Site Launch: Squids Trivia Night

For the past few years I have been active in a St. Louis team called the Squids. We are a softball team, but we use the team name when we participate in Trivia Nights as well. Last Fall I started a St. Louis Kickball team under the name too.

The group is connected randomly, a bunch of us went to Webster University at some point, but it’s mostly friends of friends. Overall a fun and friendly group.

Our softball team captain, RØB, came up with the idea for us to host our own trivia night as a fundraiser for the team. I had purchased squid-ball.com with the intent of making it a portal of Squids events, rosters, photos, etc. That site is still in the making, but in the meantime I created a mini-site to serve as a resource for information about our trivia night as well as a place you can sign-up online.

Our trivia night is this weekend – Saturday, January 12th, 2008. There are still tables available, so if you’re in the area you should come! These are always a ton of fun, and I’m even writing a category of questions :).

Site Launch: Benton Park Photography Co.

Happy New Year! Just launched: the new web site for Benton Park Photography Company, owned by Becca Young and Adam Williams, a husband-and-wife photography team. They have been building a successful business for awhile now, and are excited to launch this just in time for Wedding Season 2008.

Becca and Adam have such a diverse scope of work – they are just as comfortable shooting in a lavish banquet hall with pressed white linens as they are in colorful and raw urban settings. More than wedding photography, they consider their work ‘visual storytelling’. When you review one of their galleries you see what that means – moments and memories are captured, not awkward poses and fake smiles.

Earlier last year I worked with Adam and Becca to establish the logo for Benton Park Photography Company. The goal was to keep it simple (which I’m always a fan of), yet elegant and versatile. This was the logo that spurred my love affair with the Gotham typeface, which I find so striking and gorgeous.

I was thrilled when they approached me to create their wedding photography web site. They encouraged my to creativity run free. As is often my process, I used the logo as a jumping point for inspiration: generous white space (something I’m also a huge fan of) and clean lines. I also incorporated a romantic softness that caters to its audience without upstaging the showcase of stunning photography.

This site was a learning experience for me. The client already had a photography blog through Google’s Blogger service, but wished to incorporate it seamlessly into the site as well as ditch the *.blogspot.com subdomain. Prior to this project, the extent of my experience with Blogger was leaving comments on friends’ blogs. So the admin side was different, though not a complete surprise because I have worked with other blogging services like Wordpress, Vox, and LiveJournal. Still, they’re all different! The documentation at Blogger is lacking so a lot of this was fumbling in the dark. To compound the confusion, Blogger also has a legacy version of Blogger and a newer more dynamic and xml-version – but they aren’t equal. Ultimately the legacy version seemed to work better for custom html work, so that’s the route we went.

Another hiccup along the way was with the web host, Yahoo!. We experienced the site going up and down a lot upon initial launch, but the downtime wasn’t consistent with anything we were doing (i.e. browsers or ISP) so I had a hard time troubleshooting. The site would be down so I’d ring up their tech support, and by the time someone picked up the site was up again – of course!

I’m about to get pretty technical here, for the sake of anyone who may experience a similar issue – so feel free to check out!

To figure out the issue I pinged the IP when the site was down and ran through whois to discover there was a discrepancy in the hosting address for http://www.bentonparkphotoco.com and http://bentonparkphotoco.com – the difference between those being the “www”. The two are actually two different addresses – www is a subdomain – but most hosts set the www to direct to whatever content is on the server. However rather than specifying this, Yahoo! just has unestablished wildcard subdomains do that.

When I was finagling the Blogger I had set up www for the blog, but then become better educated and decided to cancel that request. But it seems like that request did not go through and return to the wildcard redirect, so the www subdomain was like an orphan with no specific direction, so its behavior was erratic and therefor the downtime inconsistent. Once I figured this out and explained it to a knowledgeable Yahoo! tech named Johnathan, he escalated it to their Tier 3 support who reset the DNS settings. So happy we figured that out!

So the site is up – check it out at http://www.bentonparkphotoco.com and if you or someone you know are looking for a St. Louis wedding photographer, I recommend them!

Site Launch: Little Fishes Swim School

I’m happy to announce the recent site launch for another new business – Little Fishes Swim School. Based in St. Louis, Missouri, Little Fishes Swim School is the brainchild of Ruth Zarren, a very talented and creative businesswoman. The swim school is geared towards children aged 6 months and up, and focuses on eliminating fear of the water and developing swimming skills.

What’s so cool about Little Fishes is that it’s the ONLY indoor salt-water pool in St. Louis. This means children can take classes year-round and, what I think is especially awesome, have POOL PARTIES in the winter months! As a November baby, this is something I would have absolutely loved to do as a child.

I’ve visited the space a few times now and I love how it is specifically geared towards the comfort and accessibility of children – quite different than the intimidating scary shallow end of a gigantic YMCA pool I remember learning to swim in. So if you are in the St. Louis area and have small children or know anybody who does, you should check it out. The web site will have latest info on Free Evaluation days.

The Web Site was a lot of fun to work on. Before starting on the site I worked with Ruth on the logo for the business. She had commissioned local artist Craig Downs to create the initial concept and needed my help with cleaning it up, integrating the business name, and making it ready for use in print and web. I also created the stationery – business card, letterhead, envelope, as well as Pool Party Invitations and Rack Cards.

I absolutely love working with a business to this extent; it gives me the opportunity to plan for consistency in the look of the materials, which I believe gives a professional impression. Here are some photos:

Site Launch: Wedding Distinctions

Hot off the press! A new site I’ve been working on, Wedding Distinctions, has officially launched. It’s a wedding store specializing in unique wedding favors, reception trinkets, gifts for the wedding party, etc. They’ve got quite an impressive and still-growing selection. I was responsible for developing the site and implementing within the e-commerce software. I worked closely with rockstar designer Brian Clever to bring it all to fruition.

The company was started by Malinda Hall and Kelli Gould, two very enthusiastic and hardworking women! They are super organized and fully immersed themselves in jumping into e-commerce. Like almost all clients opening an e-commerce store, they realized very quickly that it is a TON of work!

One of the biggest hurdles in this project was settling on an e-commerce provider. There are lots of options out there – some free, some cost.. to make a decision depends what your skill level and desire for technical involvement are. In my experience, most business owners running an online store want to worry about managing orders and inventory, not setting up an ASP back-end and server configurations. In those cases, managed e-commerce solutions are usually the best option.

The difference between an independent e-commerce solution and a managed e-commerce solution: the independent e-commerce solutions come prepackaged with a bundle of files. You upload those files to your own web server, and configure them. There is generally no formal tech support for these beyond maybe a forum or some online guides. You are on your own. The pros of these are that you have full control. If you have the knowledge and time, you can make it work just how you want it to. Of course, you have full control to screw it up too! In my opinion, the best independent e-commerce solutions are OSCommerce and Zen Cart.

Managed solutions are generally a LOT more hands off in regards to technical-knowhow. They’re ready to go out of the door. You can add your product and be selling the same day! Of course, you’re best advised to take some time and consider getting an e-commerce designer to help you plan a user-friendly and visually appealing online store, not to mention getting a product, setting up payment, writing copy, and all those other “ton of work” things I mentioned a moment ago.

Managed solutions cost money. They either charge a monthly fee, or a percentage of your sales, or both. In my opinion, the best managed e-commerce solutions are Volusion, Yahoo! Small Business, and NetworkSolutions E-commerce Web Sites (formerly MonsterCommerce). All of these companies provide hosting for your store, e-mail accounts, and 24/7 phone and e-mail support. Each provides an overall good product, albeit they all contain their own minor setbacks.

I personally have only dealt with the Volusion and Network Solutions / MonsterCommerce products. I’ve yet to design & develop for a Yahoo! Store, but I’d love to so I can get a feel for the full spectrum. However based on what I have dealt with, my vote is for Volusion. What gives it the winning stride? Full FTP access and superior integrated CSS control. They also have video tutorials and well-written up-to-date guides so there’s less fumbling in the dark in the beginning. Volusion is what Malinda and Kelli settled on for Wedding Distinctions, and so far it’s been a success!

When choosing an e-commerce solution, my best advice is to do your research. Note what functionality your competitors have and make sure your e-commerce provider can give you that. And if you’re in the market for Wedding stuff, check out Wedding Distinctions!