Donor Recognition Website

After we published our Janurary Newsletter we got a call from an East coast company. They needed help with their website: bddonorrec.com - it was old, stale and uninviting. 

The company, B&D Donor Recognition Products, is in a unique business, the business of supplying "walls, plaques, trees, bricks and doves" to Not-For-Profit institutions to honor and acknowledge the contributions of their many benefactors.

What was this business?  It was hard to measure the extent of the business from the existing website so the owner, Bernie Epworth, FedeX'd an envelope with printed brochures - that gave us a much better idea of what was needed.

Website Redesign Goals

1. Get more traffic to the site from search engines.  What had been a good supply of prospects several years ago had trickled down to near nothing.
2. A call to action: get the prospect to pick up the phone and talk with one of the three people in the B&D sales department.
3. After we explained that fresh content was the only way bddonorrec.com could obtain good search engine positioning and keep it, the owner decided they should update the site's content without having to call a webmaster every time something needed to be added or changed. 
   
4. Make the website user friendly and able to display the scale of the B&D experience and offerings.
   

The Challange

Our biggest challange was understanding the client's business.  It took several weeks, many emails and conference calls to really understand what it was all about.  Sometimes we think we know what is right for the client and are only 50% on the mark - this time we were stumpted more than once by suggestions from the owner that ran counter to our seasoned web development instincts.

We Listen, They Listen 

Finally, after several weeks and a couple of false starts we settled into a relationship of mutual respect and partnership.  We tried some of the owner's ideas and often they worked out fine after a bit of tweaking.  One such idea was to make the photos big, really big.  While the large photos definitely increased the the page loading time, they did quite a lot to convey the scale of various projects.  (Don't try to visit this site with a dialup connection!) 

After checking the loading time on some of B&D's competitor's websites, (they were slow), it was decided to do everything possible to increase the website's visual impact and not worry about the relatively few people that might be using a dialup connection.

Process and Results

We chose a Joomla! database driven Content Management framework for the B&D website.  Joomla! is an Open Source project which is maintained by thousands of programmers from all corners of the world.  Joomla! allows us to put togther sophisticated, owner maintainable websites in a relatively short amount of time without the $20,000 to $30,000 price tag of five years ago.

The final result is just what the client needs and it came about because of the partnership formed between our developers and client personell.  We think it's great to be able to work with a client who puts their heart and soul into a redesign project.  That's the only way to accomplish website redesign goals.  Websiterevamp lead personell on this project were Crystal Jurczynski and William Stocking.