Yahweh Yoga had a nice custom website but it was unable to keep up with the growth of their business. They needed a site with today’s features in order to include their growing community. Yahweh Yoga is a group of friendly people with a passion for Christian Yoga and expressing that visually was my goal.

Photography

The value of professional photography cannot be underestimated. Seeing your actual yoga instructors and real students in Yahweh’s studio makes the viewer eager to join in the fun.

Special Features

Featured content slideshow tells the story of Yahweh’s teacher training.
Video - YouTube link on the homepage shows an intro to one of the DVDs they sell.
Blog - Keeping the extended community up-to-date on the latest information.
Social Media Links - Yahweh Yoga is on Twitter, Facebook and more. They inform a growing group of like-minded people.
Constant Contact sign-up - An important way of keeping in touch with your community.
Link to Online Teacher training and graduate forum - Yahweh is foremost in online teacher training in their field.

yahwehyoga.com

60/20 Event Fall 2009

Craig is an engaging personality who loves to visit with clients about his work and inspiration. His clients are avid collectors of western sculpture. They meet at shows all over the west and quickly become friends. Our goal was to build a site for Craig that captures his personality and informs his collectors and displays his sculpture fully.

Team

Amy Steeby of Unknot Consulting was my partner in the redesign of this website. She specializes in strategy, marketing and usability.

Special Features

Multi-view header image - depicting sculpture in three dimensions is essential. The header thumbs display multiple views of his latest piece.

Gallery features - Each piece has it’s own page with a gallery feature that displays detailed views of each sculpture.

Show Calendar - Craig travels to many shows during the year.

Visit Craig’s website and see all the great features:

www.craigbergsgaard.com

My Wellness Tools was redesigned using a CMS. Now the site can be updated by staff without coding knowledge. Changing copy, adding images is easy with a back-end administrative panel. CMS websites save time, money and put you in control of your content.

www.mywellnesstools.com

What is a CMS?

“A CMS or Content Management System is a computer application used to create, edit, manage, search and publish various kinds of digital media and electronic text.” – Wikipedia

How is a CMS site different from a regular website? To use a simple analogy, a CMS like a three-ring binder and a regular website is more like a bound book. Both contain information in an organized readable manner.

Take the book.
It’s got a beautiful cover, a table of contents, chapters and an index. Perfect.
But what if you need to update your book? You would have to hire a printer to revise and publish a new edition at considerable cost.

Take the 3-ring binder.
It can have a beautiful cover too. It’s got a few introductory pages, followed by tabbed sections with information. It can also have a table of contents and an index.
What if you need to update your binder? You make a new page, get out your 3-hole punch and place the page in the binder all by yourself. You can change the pages, the order, and the tabs, even put everything in a different cover when the original gets old. That’s your CMS!

A CMS has additional features too.
No software needed on your computer – it runs on Open Source (free) software installed on your website hosting server. You go online to make your updates – from any computer anywhere.

• Multiple author capability.
• Searchable content.
• Archive older content.
• Separate content from structure – want a new look to your site?  You can keep the content and change the “theme”. Choose from free themes, premium (additional cost) themes, or I can design a custom theme for you.
• Thousands of accessories (called plug-ins) are available to improve your site, such as photo galleries, contact forms and SEO (search engine optimization) plug-ins.

How are blogs incorporated into CMS sites?

As you probably know from your own web surfing, blogs are a great way to keep your readers, customers, and clients interested in what your website has to say.
A CMS such as Wordpress (one of several open source publishing platforms) incorporates a 2-pronged system of information: pages and posts.

Pages. Think of the intro pages in your binder. They contain mostly static information. Although changing it is easy, it’s best to keep it pretty consistent for your readers. Example pages are About, Services, Contact.

Posts. Think of the back of your binder – the tabs and information in each section. The tabs are your categories and the posts are the entries filed under specific categories. A category can have many posts. In a CMS, posts can be filed under more than one category too.

This is the method used for blogs. New posts are filed in the front of each tab or category or at the top of a category page – newest information first followed by previous entries. Reverse chronological order.

More info: Wordpress.org

Microbusiness Advancement Center needed a redesigned website to reflect their growing services to Arizona’s small businessperson. We worked together to build a site that is professionally appealing, easy to navigate and understand. Built with open source software that was customized for them, the budget was less than for a custom website. The site is a Content Management System (CMS), meaning that the staff at MAC can make their own updates to content, add images and manage without the need of a webmaster for most maintenance. These money saving factors have always been important to nonprofits and small businesses but even more so in today’s economic climate.

Special Features

The home page has a custom rotating image feature to display photos of their Business Planning class. Other custom content areas are included to show new information regularly. Additional features are registration forms, a calendar link, Constant Contact sign-up and a Google location map.

www.mac-sa.org

]]> http://www.corrette-fay.com/2008/12/22/microbusiness-advancement-center/feed/ http://www.corrette-fay.com/2008/10/31/amy-steeby/ http://www.corrette-fay.com/2008/10/31/amy-steeby/#comments Fri, 31 Oct 2008 15:08:27 +0000 admin http://www.corrette-fay.com/?p=312

Information Architecture / User Experience

I believe that a company’s brand strength depends on the quality of every customer interaction the company has — from product design to website usability to customer service. Having a truly outstanding experience with a company is much more memorable than a snappy logo or ad jingle.
My approach to usability is different from traditional technical-only aspects. I draw on my years spent in sales and marketing to help make sure the customer experience is not only user friendly, but brand strengthening as well.

I completed my MBA in 2007 and am now studying learning, cognition, and usability in my pursuit of a Ph.D. in Educational Technology at Arizona State University. Recent clients include ACTEX Publications, Arizona Collectors Guide, and The GMarie Group. I am a member of the Usability Professionals’ Association.

Ann Norman full page magazine advertising

Specializing in bronze bath sinks, she wanted to represent her new line. With gorgeous photography by Robin Stancliff, I was able to portray both the shape and the detail of her handmade vessels.

Photography by Jamie Williams

Art direction and design by Paula Corrette-Fay