One of the most noticeable new features was the integration of tabs on the page.  There are 10 tabs in all that help the user easily navigate what we offer along with content from each of our five blogs.  At eROI, we drink our own Koolaid when it comes to online marketing.  We have a clear call-out to sign up for our newsletter in the bottom section of our page, we invite people to become a fan of eROI on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or see our profile on Linkedin and even our most recent tweets are displayed to the right of the page.

Please give us feedback in the form of a haiku – tell us if you love our new homepage or you hate it or something in between, but please please do NOT be boring. thx.

“eROI is what you look for in any business relationship: an expert partner who helps you realize your vision. The eROI team listened carefully to our needs, asked probing questions that helped us better understand the capabilities that would enable us to reach our goals, and communicated closely with us all the way to achieve success. The final product went above and beyond what we thought was possible. It was mindblowing.”
–Noah Glass, CEO, GoMobo

“Choosing eROI to help launch our magazine into the digital realm has been a great decision. The support from their web team has been incredible, making the scary transition from print to online- stress free. They provided structure, guidance and solutions to any minor hang up we experienced along the way.”
–Kaitlyn, CBS Watch Magazine (new site hasn’t been launched yet)

“Working with eROI to help with the development and launch of seven planet was key to company on many levels and will prove to be a critical positive impact on the brand. We began speaking with their team about 7 months prior to launching our virtual trading post (our ecommerce store/company site) with the intent to launch a site that was easy to navigate, that visually differentiated our brand and that helped our patrons effectively find out how the “mindful commerce” could work in their lives. In the end, they met all three of those criteria without question and in turn also were very patience with us in the process as we had scope revisions, content delays, support needs, etc. Finally, they proactively approached us after our launch with product review site upgrades, that would help improve the trading post and usability, without being asked to do so. Those upgrades are now implemented and we look forward to working with them consistently on making the seven planet site and our company newsletters as key to the brand and the vision of mindful commerce as our traditional green general stores.”
–John Friess, CEO, Seven Planet

In order to gain inspiration and ideas for the website, the eROI team did an extensive amount of research, along with a competitive analysis, to see what other green companies were doing on their own sites. Though the team looked at other sites for inspiration, they knew they wanted to differentiate Seven Planet from all the others. What resulted was a well designed layout with a different look and feel than the rest. The team put a lot of emphasis on the overall design of the e-commerce site, paying close attention to ensure that the mission of Seven Planet was evident in the website’s design. Even though the “bones” and overall structure of the site have launched, the team still expects more ideas and feature sets to roll out as the site continues to grow and interest by the community is generated.

The concept of mindful commerce was especially important to the founders of Seven Planet. Specifically, they wanted to bring the supplier of each product to the forefront. This was done by incorporating the supplier’s story above each product page, helping to give them an avenue of online marketing (something that is especially nice if a supplier doesn’t have a strong online presence yet). The site is also heavily focused on inviting and teaching the consumer to “be green,” even if they happened to be prior to visiting the site. Along with having consumers aware of their online presence, the creators of Seven Planet also wanted to have awareness of the physical location of the first store. To do this, the eROI team needed to explain the physical general store and the connection it has with the online general store. Inevitably, the end goal is to have a physical presence on each of the seven continents.

On the Seven Planet site, the design team presented two completely different design concepts to the founders. One direction focused on clean lines, a lighter color palette, and more modern elements. The other, and the one chosen, had an organic feel, comprised of earth tones and lots of texture. The founders decided to go with the latter because it spoke to a more simple life, with people getting back to basics.

This look also echoes the in-store feel that the creators wanted; a space filled with natural fibers and materials. To accompany the layout of the brand, the eROI team developed a strong icon set to match the 7 silos represented in the logo. The number “7” is an important component to the company brand and is seen throughout the website in various ways including the 7 different colors chosen for their color palette. Working with a neutral background, the designers brought the colors in subtly as to not take away from the earthiness, and chose subdued, warm colors. The chosen photography is intentionally authentic and genuine, representing natural elements such as the sky, plants and anything else that one finds on our planet.

Since Seven Planet was one of the first websites to use a powerful new e-commerce platform called Magento, eROI was excited to push the limits and maximize the new abilities that Magento enabled us to do for this site. This included ratings for the products; an elegant, intuitive, and easy one-page checkout process; and the CMS capabilities in addition to e-commerce. There is strong integration of JavaScript on this site: dropdown form fields, the one-page checkout process, homepage slide-show, and dynamic hero graphic. Lastly, dynamic data is pulled in from various parts of the site (including green tips and the latest blog post being pulled onto the homepage) allowing the content on the site to refresh as new information is added.

The Seven Planet e-commerce site demonstrates a beautiful balance of usability and content. The team did a great job in utilizing Magento deep feature set combined with each of their own talents. Props to the eROI team and especially those who worked so diligently on making it happen. Be sure to check it out!!!

Today was the first day of the soft launch of this green general store. eROI designed and produced this dynamic, search-engine-friendly, e-commerce site, so please check out the site (www.sevenplanet.com) and check back in to this blog for a more in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at what went into the thought process for the business model, website strategy, design, and development.

E-commerce site: http://www.sevenplanet.com

Our lead programmer, Tore Gustafson, is going to talk about the challenges of building this site from scratch from a programming (not design) perspective:

Social networking sites at their core are really a collection of a lot of common and architecturally simple applications. What is a blog from a development standpoint? Really it’s just a few database columns including things like a date, an article and a title. Then all you need is the application framework to edit and display that information. A social networking site takes applications like a blog, like email, like adding a person to your personal network and builds a cohesive framework for all the pieces to play together.

Building matchpointcorp.com from scratch, however, is by no means a small task. Mapping the database architecture for a site that offers so many different capabilities was probably the most time-consuming task, not to mention building interfaces for both delivering content to the end user as well as an administration portal for Matchpoint managers to administer their users, companies and service provider and ultimately connect them.

Probably the most enjoyable aspect of developing sites like this is getting cool flash-like (and much more) effects working with plain old javascript. Javascript frameworks like prototype and the ensuing add-ons like mootools have made javascript not only more consistent across browsers, but actually fun to code in. If your a developer and still ignoring javascript, grab a copy of prototype and dig in!

So hazy in fact that I was supposed to call my girlfriend, and when I woke up in the morning I called her to apologize for not calling, and it turns out I did call her. Oops. Now she’s onto just how much I was drinking. You can take the kid out of Alaska, but you can’t take Alaska out of the kid.

The cool part about this whole SXSW thing is all the conversations that occur away from the event itself. I had no idea how much value would come from just meeting and talking to people. Last night I got to meet some of the people whom I respect and follow on the web. Welcome to Geek’s Paradise.

Anyhow, on to the panels.

Design Workflows of Work: How Top Designers Work Their Magic
This panel had all the necessary components to be really really good, but it seemed there wasn’t much depth to the questions. That being said, I am a big fan of Veerle and I had met Bryan Veloso the night before while in line for the Frog Design party, so it was cool to see them do their thing. I had no idea who Bryan was when I met him, but he was super friendly and invited me to come join him with some people he knew. That’s how my night got started. The panelists did confirm my suspicions that we creatives are a different breed.

Deadlines, Clients, and Cashflow: The Business Side of Web Design
This was a good panel to attend for understanding how to manage clients and manage teams. It was one of the thirty minute presentations that goes by really fast. For the most part it was a big long nodding my head in agreement session. It was nice to see all of this useful information in one place. An overarching theme which I think really resonates with me is the fact you have to have standards for yourself. A standard price, a standard in design, and a standard way you work. In not sticking to standards, clients can control the relationship which is detrimental in the goal of doing good quality work.

Ten (er 7) Ways to Run a Startup Like Ghengis Khan
I’m not sure if it was the timeslot, or if the speaker wasn’t prepared, or what, but this one should have been titled “7 Ways Ghengis Khan Conquered Asia and Europe.” I had a really hard time drawing the parallels between the what the speaker was saying and how it tied to starting a business. Maybe I just don’t have the experience. And I have to admit that spelling errors in a PowerPoint really make me question the professionalism of the speaker (I have really high expectations for these people, they are supposed to represent the elite). He could have been hungover, as was I, which would have made it extremely difficult to get through a presentation, THAT I can forgive. Sooooo I signed up for a Twitter account after step 3.

Uniting the Holy Trinity of Web Design
I think this came out as being my favorite panel of the day. The speakers were diverse in their personalities, but all had some really great things to say. I had the privilege of meeting Jonathan Snook last night (fortunately I spoke to him today as well, and he confirmed my reluctance to accept “You were putting them back” he said. ) and it was good to see him up there delivering his points with clarity. He’s a really approachable guy and I am happy because I got to ask him some questions one on one, which to me is much more appealing than the after panel sessions.

This panel really gave me some good insights on how I may restore the balance of power in the projects I am involved in. The holy trinity consisted of Development (me), Business, and the Users. Any time those get out of whack, a project can suffer. When they do get out of whack, politics come into play, so all of the panelists also gave suggestions on how to ease tensions or eliminate sed politics and tension.

There were five panels I attended. Each of them offered a different insight into the topic they were covering. More than anything they made me inspired, warm, and fuzzy. I think SXSW draws all of the rockstars in the industry and they do as good of job being in the audience as they do on their panels. It’s refreshing to know that they are still out there seeking knowledge from their peers.

Panel 1 – A Decade of Style
I particularly enjoyed this panel because it was really relevant to what I do. The people on it were all seasoned CSS vets and were able to give a perspective that many of us lack; history.

One of the panelists, Chris Wilson, works for Microsoft and he talked about some of the things he fights for with Microsoft. I have a habit of cutting down MS quite often just because it seems as if there is a complete disregard for standards. It was interesting to hear his perspective and the concerns he has, working on the team that builds the world’s most popular browser. Ultimately he worries about backwards compatibility. I still hold my grudge, but he seemed like he was fighting for the right things internally.

Another panelist, whom I had heard of, but only that was Molly Holzschlag. I saw her on this panel and also on the last panel of the day. I think I identify with her most out of anyone at the day. Likes a lot on her plate, is rebellious, and is very individualistic. She also has an energy about her that seems to help bring up the quality of the panel. I really enjoyed what she had to say.

Panel 2 – After the Brief: A Field Guide to Design Inspiration
This was the panel that I think will be the most beneficial to me in the long run. Initially I decided to go to this one because I really wanted to see Cameron Moll, unfortunately he came down with the flu and wasn’t able to attend. However, the other two panelists, Jason Santa Maria and Rob Weychart did a fantastic job of alleviating my initial disappointment. These two guys have been friends for a long time and their dynamic was really entertaining. They covered not only how to find inspiration, but how to maintain it and foster it. In doing so, they really helped me understand on how to become a thinking designer versus just a doing designer, a downfall I know I have, but haven’t understood how to change it.

Panel 3 – Kathy Sierra: Opening Remarks
Kathy is from Creating Passionate Users and did an excellent job of explaining how to humanize what we do. She gave a good presentation and unfortunately I watched it on a video screen, so it didn’t have the same effect. Either way, she highlighted on many things, including the common differences between the audience that FAQs are written for and the audience that actually needs real help.

Panel 4 – TV: The Next Generation
This panel was really interesting because it was the first I went to that pulled in some of my “other” background I don’t get to use too much, business. How do the new distribution channels, advertising models, and content providers mix up? Ultimately it’s a complex topic and it sounds like the linear model of watching TVShows at a set time is on the way out, but it’s a matter of when. I agree with this up to the point that some people don’t want to think about what they’re watching, they just want to come home and turn on the TV, no choice required. Some people do not care what they’re watching, as long as they’re watching something. You can’t channel surf through choice.

The other point they were making was that some content providers were to small to garner any kind of advertising dollars. While this is true for traditional advertising relationships, the internet provide a solution similar to what google adsense did for websites, would do for the web. Anyone want to talk? Overall it was a great panel and really got me thinking about the industry.

Panel 5 – From to Riches: Life After Code
This panel had Molly Holzschlag as well. It was mildy entertaining, relevant, but by this time in the day I was pretty drained and not sure if my attention span could handle it. There was a lot of discussion on if I am a designer, should I learn to code, and vice versus. Since I am a fan of doing it all, some of the suggestions were lost on me. Another thing I pulled was that you can’t be a hotshot coder and a manager…ughhh.

Until then.

Now on topic, this lastest email was so large, that it would not even fit in a preview pane, let alone a browser window. You actually had to take the opposite action of scrolling sideways to see the whole image. I tried over and over to get a small enough resolution to share it, but it was imposssible.

If you are in retail, or just like good emails, sign up.

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