thePlatform: Blue Flavor Produces Measurable Results
Blue Flavor is an established team of expert web developers, with access to every web technology that’s available. But when thePlatform came calling looking for a standards-based redesign that would produce search-engine friendly pages that could be easily updated, Blue Flavor chose Movable Type. We’re always thrilled when members of our Six Apart Professional Network have case studies to share with the community, so we were happy that Nick Finck, Blue Flavor’s Director of User Experience, had a few minutes to talk to us about the project.
Six Apart: So, to get started — who’s Blue Flavor:? I feel like I know you all since many of you have been in the blogging community forever, but maybe everybody doesn’t know the name yet.
Blue Flavor: Blue Flavor is seven people, myself, Brian Fling, D. Keith Robinson, Garrett Murray, Tom Watson, Kevin Tamura and Cyndi Fling. Brian, Keith and I make up the principals. Garrett is both the youngest age wise and employee wise… Sorry, he’s taken, ladies!
Six Apart: Hah! Great. So, the latest project I’ve seen your team launch is thePlatform. Before we get to the site itself — how do you end up in touch with a relatively large company, when you’re such a small (but admittedly well-established!) team?
Blue Flavor: They say it’s all about who you know. In this case, Keith has a pretty good relationship with the client. They knew we did web standards-based design and needed someone to come in and redesign their site the right way.
Six Apart: And the site they asked you to help with is thePlatform. What is it?
Blue Flavor: thePlatform is basically a broadband application service provider. They provide services that businesses use to manage and publish various kinds of broadband media. It’s one of those companies where you see their handiwork all the time as a consumer, but are not directly exposed to the technology. It’s all a seamless experience for you. The focus is mostly on business-to-business communication.
Six Apart: That sounds like a demanding audience — but if they all have broadband and presumably have the latest browsers and things, does it still matter that you’re building with web standards?
Blue Flavor: Of course, standards are always something we need to pay attention to. We always design and build our websites so that they are accessible to all, be it people with older browsers or people with screen readers. We like to layer the advanced technologies so that users who have systems or browsers that do not support those technologies can still access and read the content on the site. Just because the bandwidth may be there for your site’s audience doesn’t mean you should abuse it as a designer or developer.
Six Apart: That makes sense — you have to have technology that works for everyone. Switching gears a little bit, this doesn’t look like a blog, in the traditional sense. But it’s powered by Movable Type. How did you make that choice?
Blue Flavor: Well, we always believe in making things simple for our clients. We’ve worked with a number of CMSs over the years and a lot of them have bloated features that not only are not used but often get in the way of the user just trying to complete their primary task: publish content to their website. While Movable Type may be a blogging system, it can easily be used to power sites that are not blog-centric, even large corporate intranets and document libraries. We’ve found Movable Type to be a simple, elegant, and economical solution for our clients that helps their web teams focus on what they do: delivering new information to their customers.
Six Apart: One thing that jumped out at me was that your client was concerned about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This question comes up all the time — does using a blogging system as the engine for your CMS help with SEO?
Blue Flavor: Yes, it certainly makes our lives easier when it comes to applying good semantic markup and best practices for search engine optimization. A lot of CMSs don’t account for things like keywords or streamlined and semantic markup. Movable Type controls the content and lets us control the validity of the markup. Most of the CMSs we have experienced output horrible markup which takes us twice, or even three times, as long to deal with because we have to go into the engine and practically rewrite it to output somewhat semantic markup. Movable Type doesn’t have that problem due to its flexible templating system.
Six Apart: You say in your writeup, “In our opinion the biggest component for SEO is good content. If you provide good content, people will link to it and it’ll be found in searches.” That makes sense.
Finally, it looks like your work is producing actual, measurable results. Can you talk about what thePlatform’s response was to the relaunch?
Blue Flavor: The site is outperforming the client’s expectations with a 300% increase in the number of sales leads it generates. When it comes to business objectives for a website redesign sales leads are often near the top depending on what kind of product or service is offered. This is one of the key things we strive for at Blue Flavor, we identify the client’s goals not just from a business perspective but also from a user and technology perspective. These three types of goals are addressed at every stage of a project, from strategy, information architecture, design, and implementation. We feel, because of this, the site was a success and exceeded any expectations.
Six Apart: It sounds like it was a great success for everyone involved! Thanks for sharing the story with us, and any final thoughts?
Blue Flavor: Thanks for having me. On behalf of the entire Blue Flavor team we would like to thank everyone at Six Apart for creating such a great system and most of all for sticking to your guns and doing the right thing. We’re happy to have such technology at our disposal and we’re humbled when it is so easy to implement.
Thanks to Nick Finck and the entire Blue Flavor team for sharing their success story with the community. We’re always excited to hear the smart ways people are taking advantage of the platform, so if you’ve got your own stories, get in touch and we’ll be happy to feature them.
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Wow... using : MovableType or MT Enterprise ? Congratulations Blue Flavor...