website design

Talking Friends Official Store – Website Concepts

By Brand Shepherd | Published April 18th, 2012

Brand Shepherd was recently hired to think through a few iterations of what an e-commerce store might look like for the wildly popular Talking Friends® brand. If you’re a parent of young kids, and have an iPad® or iPhone®, you likely know all about Talking Friends. They are the animal characters found on Apple’s App Store® that get into all kinds of stuff, and most notably repeat everything said to them. Brand Shepherd’s job was to create an e-commerce home page for standard and mobile browsers that would look and feel like a common home for all of the Talking Friends characters.

Below are the concepts we designed for Talking Friends. We are happy that some of our work lived on into the final implementation of their store. You can find it and buy some cool looking Talking Friends gear here.

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247inktoner.com User Interface Design

By Brand Shepherd | Published April 5th, 2012

247inktoner.com likes to keep it real simple: Their goal is to save consumers money on the purchase of ink and toner for printers. There are, of course, more details as to how they accomplish this, but the point is just that simple.

Simplicity is also what they wanted in a change to their home page user interface (UI). Over time the messaging had become cluttered, and a clear call to action was lost in all the helpful things they need to communicate to their customers. Brand Shepherd was approached with a challenge: Make the home page UI much simpler and streamlined with the goal of increasing conversions. Challenge accepted.

We set out to prioritize what was most-to-least important on the page, and we had a ton of help from 217inktoner.com’s owner, Calvin. With Calvin’s direction, and our design savvy, we honed our attention on two things: The finder tool, and the value propositions. From there we simply set out to design a solution to visually communicate to folks who come to the website, “Here’s what we want you to do (find ink or toner fast and with simple ease), and here’s what you need to know about us.”

Boom. Done.

For your viewing pleasure, and ours, below is the After and Before because the best comes first.

AFTER

BEFORE

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Is Your Website Ready for Pinterest?

By Brand Shepherd | Published February 23rd, 2012

Dan Crask, owner of Brand Shepherd, on PinterestI’ve been somewhat surprised by how little awareness there is about making sure a website is Pinterest-friendly. Especially when Pinterest has overtaken Google, YouTube and Myspace in generating traffic.

Some quick questions to ask yourself:

  • Can folks pin content on your website?
  • Do you even know what Pinterest is and how it’s used, why it’s important? (ok, so that’s like 3 questions…)
  • Let’s say your content is Pinterest-friendly, is pinned by a user, and another Pinterest user clicks it to see what it’s about. Does the page it resides on have engaging information and a call to action?

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Driveway Games

By Brand Shepherd | Published June 26th, 2011

Driveway Games’ website has gone through several iterations that we have been part of. They approached us when they realized that their website had been developed using Flash®, which puts a stranglehold on SEO. They thought the design was great, but needed to be able to quickly add new products, and use it as a better tool for B2B sales. We refreshed the design of the site by making small refinements, but the big task was rebuilding the website on WordPress. We created a website that the ownership would quickly update as new products were released.

Visit the site now:  DrivewayGames.com

In 2011 we saw synergies between a Brand Shepherd partner in e-commerce, Snow Commerce, and Driveway Games. Over lunch we made introductions, and an idea was launched. The bottom line is that the website was redeveloped for the Magento e-commerce platform, all while maintaining the design aesthetic for brand consistency. This change allows Driveway Games to partner with us for branding, and Snow Commerce for e-commerce strategy and implementation.

It’s a fantastic trio of businesses working toward the same goal. It also speaks to the flexibility of the two open-source web platforms Brand Shepherd designs for: WordPress and Magento. With a savvy group of developers, the front-end of Driveway Games’ website remained consistent during each transition, yet the back-end of their sales tool was altered and refined so as to help Driveway Games’ bottom line.

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Dinovite Website

By Brand Shepherd | Published May 30th, 2011
Visit the site:  Dinovite.com

Dinovite has been with us from the start, and we enjoy love working on their stuff. When Brand Shepherd had sufficient e-commerce website design experience using Magento under our belt, we approached Dinovite about refreshing (not redesigning) their website. They graciously allowed us to pitch our vision of a refreshed Dinovite.com, and from that pitch we realized we had the same brand-integrated vision for the site. Work began on creating a website that, for the most part, wasn’t a design overhaul, yet it made subtle changes that would improve the user experience, and add in a few new features, too.

We don’t want to give away too much of the process that went into the project, but a few highlights are:  Integrating image sliders at strategic and helpful places on important pages, Creating a large dynamic footer that showed recent tweets and articles, integrating more social media onto every page, creating the new Articles section, and refining the layout to make for a better user experience.

It’s worth noting that this website blends both Magento and WordPress. We use Magento for all pages related to e-commerce, and WordPress for the new Articles section. Both platforms carry a heavy load of information, but both are very easy to access and maintain for Dinovite. Our development partners did a great job of meshing Magento and WordPress together so that users don’t even notice when going between platforms.

The end result is a new website for Dinovite that informs, sells, and has lots of room for growth.

[Be sure to check out our Dinovite story, too!]

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Morgan County, Ohio CVB Website

By Brand Shepherd | Published May 30th, 2011
Visit the website right now:  VisitMorganCountyOhio.com

The Morgan County, Ohio CVB website is one spoke in a wheel of branding projects they hired Brand Shepherd to create and manage. The branding initiatives began by spending several days in Morgan County, Ohio, getting to know the sites, attractions, scenery, and people. From that we created their new brand identity. Out of the brand identity we created several key branded tools to help attract people to the area for visits, one of which is a new website.

The website’s look, feel, and aesthetic were born directly out of the initial branding exercises we went through to figure what the Morgan County, Ohio brand looked and felt like. Brand Shepherd designed 3 initial home page concepts, each a different take on the core branding, and from those 3 one was chosen to create the website from.

We designed and built the website for WordPress. This allows the CVB to use their time and money very efficiently – they can posts events on an integrated events calendar, create pages for specific attractions, and make it super easy for guests to interact with the CVB. We designed a website that accomplishes two goals. First, it continues to build and reinforce the brand we initially established. Second, it is a beautiful user experience that doesn’t nest information guests want in hard-to-find places. The end

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Na & Associates CPA Website

By Brand Shepherd | Published May 30th, 2011
Visit the website right now:  NaCPA.com

Na & Associates CPA has trusted Brand Shepherd with their branding for several years, and when it came time to update their website we were honored to work with this fine organization again. This website presented us an opportunity to work with a company Na CPA had hired some years previously to help generate and manage content specific to CPAs. It became clear that using one of this third-party business’s website layouts would be the most cost-efficient approach for Na CPA. Brand Shepherd’s job would be to take the stock layout, and brand it so that every touch point maintained the branding we had previously worked hard to establish. The final result is a website that really helps the Na CPA brand go to a new level of professionalism. There are no other CPAs in their competitive market who have a website like Na CPA – it stands head and shoulders above the competition.

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North Central Cyclery Website

By Brand Shepherd | Published May 30th, 2011
Visit the website right now:  NorthCentralCyclery.com

North Central Cyclery (NCC) has been gracious to hire Brand Shepherd for various projects, and over the years we built up enough trust for them to hire us to recreate their website. NCC’s vision for the site was to take it from it’s previously static information state, into a more dynamic information place where each day you visited the website you would encounter new information about cycling. Their branding has been beautiful from the beginning, so our job was simply to continue applying it to a new website that felt as wide-open as the prairies of north-central Illinois, where they are based. We designed and developed the new website for WordPress, and now NCC can post updates daily and integrate those posts with their social media. They still have the static information pages that customers want, but they also have a new website that has become a destination for cycling enthusiasts.

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SMA Website

By Brand Shepherd | Published May 30th, 2011

The SMA website is a classic example of a business – in this case, a B2B business – that needed a simple website where they could update information on the fly, and not have to contact a web designer or developer for every little need. Enter Brand Shepherd’s WordPress savvy and experience. We started by creating a refreshed brand identity, and then took the style (colors, fonts, etc.) from that new logo, and applied it to the new SMA website. We developed the website on WordPress so SMA can post upcoming seminars, press releases, and new services in minutes. Brand Shepherd remins involved in the site now and then to create branded home page slides that speak about their services, but the bulk of the up

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Frosthawk Website

By Brand Shepherd | Published May 30th, 2011

Frosthawk takes the RPG community to a new level by offering all the stuff that they use and value in one place. Frosthawk Games has a few components to it: It’s part e-commerce store, part online forum, part blog, and part product information resources. Brand Shepherd started this project by creating a new brand identity from scratch. We the set out to find the best e-commerce platform, and when we learned that the “suggested products” feature was a must, Magento became the go-to platform to develop the site. The nice thing about designing for Magento is that it allows us to flesh out the branding across all the different plugins. We used Magento plugs for blogging and online forums features. That way Frosthawk ownership could manage product sales and inventory, blog, and contribute/moderate the online community forum all under one roof.

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