HartungKemp Web Design meets Sierra Bravo Web Development
A Partner Program Project to Build a Healthy Online Community
Partner Profile
HartungKemp is a Minneapolis design agency that seamlessly blends strategy with creativity to help clients gain momentum, bringing innovative thinking that breaks away from the known and expected. In this Partner Program project with Sierra Bravo, HartungKemp’s client was a global marketer of nutritional products.
Objectives
HartungKemps’ client’s site seeks to establish a personal relationship with people with diabetes. They wanted a resource center to bring together educational elements, useful tools, and access to relevant products and services – all within the context of an online community. They wanted engaging content and elegant visual design to work together to showcase the personal stories and video testimonials being told on the site — and to bring the integrity and empathy of their brand to life on the web. Care would be taken to ensure that the site enables expansion and addition of features through future iterations with minimal rework.
The new site was to form the foundation of the client’s online branding efforts. They wanted the site to take on the personality of a trusted friend — a design essence captured by HartungKemp. Sierra Bravo’s challenge was to make it all live and breathe online in a friendly, informal, personable tone.
Solutions
Our collaboration with HartungKemp was an iterative process. They created storyboards for the animated screens and sent us design in Photoshop. It was Sierra Bravo’s job to create a fully functioning website that was true to their creative vision, and make it work in every web browser so it would be accessible to all.
Site template development
We built the HTML, CSS, web-ready images, and JavaScript that were required to make the site functional.
User assessment survey development
On the homepage/landing page interaction, Sierra Bravo suggested tracking the visitor’s user-assessment answer in session to control how often a user is prompted with a question.
Interactive navigation development
This menu structure is used throughout several sections as a left-side vertical scrolling list or pages with thumbnail graphics of each item. We built this as a progressive enhanced HTML list to ensure backwards compatibility.
CMS features
The content management system (CMS) supports up to three content areas per page, and provides CSS-controlled layout of the content. Tagged content supports content correlations. The CMS was built to support:
- “Send to a friend” email message templates
- FAQ question and answers
- Community experience stories
- Bulletin board/blog articles
- How-to articles/videos
- General site content, e.g. header/footer links
Considerations to accommodate the client’s content review policy included:
- Record of what was changed, by who, when
- Ability to preview a page with new changes without publishing for public view
Security requirements
As a prerequisite to getting this project, HartungKemp’s client required Sierra Bravo to take advanced IT security assessment and additional security enhancements — steps that can only help protect Sierra Bravo and its clients moving forward.
Site search
Users can find pages containing requested keywords in the page’s text or tags. Search results are grouped by content type. Adjacent to the results from the site, we added a link to “Search for (keyword) within (site).”
User profile
In the self-registration process, users complete a form providing a valid email address and responses to demographic-based questions, and then validate their account via email.
Share with a friend
This single tool provides a context sensitive “share with a friend” feature that can be added to any page or article on the website. The page uses the appropriate email template for pages being shared; these templates are created and maintained in the CMS.
Assessment tool – Getting to know visitors in Flash
This is a Flash-based interface that can have a similar user experience as the tag cloud. As a user slides the scales, hot-spot tool tips appear and tag-cloud items’ scales change to highlight content relevant to the scale values selected. The call-to-actions shown can also change dynamically as scales match their required levels. The scales, tool tips, and call-to-actions were predetermined and built into the interface.
Content management tags are used to highlight articles relevant to the scale levels. These tags are linked to discreet levels, such as “cope-high” “cope-neutral” “cope-low.”
Spot Check – using Flex to gauge user needs
This Flex-based menu gives users a tailored feedback and resources based on their response to three guiding questions to determine how knowledgeable they feel about their condition (I get it; I’m getting there; or, I’m pretty clueless), how well they think they’re managing it emotionally (I’m doing great; I’m up and down; or, I’m struggling), and how motivated they are to deal with the disease (I’m ready to do what it takes; I’m on and off again; or, I can’t seem to get going).
Results
Our partner and their end clients appreciated Sierra Bravo’s dedication and timely responsiveness to their questions and concerns. We applied their feedback quickly and effectively. We covered all facets of the job — something few companies could actually do.
When Sierra Bravo took this project over from a web company that couldn’t do it, we started fresh with a six week deadline.
“As a partner, we appreciate Sierra Bravo’s ability to plus our creative through their own strategic technical ideas to further the branding of our clients’ websites,” said HartungKemp’s Mary Kemp Murray. ”Our client was happy and amazed at Sierra Bravo’s ability to accomplish what we did so quickly — their in-house development team alone could not have done so.”
“There are few web development shops with either the bandwidth or diverse skill set to handle a job such as this,” said Sierra Bravo’s Mike Johnson, a software development manager.
Throughout most of the project, Sierra Bravo interacted mainly with HartungKemp, and dealt directly with their end client as the end neared. We did extensive testing to make sure that the finished product met the end client’s objectives and specifications, and that the web functionality worked as conceived in HartungKemp’s design phase.
“It speaks highly of the team’s ability to adapt to unforeseen circumstances and still deliver a quality product on time,” added Nick LeGuillou, a Sierra Bravo software development manager.
The web development project took about 800 hours by a Sierra Bravo team of a software development manager and four programmers (one PHP, one PHP design/production, one Flash, and one Flex programmer). It also took a few late nights and weekends.
“I recommend Sierra Bravo to any company — or any agency — who doesn’t want to add staff to handle web development,” said Mary Kemp Murray of HartungKemp. “They bring strong project management and are thorough about making sure everything works on the web.”
As this case study was created, Sierra Bravo and HartungKemp were set to collaborate further in their next Partner Program engagement — the next web development phase for the same end client.