New Site for Clinton Street Baking Co.

We just revamped the site for Clinton Street Baking Co. It was surprisingly a lot of work. You’d think re-designing an existing site would be easier, but this was almost a complete overhaul. DeDe, the co-owner, put a lot of thoughts into how best to present her restaurant on the Web. It was a true collaboration.

The vast majority of restaurant websites are poorly designed and built. Some are just bad while others are just a bunch of fluff and flash, reminiscent of all the flashy websites circa 2001, when Websites were built more for the sake of amusing people than for the sake of serving real purposes.

We wanted Clinton’s site to be highly functional and informative. We used our own content management system (blockCMS) to build it. Instead of doing extensive work in wireframing, we built a scaffolding site with the CMS. This allowed us to collaborate easily with DeDe.

Wireframes work fine as long as people who are viewing them are well versed in web development, but most end-clients aren’t (after all, that’s why they hire other companies to do it.). Even if you are an experienced web developer, it’s not easy to visualize interaction. So, if a scaffolding site can be built rather quickly, we often skip the wireframing stage.

Once the scaffolding site is up and running with a content management system, the clients can start interacting with the site, and add/edit the contents. Discussions about what is working and what is not working, what needs to be added or changed, become much easier when you have a website that you can interact with. It’s a great way to communicate with the clients.

The original site was 4.5 years old and it was definitely looking dated. The first sign of Web 1.0 is its page width which assumes a 800 x 600 computer monitor as the lowest common denominator. (Now, most sites assume 1,024 x 768.) Another problem with Web 1.0 sites is that fonts are too small for high density LCD displays. Even though we gained more pixels as our canvas, we are not putting more content into it. We are basically using more pixels to render the same amount of content, which means that the resolution (DPI) is going up.

Hopefully this new site will be able to serve the needs of Clinton Street Baking Co. for the next 5 years at least.

—posted by Dyske   » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page