Portfolio

Eye-Fi

WordPress as a CMS

Eye-Fi needed a new design for their website in early 2008. They required a few key elements that their previous site couldn’t support: adding new content and information, and the ability to expand the site with future product lines. We engaged them, looked at the requirements and worked with them to implement a customized WordPress solution as their content management system.

Crowd Favorite built the site from the ground up: everything from the visual design to the WordPress plugins to support it. We wanted to make sure everything could be managed within the dashboard. Including revisions and development, the project took about a month and launched in May 2008.

If content is king, design is the throne

After evaluating their needs, Crowd Favorite suggested some best practices and ultimately developed a custom WordPress theme for both the corporate and support sites. We incorporated their ideas and feedback into a new design that accurately matched their offline assets. The look and feel of the site would never suggest WordPress. But, sure enough, it is. With subtle gradients and bright oranges and blues, Crowd Favorite delivered a non-traditional site design that also matched the look and feel of Eye-Fi’s existing product offerings and offline assets.

Doesn’t look like a duck...

Sure, the entire site is managed by WordPress, but, our custom development and theme are far from the everyday two-columned blog. The styling and layout was built for products, not posts. Put simply, we gave Eye-Fi a content management system (the blog happens to comes standard).

Simple solutions arise from complex problems

The best part about working with clients like Eye-Fi is we will build a solution, not just a site. In other words, we implemented plugins and custom CMS features that allow them to manage and update their own site after the project is completed. We think of this as win-win. Their needs were complex but we made it simple for Eye-Fi to maintain their own site in the future.

Content management, no coding required

We like to build products and solutions for our clients that allow for self management. Clients like Eye-Fi would rather have the ability to add, change, and delete elements from their site than have to ask us to do it every time. We’ve built abstraction into WordPress that allows them to make changes from the dashboard, not the command line.

It’s not that easy to sneak a peek

As we worked through the visual design stages of the project we needed a way to show Eye-Fi our progress and make sure it was what they expected. For that, we configured and implemented a staging server and subversion. The staging server acts as the private site to view the latest updates and subversion acts as our backup and version repository.