Archive for ‘Development

Beautiful Brown County’s Beautiful New Website

Posted by tyler

Nov

2011

Filed Under: Design Development SmallBox

When we travel somewhere, whether it be for an extended weekend or longer, for work or for play, there are things we obviously want to know in order to make the experience memorable. What are the best places to eat? Where will we be staying? Is there anywhere to shop? What do we have to see and experience before leaving?

For Brown County Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB), they knew a more user-friendly website that answered all of those questions and more for visitors would be key to their future growth.

The Challenge

For years, CVB knew their website provided valuable information to visitors, but content was hard to find unless visitors knew exactly what they were searching for. Navigation was unorganized and hard to manage. CVB wanted their visitors to find lodging solutions much more easily and quickly.

CVB needed a custom web solution that was clean and user-friendly – allowing customers to easily find lodging locations throughout Brown County. They also needed a solution that was easy to manage, provided valuable information to their customers and offered a fun experience. They wanted their customers to be able to search for and find valuable information easily.

Brown County CVB has partnerships with local businesses as well. Restaurants, lodging, shops and other multi-faceted organizations have pages and information on CVB’s website for people visiting the area. For years, CVB was spending countless hours inputting information from their valuable partners who operate businesses throughout Brown County. Anytime a partner needed an update to information, CVB was responsible for updating that on the site.

They needed a custom solution that allowed all of their partners to login and update their pages and information that was important to them and potential customers.

The Solution

After two years of deliberating on building a new web presence, Brown County CVB partnered with Smallbox. Brown County CVB knew they wanted an Indiana company to build their new website and after they learned about Smallbox’s success with the 24-Hour Web Project and involvement in the community, they felt that the partnership was a good fit.

Smallbox built an incredibly robust content management system that would provide logins and editing capabilities to CVB’s unique partnerships. Not only did Smallbox address Brown County CVB’s lodging concerns and make it easier for visitors to locate local lodging establishments, we applied the same technology and functionality to restaurants, shops and other organizations in the community as well.

Smallbox implemented multiple calls-to-action on Brown County CVB’s new website that drive traffic to upcoming events and an interactive map where visitors can browse all of the businesses and establishments by location.

The Results

In browncounty.com, Brown County Convention & Visitors Bureau now has a robust custom web solution that is extremely easy to navigate for visitors.

Whether you’re looking for a place to stay, shop, eat or see, or if you’re looking for things to do, it’s easy to find simply by browsing and making your way through the website. You can search by things to do, see, eat, etc or by location through an interactive map. No longer does a person have to know specifically what they’re searching for in order to find it.

Clear and easy-to-find calls to action blocks throughout the site help drive visitors to finding information and content they’re looking for.

Brown County is beautiful. CVB’s new website and CMS provide the tools they need to sufficiently show off Brown County. The Smallbox CMS is easy to update content with new photos, video or other media like a live “Leaf Cam” where visitors can monitor color changes in the trees and make trip decisions based around “peak times” throughout the year.

With the addition of partner logins, Brown County CVB team members save substantial amounts of time and resources from fielding requests to edit, exchange and create new content for each individual business on the site. Now, individual businesses and partners can manage their own content anytime they want.

Feedback from users has been incredibly well received. Brown County CVB partners predominately love the flexibility the site and CMS have to offer.

Check out Brown County’s new site here.

The One-of-a-Kind Million Dollar List

Posted by tyler

Oct

2011

1
Comment

Filed Under: Design Development SmallBox

One of the most important aspects of philanthropy is simply awareness. The more transparent a foundation, charity or other organization is about their mission and needs, the higher probability there is for people to interact through donations or other contributions.

We are so excited to have worked with Center on Philanthropy to launch The Million Dollar List, a one-of-a-kind online database. Here’s the story:

Challenge

Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University wanted a comprehensive resource that projected philanthropic gifts of $1 million and more to anyone who was interested in learning about philanthropy, donating or raising funds.

They wanted to raise awareness through the transparency of giving. Anyone should be able to search to see where donations are coming from, the organizations receiving them, and where else needs for donations might exist.

Solution

Center on Philanthropy came to SmallBox with a big vision in functionality and a short timeline. Not only did we want to make this extensive list of data searchable, and easy to understand, but we wanted to make it fun for visitors to the site!

One million dollars is a significant amount of money to donate, and therefore we needed to provide users with the ability to easily discover where they want to give. We implemented a search functionality that allows users to search donations by donor, recipient, location or subsector.

An Indiana resident who is passionate about both higher education and his local art community and wishes to support it through donating $1 million, but wants to know where his money is most needed, can visit www.milliondollarlist.org and search by location. From there, he can search total donations received by sector and will notice that higher education has received over 57%, while Arts, Culture and History organizations have received just over 4% of total Indiana donations. He can easily and quickly click on organizations to learn more about them and discover where his contribution best fits.

SmallBox scaled processes to fit within Center on Philanthropy’s quick 4-week timeline. We wanted to see what tools were already available that would fit with this big picture, but we also wanted the user experience to be easy and fun. We made sure that while the deadline was tight, our quality of work didn’t waiver.

An effective and interactive interface, even one that contains extensive data, shouldn’t require instructions. The content and functionality should do all the work. We wanted it to be easy and fit Center on Philanthropy’s needs and the needs of visitors to the site.

Results

In milliondollarlist.org, Center on Philanthropy has an awesome searchable, powerful and free tool that arms their audience with a tool to easily make decisions, learn about philanthropy and raise their awareness on where needs for substantial donations might exist.

Anyone can visit the site and learn about philanthropy by seeing who has given, where they gave, discover trends in giving and more. The site covers more than 60,000 gifts of $1 million and up in one single database. A visitor can search throughout the entire world for donation information, or segment their list as small as individual donors or recipients.

SmallBox’s content management system allows Center on Philanthropy to be more efficient in their reports on giving. They no longer have to take the time to update extensive spreadsheets. The data updates on the site and is easily exported in as large or small segments as needed.

Together, Center on Philanthropy and SmallBox launched the most comprehensive, free, online public record of gifts of this size.

Recap: 24 Hours of Awesome

Posted by sara

Sep

2011

0
Comments

Filed Under: Culture Design Development SmallBox

We’ve had some time to rest up and recover from the all-night frenzy of planning, designing and coding known as the 24 Hour Web Project. In its third year, SmallBox designs and develops a site literally overnight for one Indianapolis nonprofit, all for free.

This year, we doubled the challenge and took on two websites — one for Earth House and one for INDYCOG. Keep in mind, we don’t do templated sites. Each nonprofit received custom web solutions, built from scratch just for them. Yes, we lost a little sleep, but we had a blast and we certainly learned a thing or two along the way.

Stronger Collaboration
Working at the rapid-fire pace and in such proximity, all in the Earth House Café, the team gained a better understanding of each person’s role. We had more face-to-face interaction, less emailing and IMing to solve problems. Post-project, I hope we continue to get up from our desks more often to talk through our work together.

Content Doesn’t Have to Be So Painful
Managing the content population process for a new website can be a bit of a pain point. Taking on two websites meant there was really no room for error. During the project, we tested out a new product built by our own Joe Downey — a content population tool — and we all felt this tool was key to our success. There were no surprises about unfinished content. The team could see where we stood at a glance at all times. We can’t wait to use it on regular client projects.

And a reaffirmation…

We Heart Indy
We also confirmed something we already knew. Indianapolis is a great place to do business. Earth House and INDYCOG are both amazing organizations, adding cool events and promoting healthy living in our city. Many of our friends and partners stopped by the Earth House to cheer us on. And some awesome folks supported a side aspect of the project — a mini-donation drive for the recipients.

Our Broad Ripple neighbor, Just Pop In matched the first $500 in donations — a goal which was met, then exceeded. We were thrilled so many people stepped up to support Earth House and INDYCOG. We’re not sure if it was our sweet moves (see our dancing and acrobatics in our donor recognition videos throughout the blog) or the fact that these two nonprofits are adding so much vibrancy to our city, but at the end of the day, each walked away with more than 500 bucks in addition to their new websites. We can’t thank Just Pop In and all of the amazing donors enough!

Have an idea for us?
Though it seems this year will be tough to top, we’re plotting ways to make the 24 Hour Web Project even bigger and better in the future. Please let us know if you have any ideas to share in the comments!

p.s. Want to see the Before and After?
Go here for Earth House
and here for INDYCOG.

5 Takeaways from re:build 2011

Posted by Justin Shimp

Aug

2011

0
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Filed Under: Culture Design Development

Last Friday I attended re:build 2011, which took place in Indianapolis. The stage was aptly located right below a basketball goal (Hoosiers, anyone?). I wasn’t too sure what to expect but I was blown away by every speaker and the attendees. The speakers were intelligent and captivating and I walked away super inspired with ideas to bring back to SmallBox.

Here were 5 of my takeaways

1. We shape the future of the web.
Faruk Ates brought up the topic of how designers are the sole architects of how the web will be in future. It is up to those of us using the web to continually push boundaries and evolve the web by experimenting with new technologies and devices. Technology is a field of lifelong learning, and you can easily fall behind. But the rewards for keeping up to date are priceless, as we are shaping the future interactions of our children and our children’s children. It’s a truly marvelous privilege when you shift your perspective this way.

2. Content has experience.
Every day since working at SmallBox the big buzzword seems to be content and its importance to the web. Rightfully so, because content is what drives user experience and is at the core of what people use the internet for. Users will gravitate toward content that is rich and intuitive to use, and over time websites with poor content will be weeded out. Keeping content as a priority in the web development process can have amazing results if done correctly.

3. Take a step back.
Too often we are so deep in our work, with our noses to the grindstone that we rarely take time to reflect and look at the big picture. Faruk Ates and Nevan Morgan both discussed this and described how artists take breaks and move away from their work and reflect on it without being able to alter anything. This reflection can help determine the next move in a thoughtful and planned manner.

4. Limitations breed creativity.
SmallBox CEO Jeb has talked about this before with our team and I keep it in mind often throughout the work week. It was not too surprising that these bright and intelligent speakers also talked about putting limitations on ourselves to foster and grow creativity inside a project. Putting restrictions on our work gives it scope and usually leads to more interesting and introspective work. A painter has the limitation of his canvas, a musician has the number of tracks/instruments he can put on one song, and a web designer has only so many pixels to manipulate in a browser window/device. By setting limitations, we force ourselves to be resourceful and creative.

5. I want an iPad.
Okay, so this one is a joke, but seriously I had iPad envy throughout the day. I saw how useful they were during events like this for communication and for sketching out ideas/notes really quickly. I am going to start saving up.

Re:build was an amazing event that I was happy to attend. I recommend it to everyone interested in web philosophy and emerging trends on the web. It was a delightful experience and I cannot wait to go next year. Many thanks to the events organizers for a fantastic job with a Hoosier touch.

The Uncertain Future of Apps

Posted by Jeb

Feb

2011

8
Comments

Filed Under: Development SmallBox

In the past two years Apps have infiltrated our lives. Every smart phone device/OS (iPhone, Android, Blackberry) has an App store. It has become a huge cash cow for all involved from the makers of hit Apps (hello Angry Birds!) to the device makers (Apple’s App Store). It’s no surprise the carriers are trying to get into the game as well.

So when a Austin web shop, Clarus, declared its intentions to switch to an app only business model (they are still looking to do Web apps) I began to wonder whether we were missing the App boat here at SmallBox. Are Apps the future or are they an “inbetweener” product like VHS?

Let’s break it down.

App Advantages:

Experience. Apps have a much richer, and often much faster, user experience since they are running software on a local OS (Operating System).

Connectivity. Apps work when you are offline, for the most part, so you don’t have to rely solely on your spotty reception (thanks AT&T!).

Mobile Browsers Suck. Modern browsers are relatively primitive compared to mobile Operating Systems. Since Apple and others don’t support Flash this is especially the case with current mobile browsers. Gaming apps in particular have no chance going the browser route without Flash. Apple and others claim that Flash is a memory/battery hog, sure, but I think the real reason is…

Money. There is a lot of money in the App game. Apple is making a killing. Also, the incentive of a big payday draws a lot of quality App developers into the market. So Apple and App developers don’t really want to have the apps running for free in a Web browser. The App Stores make a lot of people a lot of money.

App Disadvantages:

Cost: users don’t like paying for things. I understand the argument that money makes better apps but looking at what has happened to the music industry I wouldn’t place my bet on the paid medium (ie CDs, another soon to be “inbetweener” product). If the same App experience was available via a mobile browser I would expect to see users start moving to free option.

Hassle. It takes time to find and download apps, it’s a pain. If I’m in a new city and want to find out about the local music scene I don’t want to mess around with downloading an App created by a local music zine. I want to have that experience via a Google search then landing on a mobile optimized site.

Operating Systems. There are currently three main mobile Operating Systems- Apple (iPhone/iPod and iPad), Blackberry and Android (Google). There may be more. Web browsers have some variation between them but not as much as different OSs.

Conclusion:

Apps are “inbetweeners”. As mobile browsers improve, increases in coverage & speed from carriers as well as more Web developers working with HTML 5 we will begin seeing increasingly rich mobile Web Apps. I think you can see a model for this with 37 Signals recent move to go the Web App route over building Apps for each mobile device Operating System. I won’t be surprised if mobile Apps even end up having a store or being included in existing App stores. Regardless, I see the future of Apps in better browsers not more mobile OSs. So investing in learning those platforms doesn’t look like a good long term strategy for us.

Note: this blog inspired by a great LinkedIn Group conversation initiated by Mike Seidel. Thanks Mike!