Workshed recently completed an ambitious project for Seattle-based interior designer, Kathy Banak, and her custom line of Paints and Fabrics, Authentic Home. Kathy approached Workshed wanting to unify her online brand, expand her offerings and move to a CMS-based platform to ensure scalability and ease of growth.
Workshed worked closely with Authentic Home over the course of four months to establish a strategy for linking a network of web sites together visually, strategically and technically. Today, we finally get to see the results of everyone’s hard work as she officially announces her new sites.
The Authentic Home Network of sites is comprised of a content-managed Interior Design-focused site that promotes the services Authentic Home has to offer, a blog site that allows Kathy to keep her clients informed and share her expertise on Interior Design and last, but not least, a fully-featured e-commerce site that allows her to sell her custom line of interior and exterior paints, as well as custom fabric selection. The key to Authentic Home’s store is the ability for customers to see and purchase paint and fabric in moods, which are pre-matched sets of colors and patterns that match certain moods.
Workshed leveraged open source technologies for the back ends of these sites, settling on the highly flexible and extensible Concrete5 CMS framework for the interior design site, the tried and true WordPress for the blog and Magento for the e-c0mmerce site. These technologies allow us to provide Authentic Home with a search engine friendly, easily manageable and extensible framework for the growth of not only Authentic Home’s Internet presence, but also for the growth of its business.
Workshed is proud to have been a part of this project and we look forward to seeing Authentic Home settle into its new home(s) on the Internet.
Our offices will be closed on Thanksgiving day and Friday. If you should need urgent assistance, please call 360-833-2901 x1 or email us at support (at) workshed dot com.
Oftentimes, when we’re building out web sites, factoring in time for IE6 amounts to a lot of extra time, blood, sweat and tears. Entire societies have crumbled as a result. Financial markets have been thrown into irreparable states of turmoil. Lives have been lost.
We’ve often stated that we’d drop support for IE6 when its browser share drops to 10%, a time for which we have waited with baited breath, anxiously watching Google Analytics reports as they inch ever closer. Alas, it’s been hovering around 20%, which is not yet there.
However, we recently read an article that put it all into perspective for us: IE6 is holding back the progression of the web. There. I said it. IE6 just isn’t a good match for your web site anymore. You see, in order to support IE6 so your web site doesn’t look like a discarded pile of yesterday’s images and text, we have to hack your web site’s code to do things it was never meant to do. Degrading things. Demeaning things. Things your web site will forever regret like the haze of a night on the town gone badly.
The biggest stumbling block is the dreaded Windows 2000, which will not run IE7 or greater. How do we support these users? How do we keep your web site intact when someone using IE6 wants to use it? It’s easy: Warn them that they will have a much better experience with another browser. After all, Firefox is free and it’s fantastic.
All hacks aside, the fact is, the big boys are starting to drop support for it, too. Google, Facebook and 37 Signals have all announced and/or provided lessened user experiences for IE6 users.
This is the beginning of the end for IE6 support, and at Workshed in particular, it is the end. As of April 1 (this is not a joke, either) we will no longer support IE6 for web sites we build without additional hours built into the project budget. There are far too many exciting things happening in the world of Web Development (embeddable fonts!) to have to dumb down the experience for a browser that’s 8 years old and counting.
We recently had a client whose CMS stopped saving data. We knew we hadn’t touched the code on it in at least a year, so it was a very strange situation. After poking around, googling incessantly and debugging a ton, we discovered that another developer who had been working on SEO modifications for them had created a .htaccess file that was wiping out all POST data sent to a index.php file — ANY index.php file. Our app was written in an older version of the Fusebox 3.0 framework for PHP and as such, everything is channeled through the index.php file in the CMS directory.
The fix? Adding a new .htaccess file into the CMS directory that turns off the Rewrite Engine did the trick.
That’s right folks, at the end of December, we’ll be moving into a new office space—just down the street from our current location. If you’ve been in Camas, you may remember Artistic Home and Garden. We’ll be taking over the front end of their space and making it into our own little Workshed haven as of January 1, 2009. Our new address will be:
421 NE Cedar St.
Camas, WA 98607
We’ll have the same old phone number and fax number, as well as the same PO Box address.
We hope you enjoy your new year as much as we plan to enjoy ours!
I wanted to take a moment out to shift focus from internal chest-thumping to a pet project one of our employees has been working on for some time, which has become an invaluable tool for many a web developer.
Oscar Godson, one of our designer/developer folks, has created his own web app called Project Deploy*. It’s a genius tool that speeds of the process of generating a ready-to-go web site framework so you can quickly get started on your new web project. Select a few radio buttons, choose your flavor of XHTML, set some more options and BOOM! there you go. Instant web site skeleton ready for the skinning.
Not only has he created a great tool, but he’s also gotten the traffic for Project Deploy* into the 35,000 rank on the Alexa index. A truly impressive feat that is further proof he had a great idea and ran with it.
While we don’t like to get all hoity toity around here, it’s getting hard to ignore the number of awards that have been given to projects with which we’ve been involved lately. It’s not like we’re out there begging for awards in the streets, but heck, if they keep giving them out, we’ll keep taking them!
This time, it’s the Zookbinders web site we developed on behalf of SDM Marketing, with the design provided by PBR Design. Workshed did all of the information architecture, wireframes, slicing, XHTML/CSS templates, SEO, Flash development, PHP development and custom CMS development (built on our very own Pegboard platform), as well as providing dedicated hosting services in our colocation facility.
The award was from the Summit International Awards — in the category of Emerging Media. The site was presented a Leader award. Of the approximately 700 entries from numerous countries only 12% earned recognition. There are 3 levels that were recognized: visionary, innovator and leader.
Workshed is extremely proud to have been a part of this project and thanks SDM Marketing, PBR Design and most importantly, the fine folks at Zookbinders for allowing us to be a part of it.
We just launched a new coordinated advertising campaign for Lacamas Community Credit Union. Titled the Better Match Campaign, it’s geared towards educating consumers about their offerings in an entertaining way, and ultimately increasing their membership. The campaign consists of a web site and four TV spots currently, but will be expanded to a print campaign and have additional TV spots added in the future.
The TV spots will be showing on KPTV (Fox 12) in the mornings, then across multiple cable channels on Comcast, such as TBS, USA, Food Network, Oxygen, Animal Planet, CMT, CNN, E!, FX, TRU TV, A&E and TLC.
The web site features the commercials, engaging copy and design style as well as a viral marketing-style Breakup Letter Generator, which consumers can use to break up with their current bank by e-mailing their customized breakup letter to one or more people.
Special thanks to Furman Pictures for their cinematography and editing contributions!
Check out the spots below and if you live or work in Southwest Washington, check out LCCU, too!
Congratulations to Workshed client, Lacamas Community Credit Union, who recently won First Place at the Washington Credit Union League’s Spectrum Marketing Awards. The award was for their recent “Dear John” direct mail and in-branch campaign, for which Workshed created the concept, copy writing, creative and art direction. The award category was for the the 150 million to 300 million asset category for best coordinated campaign. The contest was judged by a panel of non-credit union marketing and branding experts.
LCCU and Workshed will be expanding on the “Dear John” concept with an expanded, integrated Television, Print and Web “Better Match” campaign, which will be hitting the airwaves in early October.
We’d like to thank LCCU for being such a great client to work with, for trusting our creativity and giving us the freedom to cooperatively help push their brand and marketing to a new level.
Workshed recently completed an ambitious project for Seattle-based interior designer, Kathy Banak, and her custom line of Paints and Fabrics, Authentic Home. Kathy approached Workshed wanting to unify her online brand, expand her offerings and move to a CMS-based platform to ensure scalability and ease of growth.
I wanted to take a moment out to shift focus from internal chest-thumping to a pet project one of our employees has been working on for some time, which has become an invaluable tool for many a web developer.
While we don’t like to get all hoity toity around here, it’s getting hard to ignore the number of awards that have been given to projects with which we’ve been involved lately. It’s not like we’re out there begging for awards in the streets, but heck, if they keep giving them out, we’ll keep taking them!
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