At Synotac, when we’re working with a client, we spend a amount of time in the define stage where we get to know our clients and their businesses so that we can create a custom solution for their web design needs. Sometimes that means understanding how a company or individual wants to be seen or understood by their customers, while other times that means understanding a manufacturing, advertising, selling or even shipping process so that we can communicate that clearly through their website.

Almost all of the time, we find that our clients have very specific needs when it comes to how their website will function, and more importantly, how it will be updated using their content management system (in most cases, WordPress).  These are some of the ways that we help them to meet their needs.

Building a Better Back-End

It is one thing to build a beautiful web site and quite another thing to build it so that it is capable of being updated by a non-web-savvy client who does not know or care to know about HTML, CSS, PHP or any other web acronym.  We understand that, and as a result we have harnessed the power of WordPress to build custom plugins to cater to our clients specific problems and needs allowing them to update their site and the custom solutions we have come up for them quickly and easily.

Case Study: Sunset Imports

Sunset Imports is a Portland, Oregon Audi and Porsche dealership who came to us in need of a few custom solutions.  There are many things we could discuss about this project (how we provided a less templatey site with more of a local feel to it, or the custom car search application) but to try and keep things short and sweet, we’re going to only focus on one of those custom solutions.

The Specials Widget / Plugin

Sunset occasionally has a number of “specials” that they wanted to present on their website.  The specials were a very important piece of getting people to go to the website as well as to do business at Sunset.

Here is what we were able to come up with them in the design:

They also wanted complete control over how these specials were displayed, where they were displayed, and the ability to add, edit, and delete specials quickly and easily.

We decided that a custom WordPress plugin would do the trick.

When it comes to WordPress plugins, there are correct ways and very incorrect ways of doing them.  The best WordPress plugins integrate seamlessly into the WordPress framework and utilize it’s extensive suite of powerful tools.  The plugin that we came up with for the Sunset Imports Specials is a prime example of how WordPress can be expanded upon to fit many custom solutions.

Here are a few screenshots highlighting the Specials plugin we wrote for Sunset Imports:

The plugin fits seamlessly into the WordPress admin area.

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The “Add Special” page consists of a form which adds the special to our custom specials database so that the specials can be organized and grouped together (as well as edited, turned on or off, and deleted).  There is also a preview of the special on the right hand side that gets updated in real time as you type in the various elements (title, description, and the image).  The images tap into WordPress’ built in media manager to utilize all of the image editing capabilities and media management power of WordPress.

Click to enlarge

The “Manage Specials” page consists of a top portion where Sunset Imports was able to organize and position their specials into four separate pages and multiple tabs on each page.  The way it works is that you choose the special you want to fit into the specific position and then click save order and those specials are locked in.

Click to enlarge

The bottom portion of the Manage Specials section contains the table listing of all the specials.  This table can be sorted by column, as well as filtered by section to make it easy for Sunset to find the specials they want to edit or delete.

More “KA-BANG” For Your Buck

It’s true that you may find “cheaper” options out there in the web design world for your next project or redesign.  But what Synotac can promise you is that it is well worth it for your web designer or web design company to understand your needs, like Synotac does, and to provide you with a tool that is not only powerful, but is easy to use and gives you the power to update your site whenever is needed.

When you are trying to communicate a specific message to your customers and craft something that is beautiful, informative, and functional, it takes time and expertise. Throwing something together does not yield happy results. For example, most of us know the pieces that make up a car. You have the wheels, the body, the engine, a steering wheel, some seats, etc. But if we were asked to put one together, most of us would have a hard time creating something that actually worked. (We might be able to make it look like it works, but try starting it and having it function and it all falls apart.)

The same is true in the world of website construction. So the Synotac team put our collective expertise together to carefully create a new site for CoreIP. The new site includes best practices in usability and visual design as well as a robust content management system that will let CoreIP staff update their content and post news on the fly.

The partners at CoreIP are smart folks with no doubt a lot of technical expertise between them. Maybe they could have pieced together a website, but they recognized that for their new site to be functional, usable, and easy on the eyes, calling on an expert team would pay off.

EarthTechling, a green technology blog, seeks to inform it’s readers about “eco-tech gadgets, electronics, automobiles and in-home technologies, which, in some proven manner, help a person live a more green lifestyle.” They came to Synotac looking for help creating an online presence that would give off the “green vibe”, not look like every other blog, and function exactly how they imagined. We were really excited to accept the challenge.

This was the first “true”, “professional” blog that we have created. Our staple Content Manager that we use is WordPress, an application that is meant for blogs, although most of our projects since we started using WordPress have been business or personal sites where WordPress was being used to update content on static pages rather than power a dynamic, fluid, robust blog.

See, the thing about blogs, is that they are “theoretically” never ending. With non-blog sites, you know, to a certain degree, exactly how much content is going to go on any given page. You create a certain number of pages and you put content areas that may grow a little bit, but are relatively contained. But with a blog, you have to compensate for the fact that content will continue to be created, potentially forever, and that created content needs somewhere to go and systems setup for organizing it.

This is what makes designing and programming a blog so challenging: you have to imagine ahead of time how the site will function when it is brimming with content.

Luckily, with EarthTechling, content was being created even before we got to programming the template. But planning began well before programming in the design phase. Design Guru David came up with a design that not only looked amazing, but which took into consideration the fact that content would literally be oozing from each section.

A Simple, Polished Design

David was able to create something that was sleek, but not too glossy. The buttons and gradients used on the site are very fresh and “web 2.0″, yet it is not overdone and leaves space for the content to breath and really stand out.

The article slideshow on the front page is a great example of this.

These slideshows are a great feature for the front pages of websites, and you can immediately see why on EarthTechling. The image preview is the first thing that catches your eye, and then the title of the article is nice and big and bright. The excerpt is short and to the point, and the links for reading more, comments, and ratings are right there tucked nicely under the excerpt. The title, the image, and “Read More” all link to the article, making it super easy to navigate. The subtle directional arrows on the bottom right allow you to easily navigate through the slideshow.

Taxonomies: Nothing To Do With Money

Another important thing to think about when designing and planning a blog, is the use of taxonomies. Taxonomies are the organization of the articles into things such as types, categories and tags. EarthTechling splits their articles into three main categories or types: Reviews, News and Features. Features is broken into four sub-types: Buying Guides, Previews, Interviews and How-Tos. From there, the articles are divided even further based on tags and topics.

The use of taxonomies makes it super easy to find exactly what interests you. Say you come to the site looking for green gadgets for your ipod. It’s possible that there could be reviews on those gadgets, or news articles, or even features such as a buying guide about such products. But rather than searching through those individual sections, you could simply click on the Gadgets topic in the list of topics which shows on each page. Alternatively, you could use WordPress’ powerful search and see all the articles pertaining to “green ipod gadgets”.

You can see that you don’t have to even view the entire article to see what tags and categories are on specific articles, allowing you to broaden your search by clicking on one of these links which will take you to the tag and category list view of articles.

What we tried to accomplish through the use of taxonomies, was an assortment of ways to find and categorize articles to make them easy to find.

Being Social Isn’t Just About Being Social

“Social Networking” is a hot topic in the business world these days. Everyone seems to be talking about the likes of Twitter and Facebook. Business’s of all sizes are creating accounts with these social networking sites to promote themselves; and it’s working.

By connecting your business, or in this case, blog, to a social networking site, you are ensuring yourself masses amounts of free advertising. Here is how it works:

1. You create an account for your business through a social networking site like Facebook.
2. You connect your blog to automatically post updates to Facebook everytime you make a change
3. Everyone who is attached to your account sees the update and potentially passes it along
   OR
4. People visit your site, click the facebook icon, and share the article or page with all of there friends… and the free advertising begins!

Even before EarthTechling’s blog launched, as I was testing the Share feature for Facebook, I published an article to my facebook account and within minutes was receiving comments from friends who were trying to go to ET’s blog, and were having trouble because it was password protected (because we hadn’t launched yet). Social networking really does work.

And so we built social networking right into EarthTechling’s blog.

You can DIGG articles, or share them through a number of social networking sites. ET also created profiles through some of these sites and we displayed their links right in the navigation bar on the site.

ET Phone Home

As I write this, we are on the eve of deploying ET (EarthTechling) into cyber-land, and seeing first hand how all of our planning and implementation of building a better blog goes. We are confident and happy with what we built, and we wish EarthTechling the best as they blog away about a brighter tomorrow using green technology.

Go check it out for yourself: www.earthtechling.com

Jereme and Cameron were undeniably good partners in creating something original that can soak up hours of time and provides an impressive amount of information about Jereme’s film: A Moment On Earth. The mosaic contains 3,192 images taken from the film, all of which visitors are able to click on for more information about the image. To visit the mosaic and learn more about the film, visit Satellite Film’s website.