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.

More and more, a website is one of the most effective means of marketing yourself or your company. Many businesses nowadays view their website as the foundation of their marketing efforts, and for good reason. Rather than printing thousands of expensive brochures, posters, knickknacks and other marketing collateral, companies can simply display their products or services on their website, where the storage is unlimited and they have extensive multimedia options like video and Flash to promote themselves.

To start your own website, you need three things: a computer server, a domain name, and, of course, content.

1. You need a computer server to “host” your website: basically you need a place to store your website content in a manner that other people can access and browse through it through the internet. Any computer can become a web server, although it takes a decent grasp of the technical and security issues involved if you want to turn your personal computer into a web server. What I recommend to my clients is leasing server space from a dedicated hosting company like HostMonster.com. The prices are cheap — around $6 a month — and they take care of all the technical support and security issues for you.
2. In addition to a place to host your website content, you will also need a domain name for your website. What is a domain name? Quite simply, that is the address of your website, as in “www.yourdomain.com.” You typically lease domain names in increments of one year or more through companies that specialize in facilitating these transactions. Odds are, the company you choose to host your website will also offer domain name leasing services, so you can take care of both of these steps together.
3. Finally, after you have server space and a domain name set up, the last thing you need is content. This is the text, pictures, video and/or anything else that you want your site visitors to see and interact with. Website content is arranged and formatted in a computer language called HTML: HyperText Markup Language. These HTML files are the foundation of every website. The HTML code of web pages determines both the structure and division of the page content, and the visual design and formatting of the page. If you cannot or do not wish to try and design and develop these HTML files yourself, contact a professional who can work with you to build your website for you. Website design and development is the primary service we offer to our clients nowadays.

This is just scratching the surface of the process of building and maintaining website. If you have additional questions about starting a new website or updating your current site, you can write to us on our contact page, and we will be happy to answer your questions. We will publish featured questions and answers in future news articles on our website.

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.