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Partner agency Eleven and Business Impact Group

A BIG and Better Website

Client profile

The mission of Business Impact Group (BIG) is to help companies build brand awareness through merchandise. They strive to exceed expectations through measured sourcing, delivery systems and business insight. ELEVEN, our partner, is adept at creating design concepts and creative strategies to bring brands to market and build them up. ELEVEN is a made up of people with real-world business experience who are committed to understanding their clients’ business, market, and consumers. They build business and brand by combining insightful strategy and brilliant creative.

Objectives

ELEVEN and BIG needed a partner with web development expertise to make their design ideas function online. BIG wanted a clean website and had the makings for it with the design elements created by ELEVEN. Our partner ELEVEN looked to Sierra Bravo to execute their design through backend web programming.

BIG’s old site was created entirely in Flash — essentially a one-pager that was not easily indexed by search engines and somewhat difficult to maintain. Also, it was a rigid and not extendable for growth or modification. BIG wanted their new site to combine static-content pages and dynamically-created pages.

ELEVEN’s mission is simple — their clients’ success. A majority of the staff at ELEVEN at one time or another has been on the other side of the fence; they understand clients’ needs. “We were in search of a web development partner that could assist us,” said Mary Grams, director of account services at ELEVEN. “We would provide creative design and input, but we needed a strong web development team to work closely with the creative and AE team to incorporate a strong and unique website in a timely manner.”

Design by ELEVEN

Based on a fresh and creative look and feel designed by ELEVEN, Sierra Bravo set out to implement a CSS/XHTML-based skin for BIG’s website. Site navigation would feature simple and logical design in that the most common tasks of online visitors are never more than a single mouse click away, and the most pertinent information is readily available with minimal clicks.

Solutions

Build-out of design elements in HTML

ELEVEN created the design elements in Photoshop and sent Sierra Bravo design mockups to work from as the basis of BIG’s website. Our programmers translated/recreated ELEVEN’s Photoshop images to HTML.

Static Content Migration

Our developers migrated and re-formatted all existing static content on BIG’s former website. This included re-working the site’s visual assets including Flash, images and menus. The existing content was revised and polished to integrate into the new look and feel of the website. Our programmers used CSS and JavaScript to make a dynamic drop-down menu for user to scroll over to read at-a-glance teasers of deeper pages on the site. We also facilitated the seamless migration their site to a different machine with their existing web host.

Flashy Intro

We also helped add a Flash video for the launch/intro to web visitors. In particular, we resolved some preloading issues through a pre-buffering application which made for a smooth video launch.

Search Engine Optimization

The BIG site was built with industry best practices in mind from start to finish. Sierra Bravo builds sites using modern layout techniques (CSS, XHTML) ensuring that content not only looks great, but is easily indexed by search engines. We produced each page of the site in a manor that contributes to the overall relevancy; when all the website copy was ready for layout our SEO pros optimized the markup so search engines would easily recognize the semantics.

Results

Throughout the development process, the Sierra Bravo team worked primarily with ELEVEN — and by proxy we were responsive to BIG’s direction via ELEVEN and able to quickly implement changes in a way that ELEVEN could show BIG timely progress during development.

“We met frequently with Sierra Bravo to discuss the progress of the site,” said ELEVEN’s Mary Grams. “ELEVEN provided copy, creative assets and direction to Sierra Bravo regarding the overall development of the site. We were the liaison between BIG and Sierra Bravo — it was great working with them. The team is very accommodating!”

Because we used a template approach to separate site design and layout from content, changes that affect the entire site can be made in seconds. This means that future adjustments to BIG’s site will make a big impact on their audience, but not on their budget.

BIG’s Dynamic Pages: Press Release and Career Advertisement Management

The press release section is a blog-like news and announcement page organized in descending order based on publication date. An admin interface to this dynamic content allows users to add/edit/remove press releases with “publish on” and “unpublish on” dates. Displayed career opportunities are dynamically-created from a database, also displayed in an administrative area.

All About BIG

A corporate information section was created to provide visitors detailed information on BIG on four static content pages: Mission, Management Team, Clients, and Brands. There are also links to the dynamic content nodes for press releases and career opportunities within this section.

Finding BIG

A static Contact Information page was developed, including an embedded map from GoogleMaps; clicking the map or a link opens the mapping service with BIG’s address preloaded in a new window.

“The new site is easy to understand and maneuver — very clear, clean, crisp and efficient,” said ELEVEN’s Mary Grams of BIG’s new site. “They now have a new unique website that allows them to the ability to work with the new administrative tools on their site. They have the option to add press releases, job opportunities and updates on their site, which is something they didn’t have. They love the new look, feel, and functionality of the site, the ability to update the site on their own.”

Moving forward with their new, cleanly-designed website, BIG can make edits in an extendable framework and versatile application. BIG’s website took approximately 100 programming hours. It was our first Partner Program endeavor with ELEVEN with others rolled out soon thereafter. We even went on to put our heads together to recreate ELEVEN’s own website.

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