As Project Manager for the California Closets website redesign, we managed development and design teams to meet the corporate goals of the company. Branding in the forefront; quality, relavent content at its core; accessible information for the customer built into the design; ease of use in its user interface and implementation; these were our tenets. With over 85 franchisees in their system, California Closets offered a challenge in establishing their brand and maintaining their local feel. And with only one metric for success on their website – to get the customer to contact a franchisee for a consultation – there was a direct path to the marketplace that had to be established and nurtured.

With world-class search engine optimization, lighting fast page load times, and a user interface that is clean and concise, we nailed our goals in terms of functionality. With amazing product shots and expertly written content, we exceeded even our own expectations with regards to execution. Ease of use for the corporate team means that all of the content is easily updatable at the corporate and franchise level. This site consistently ranks first in search in its category, and delivered a 45% increase in visits and a 60% increase in requests for consultation in its first few months after launch.

The design came about organically once we had all of the elements we wanted on the site vetted, documented, and prioritized. Leveraging existing online services like Google Maps and Google Calendar allows us to share and document our message across many channels: we use these tools in social media like Facebook and Twitter, and include references from these sources in our monthly newsletters. We employed the very robust and simple to use WordPress publishing tool as a Content Management System to allow for ease of use for the administrators at the pub, and also to provide flexible and portable scalability as we move forward.

We’re capturing newsletter signups and Facebook fans unobtrusively in the sidebar on every page. With our primary marketing channel of the monthly newsletter being sent directly from within the website, we leverage our contact point with the customer into a visit to the website. Maintaining blogs posts about new press releases, events, food, and music at the pub, as well as what’s happening in the brewery, we keep our content fresh and relavent.

Organizers of the festival are based in Emeryville, California. Part of their management team lives in Portland, Oregon, and of course Del McCoury and his team use Maryland as their home base. An online solution for their site that answered several unique challenges was required. Their site needed to be easy to manage and able be administered by several concurrent users with a broad range of technical skills. The look and feel had to fit the billing of the festival. The tone of the content needed to appeal to as broad an array of customers as the variety of music that the festival attracts. Zabierek Designs met these challenges and used the opportunity to display some design chops and solve some user interface riddles, all the while answering the needs of all of the stakeholders.

Once again it was WordPress that saved the day as the easy to use content management system (CMS) that allowed for the different types of content administrators that the organization required. It’s ability to plug and play widgets provides the folks at DelFest with a CMS that can implement the latest developments in functionality on the web – be they image viewers or music playback options – by simply installing a plug in.

Coordinated Facebook marketing campaigns leverage existing social media tools and drive users to special deals at the site throughout the year, and keep the festival top-of-mind for festival goers. Targeted search engine optimization (SEO) answers the call of placement in search, garnering them top placement for common search queries. Easily updated pages allow for announcements and new marketing campaigns to be created quickly and easily, while an ad placement plug in provides tracking for marketing campaigns via Google Analytics.