.  In fact, this is one of our favorite website visual designs to date.

The Steamers Coffeehouse facilities

A sample of some of the colors and textures used on the new website

Steamers Coffeehouse prominently features a “staff picture wall,” showing framed pictures of all of their employees, and they wanted to do something similar on their website as well.  So we designed a Flash-based picture slideshow to feature prominently on the website’s homepage, cycling through both formal portraits and candid shots of the coffeehouse staff.  The slideshow is powered by an RSS feed from Steamers’ Flickr Photostream, making it very easy to maintain and update.  We also designed the slideshow to look as if it were an actual picture frame hanging on the wall, to further match the visual motif of the coffeehouse facilities.

The Flickr-powered slideshow on the homepage

Finally, we built the entire website on a custom content management system.  Our content management system gives Steamers employees the ability to easily update the text and pictures on their pages, and to add, delete and re-arrange pages with a visual drag-and-drop editor.  This will give them the ability to maintain and manage their website long into the future.

It was a pleasure working with Steamers Coffeehouse throughout this project, and we’re very proud of the results.  Steamers has a great group of people, great facilities, and some of the best food and drinks around.  Working with them was a great opportunity to produce some very high-quality work, both on a visual and a technical level.  We wish Steamers the best of luck going forward in their business, hope that their newly revamped web presence serves them well.

You can find Steamers Coffeehouse’s new website at www.SteamersCoffeeShop.com.

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We kicked off the new year with a new website launch for Chaput Rootmaster, Inc, is a Denver-based plumbing, heating and cooling company.  They’ve been in business for 65 years and are very well-respected in their community.  They had an existing website, but it was unsatisfactory for many reasons: aesthetically lacking, technologically out of date, and difficult to maintain.  Realizing this, they approached us to give their site a top-to-bottom redesign.

Chaput Rootmaster's existing website homepage

We started off by analyzing Chaput’s marketing objectives for their website. Who was their target audience? What are their needs? What should their target audience know about Chaput Rootmaster? When visitors come to the Chaput website, what is their desired action?  After discussing this with the Chaput Rootmaster employees, we analyzed and refined the site’s information architecture to align the site content with their marketing objectives. We also planned out wireframe layouts for each page, determining what content needed to be on each page, and where it would be placed.

Our wireframe for the redesigned site's homepage

After we had the site structure and page layouts determined, we worked on the site’s graphic design and look-and-feel.  We decided upon a silver, blue and orange color scheme, with extensive use of brushed-metal texture, to fit the semi-industrial image of the website’s subject matter.  We also placed prominent calls to action on every page of the site, with a prominent phone number and a link to an online appointment-scheduling form in the header of each page, and with an additional appointment-scheduling form placed on the right side of all the body pages of the site.

The website's page headers, showing the blue and brushed-metal color scheme, and the prominent calls to action

We coded the site on a custom content management system based on SilverStripe technology. This allows the Chaput Rootmaster employees to easily update and manage the site content themselves, rather than having to manipulate HTML code or outsource site maintenance elsewhere. We also coded the website to be extremely flexible, with the page menus and interface designed to handle a page hierarchy up to four levels deep.

As we coded the site, we made extensive use of jQuery functionality.  This is most immediately obvious on the homepage, where we used a heavily customized version of the jQuery cycle plugin to create the “Featured Services” slideshow at the top of the page.  We also used jQuery in more subtle ways as well, such as auto-formatting date fields and form validation on the input forms on the site.

jQuery auto-formatting for this form's date input field

jQuery form validation alerts the user if they forgot to fill out a required field on a page form

One particular challenge in development was displaying a map with an overlay showing Chaput’s service area in the Denver metro area.  We wanted to use Google Maps to accomplish this, but we were limited by their terms of service: you are allowed to display screenshots from Google maps, but are not allowed to alter that screenshot in any way.  What we ended up doing was creating the map and the service area overlay as two separate images, with the service area overlay positioned to lie on top of the Google Map screenshot.  Thus we could still visually illustrate Chaput Rootmaster’s service area without violating the Google Maps terms of service.

The Google Map screenshot and the separate overlay image layered on top of each other in the web page

We launched Chaput Rootmaster’s new website on January 5th.  Since then, both us and the client have received a lot of very positive feedback.  Several people have told us that it’s “the best-looking plumbing company’s website [they've] ever seen.”  We’re glad to hear all the positive responses to the new website and we’re happy to have the opportunity to help out this well-respected company.  We’d like to congratulate Chaput Rootmaster on their first 65 years in business, and we hope their newly-launched website will be a great asset for their business both now and into the future.

To see Chaput Rootmaster’s full website, please visit www.ChaputRootmaster.com.

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The new LCMS New Jersey District website

We recently launched a redesign and re-implementation of the website for the New Jersey District of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS).  They had a district convention coming up in June and they wanted to overhaul their site in preparation for that event.  The project spec had three main objectives:

• A visual redesign with a more professional look
• An easy-to-use content management system to allow the district office staff to be able to easily add and update the site content
• The ability for the district staff to continue using their existing web-based tools on the new website: Picasa photo galleries, Google calendars, Constant Contact e-newsletters, email, etc.

The original LCMS New Jersey District website

We broke the project down into four phases:

• Site re-organization and information architecture planning: The original website, after years of organic growth, had inconsistent organization of its content.  Working with the district, we planned out a new top-to-bottom re-organization of all the site pages, divided by category.  For instance, “Missions,” “Stewardship,” “LWML,” and “Conferences & Conventions” were all moved into sub-pages of “Ministries.” We also planned out the major content and interface elements of each page type: Homepage, Menu pages, Body pages, Blog pages, etc.
• Graphic design, layout, and look-and-feel: We produced several proposed mockups of a redesigned homepage layout and discussed them with the client.  Once we had the homepage visual design finalized, we used it as a basis to design the other site pages.
• Building XHTML/CSS Templates: With the look-and-feel for all the site pages planned out, we built XHTML/CSS templates for each of the major page types, ready to be implemented into a content management system.
• Implement the site on a suitable content management system: We researched various content management systems that would be powerful enough to meet the needs of the client, but still simple enough for them to be able to easily pick up and use.  In addition, due to budgetary considerations, we also wanted to use an open source solution.  We ended up selecting SilverStripe, an open-source, PHP/MySQL-based system. Daniel Bergquist handled the development and implementation of the site, converting our XHTML files into SilverStripe templates, and building in all the functionality that the site needed.  We wrote additional CSS as needed to cover all content contingencies, and corresponded with the client during the process.

The design for the site's menu pages

The design for the site's body pages

The new site launched on June 3, 2009, just in time for the district convention.  It was the biggest site that we’ve worked on yet, both in size and functionality.  It included such things as embedded Picasa photo slideshows, an embedded calendar, a dynamically updated homepage news feed, and multiple blogs with RSS feeds.  You can see the finished website here:

www.njdistrict.org

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