cultureblog

We are excited to announce the launch of the new First Aid 2000 website at www.fa2000ca.com!  First Aid 2000 is a local company offering first aid and emergency preparedness supplies to all kinds of businesses and schools.  (Look around your office… do you have a first aid kit handy?  If not, you should probably give them a call.)  As First Aid 2000 realized that their industry was becoming increasingly reliant on the web to gain new business, they came to us to create a website to showcase their company’s services and inventory.

First Aid 2000’s inventory is nothing to sneeze at – with hundreds of products in dozens of categories, the organization of products with their correct product codes, descriptions, and images was quite the feat.  It required a massive product spreadsheet and close monitoring, but the end result is a successful and organized listing of the First Aid 2000 inventory, so that existing and potential clients can view all offerings.

We built the First Aid 2000 website on a WordPress platform; Even though the client isn’t going to utilize the traditional “blogging” functionality of WordPress, the content management system (CMS) that it provides will be invaluable.  If a product code changes, if offerings change, or if new features need to be highlighted, those edits can be made quickly and easily – minimizing the effort of upkeep for the site.   

We’re thrilled about another successful local partnership and the opportunity to take First Aid 2000 into the world wide web. 

Durrani is happy to announce the launch of the newly redesigned Cruxial website at www.cruxialwear.com! Cruxial is a new brand on the action sports scene, offering shirts and hats with unique design aesthetic. We were excited to give this fresh, young company an equally fresh, young and cool new look for their online showcase.

We were excited to work with Cruxial for many reasons, one being that they are a local company with an industry and a target market that we understand well. Since we’re located in Southern California a couple blocks from the beach, we essentially live in the center of the culture Cruxial represents. As a bonus, when Cruxial first came to us we had recently launched the action sports retail site S.A.W. (www.skullsandwings.com), which gave us even more insight into that industry.

Cruxial’s primary goal for their new site was to have a place to showcase their clothing line for customers and wholesalers to view the product. They also wanted a place to highlight the bands and surfboard shapers who have teamed up with them, as well as a blog and a photo gallery. They also wanted to be able to easily make their own updates and changes to the site. Durrani found a solution for all of these needs in a WordPress website platform. Using WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS), their site is dynamic and flexible, easy to edit and expand.

One of the ways we used WordPress development in this case was in utilizing the array of WordPress plugins that are available today. Instead of starting from scratch to customize something like a photo gallery, we used a plugin and adjusted it to get the results we wanted. The final product is extremely beneficial for the client as well: now they can add, delete, and organize the images in their gallery easily and seamlessly. The moral of this story: Don’t reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to. Use the tools that are available to you to get the results you want.  In this case, WordPress and the available plugins were the tools we used to create a successful site for Cruxial.

GoodSource Solutions is a nationwide organization that specializes in supplying food options to schools, relief organizations, corrections facilities, non-profit food agencies and other alternative markets.  Though GoodSource has been an industry leader for over 20 years, they recognized that they needed an updated web presence.  They came to Durrani to redesign and develop a cohesive site for their multiple divisions and to give them a fresh, professional online showcase for their products and services.

Using a Wordpress MU multi-user platform, we created a customized Content Management System that GoodSource can easily and efficiently maintain in-house.  We applied a modern, clean design and a site structure that incorporates each of their company’s six divisions, housing a unique restricted area for each division so that distributors can access pricing and additional materials which remain hidden from competitors and the general public. 

To correspond with the launch of their new online presence, GoodSource has also launched an email marketing campaign to highlight specific products and specials.  We have handled the process of programming the html emails, coordinating and sending them on schedule, and providing analysis of open and click-through rates.  GoodSource has found email campaigns to be a relatively inexpensive and effective method of online marketing, and Durrani is happy to provide strong solutions that boost GoodSource’s online presence!

They say a doctor is his own worst patient and the saying holds true with most businesses as well. Our own internal projects are always the last to get attended to but we were finally able to squeeze in some design and development time to re-launch or own company website. Previously, we had a relatively thin site that showcased some of our portfolio by type of work, as well as a company blog. The two sites, however, had very different designs and layouts. As with most companies, when we launched our blog a few years ago, it came after our primary site was already done and it was put together without spending much time unifying the sites and their themes. Many companies end up taking this approach just because they are limited on time and resources and they really just want to get their blog up and running. They compromise on design and branding and the blog ends up being this orphaned website that does not match their overall corporate look and feel.

It’s important, however to constantly go back and refine and polish your brand and your look so that you are always presenting a unified and coherent look to your customers.

Even though we just redesigned our website last October, we wanted to keep things fresh. So a task that has long been on our own to-do list is now complete and we are very excited by the end result. Our main site, our portfolio and our blog are now all using the same global design theme and the navigation is unified and consistent across all pages.

For much of the site, we used Wordpress to manage the pages and content, as this is a superb content management system. We also separated our portfolio by type of work (website, photography, print and branding) and also by client and their industry. We think the presentation worked out well for us.

The lesson here, which is one that we also try to convey to our clients, is that your company website should not just be a “set and forget” one-time thing. It should grow with your company and be an ongoing project that is updated frequently and is part of your marketing plan that reflects your brand, products and services. Many companies just use their website as their online brochure that they create once but it can be so much more if you spend a little time building it right. It should be a tool that helps your business succeed, not just another to-do on your list weighing you down.

We invite you to browse through the refreshed presentation of our work, and as always, please let us know what you think… we love hearing your feedback.

Durrani Design is excited to announce the launch of the new website for Perfect Fit USA at www.perfectfitshop.com.

Perfect Fit USA is a new local personal training studio located in Carlsbad, CA. With their grand opening scheduled for May 2009, they are gearing up with a new website, new marketing materials and new promotional products.

The website is completely custom made from the design to the PHP programming. Our team designed the look and feel as well as all of the logos, artwork and branding. In addition to their websites, we has also created their entire business collateral package including business cards, brochures, mailers and even custom screen printed T-shirts (through our promotional tees division at www.teecompressed.com).

Along with the PerfectFitShop.com website, we are also in the process of designing several other online sites for them including an e-commerce storefront. Their future store, Kettlebells for Mommies (www.kettlebellsformommies.com) is currently under construction and is built using MIVA Merchant 5.5.

We’re excited to announce the launch of our latest web design project at ZENsei.com. ZENsei, a fellow local Encinitas business, joined Durrani as a client in the fall of 2008. At that time, they were struggling underneath the burden of an online store that was difficult to maintain and update, where months would go by before they were able get new product clothing lines posted on the site. They also wanted to create a fresh new Flash introduction to really showcase the rich details of their fashions. As we’ve said before, image is everything and online shoppers need to come as close to touching and feeling a product as possible or else you won’t get the sale. As an online retailer, you need to overcome the obstacle of your customers not being able to experience your product like they can in a retail store.

We started by creating a large expanding view flash runway for each of their seasonal collections to show each item in multiple full-size detailed views. This allows customers to really get in and experience the fashion. After launching the flash runway, we went right in to work on redesigning the website to match.

Part of the problem with the original ZENsei website was that it was built in osCommerce. Now, we’ve used osCommerce ourselves and it is a popular open-source shopping cart platform but, in our experience, for every benefit it has from being free and open source, there are equally as many negatives for maintaining it and trying to build a business with it. We’ll save the osCommerce versus other systems discussion for another day, but for ZENsei we put them into our favorite shopping cart of choice, MIVA Merchant 5.5. MIVA is an extremely extendable and expandable system will grow with any size company. The source design templates are simple to work with and maintaining the integrity of the core system files and maintaining security is much much more efficient.

So, after a few months of work, we have now launched the new website. At Durrani we are firm believers in rapid application development, which simply means getting the site up quickly so it is functional, operational and making money (or serving the other business goals you have set). You can always polish the look and tweak the fonts and colors and graphics once the site is live, but all to often, sites get delayed for too long to get things just perfect. Of course, we don’t ever want to merely launch buggy or poor quality work, but there is a right time to go live and we get there quickly. 

The economy is bad and continues to get worse. This is no time for businesses to roll into a ball and crawl under a rock. The marketing work you do now and plans you put in place will all be much stronger when the economy bounces back.

We invite you to sit back, relax and browse through the NEW ZENsei.com.

Durrani is excited to announce the recent launch of the new Bumbleride.com website for 2009. Bumbleride is a leader in urban and stylish baby strollers for the young and modern family, and we have been proud to have them as a client for over a year.

For this latest redesign, we wanted to take advantage of the growing size of standard computer monitors and make the best use of this wider available space. A product website is the online showroom for a company and pictures are the most important feature. Customers aren’t visiting the website to write a research paper on baby strollers, they are there to view the product, compare specifications and buy. So we made sure to use big and bright images to showcase the features of the strollers along with their signature vibrant color lines. Making sure customers can navigate quickly to the information they are looking for is a top priority.

Also in the 2009 redesign is the expanded use of multimedia, both with flash video and image galleries. Although Durrani was not responsible for the actual creation of the videos or the product photography, we did ensure that the presentation of the videos and the theme of the flash players themselves seamlessly integrated into the new site design. Using the colorful and playful Bumbleride lifestyle photography, we also created a new short flash movie introduction to set the right tone and mood that is important to the Bumbleride brand.

For the technical aspect, the site was built entirely custom from the ground up using PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript and Flash components. Certain content sections of the site are also being delivered from a MySQL database. A Wordpress blog is also integrated completely into the global design so visitors can pass seamlessly between the blog and main product pages.

As with any website, a business needs to first ask themselves, what is the purpose and goal of building the site and what is the call to action for the visitor? What is the intended result of having a customer visit the website? With Bumbleride the answer is to promote their brand and laser-focused image to their audience, showcase their baby strollers in the best possible and most attractive way and increase sales directly or indirectly through their distributors.

In a world where people’s attention span is growing smaller and smaller as we are bombarded with an overload of information, you have to be quick and concise in your message. Less is more and image is everything.

Visit the new Bumbleride.com