Outpost
www.outpost.coop
Description
Outpost Natural Foods has been leading the discussion about organic, natural, local, healthy and quality in food for 40 years. They've helped us understand that the wheres and hows of food production is as important as how food tastes. They've showed us how organic, sustainable and local food can make a difference at the dinner table. They have set the bar for grocery stores.
When we were asked to create their new site, we were elated and a little scared -- there's a mountain of information and 40 years of culture to convey at first glance. Outpost has an amazing recipe database, hundreds of articles from their magazine, inventive and well loved blogs and a commerce system that helps them manage memberships and events. And this is Outpost -- we're big fans and we absolutely have to nail it.
Strategy
The site needed to look fresh, clean, and fun. We feel that we did nail it, capturing the natural feel of Outpost while delivering content in a professional and accessible manner. The site features their products, their suppliers, their owners, and their staff. They needed a way for community members to log into the site to collect recipes, comment on blog posts, and see their membership status and history.
We built them a community section which allows them to provide information about their food providers: their backgrounds, where they produce the food, and how they produce it. Quality food is vital to Outpost, it's important to everyone, so we built a site that shows how Outpost Natural Foods is leading the discussion and delivering quality on every shelf.
MHSA
www.milwaukeehighschoolofthearts.org
Description
The Milwaukee High School of the Arts is the school for students with a passion for the arts. On top of a rigorous conventional academic curriculum, they provide two hours of focused art curriculum. They needed a site that showed their passion and successes to attract the best kids and parents who wanted to learn more about their music, theater, dance and visual arts and design programs.
Strategy
Designing a website for an art school is daunting, especially for us -- it's going to be understood and viewed in a different light than any other school. We created the siteto be a functional, focused work of art. We used a lot of bright colors and images to bring out the artist in every visitor.
The site itself provides the perfect venue for informative course descriptions and faculty profiles, performance videos, band recordings and art galleries. Prospective students and families can get a feel for the value in a MHSA education. Current students use it as a centralized place to go for the information they need to be successful. Colleges and employers see the care that MHSA has taken with the site and with the students and their education. Everyone learns, everyone wins.
Leo Science Lab
Description
The folks at Learning Encounters started a company with the simple belief that teaching children about the world and the universe will activate the young minds and make the world a better place through better education. So they developed powerful yet affordable science education products for students across the world.
They needed a website to sell the products and show their vision to buyers and investors. They also needed to create a science club to get kids to be more fascinated in the world around them. We built a site that covered that and more.
Strategy
We created Learning Encounters a fun, visually stimulating e-commerce website that included the science club, a blog, a series of educational pages, and a fun augmented reality tool where kids of any age can show a marker to their computer camera and hold the world and moon in their hands.
We also created an easy way to keep the content fresh and add manage sales and products. ByteCMS with e-commerce gave them the management and editing tools they needed to create and manage products, sales, customers, pages and activities throughout the site.
Orchard Street Press
www.orchardstreetpress.com
The best clients are often the ones who have a similar outlook as us. They create expert-level, quality products. They are leaders in their industry. They care about the world and community that surrounds them.
Orchard Street Press (OSP) is one of those clients: they produce eco-friendly, quality screen prints for t-shirts, aprons, hats, posters and babies onesies and bibs. And they give their expert advice and design opinions to their clients, and that helps their clients produce better, more market-friendly products.
When they needed a web design partner that got their vision, and could communicate their level of quality online, they chose Byte Studios.
Strategy
We care wildly about our community, so when we find clients who have the same passions, we love the work. Not that creating OSP's site was without its perils. They, like a lot of our clients, have their own clients but also their own products. We took what seemed like an endless amount of time to find the right design that found that hybrid nature. We also needed to create a hybrid product/category system where products could be listed and also sold through Etsy or other like-minded sites.
It took us some time, but we created a perfect blend of design and content that gives each visitor a sense of OSP's passion for producing first rate work that preserves our planet. Come to think about it, a company that produces baby clothes should ought to be as thoughtful and forward-thinking as OSP.
Community Advocates
www.communityadvocates.net
For 35 years, Community Advocates (CA) has not wavered in its commitment to help low-income Milwaukeeans meet their most basic needs – including safe and affordable housing, adequate healthcare, safety from domestic violence and reliable utilities. When they needed an online presence that not only showed the breadth and quality of their services to potential clients and funders, but also help them put five social service agencies' sites under one roof, they chose Byte Studios.
Strategy
Because of the shear amount of services CA provides our communities, and the amount of information from the variety of organization that are now a part of CA's family of services, we had to define a system that each of their user groups would be able to traverse. We changed from a standard navigation to one that starts a narrative of the organization, and we added specific navigations for different types of users and tool sets. Site visitors need to understand a site's objective and the type of content in a matter of seconds, so using the navigation to tell an organization's story is one of our many methodologies for site success.
Through our content management system, ByteCMS, CA can now easily share new information with their clients, staff, law makers and funders. News stories, press releases, event details, client success stories, and so much more can be added and modified through the content management. CA employees now have a centralized place to reference the organization's information by logging into their staff section. And to top it all off, the site stands out among its peers not as the glossiest site, but as the most functional and useful site.
Byte Studios is committed to a better world, and we give our non-profit clients our best work at a real non-profit discount. Community Advocates is the kind of organization driven by expertise and commitment to their community, so they trusted our expertise and commitment in our field. Working with CA was the perfect experience all around, as evident by the clarity of the communication and the quality of the site.
