Neoteric Design Case Study

Neoteric Design Uses Movable Type as a Powerful Content Management Tool

Customer Profile

Chicago-based design and development firm Neoteric Design specializes in re-designing websites for a wide range of clients. Through their user-centered design approach, they help businesses, cultural and educational institutions, and not-for-profits to develop engaging websites that are easy to maintain and update.

We think of Movable Type as a tool to produce blogs, yes, but more so as a way to create archives of documents, images, catalogs… a platform on which to design and manage all kinds of things.

- Nicholas Gracilla, Founder and Principal of Neoteric Design

The Challenge

Neoteric Design’s tagline - “fixing the web one site at a time” - perfectly sums up the mission of this talented Chicago-based design and development firm. For the last decade, Neoteric has built a solid reputation for taking outdated, hard-to-navigate websites and turning them into vibrant, user-friendly sites that attract readers and build brand value.

Founder Nick Gracilla brings a unique perspective to the process - he began creating websites in the early 1990’s, hand-coding content management systems for clients such as McDonald’s and Shure microphones. Digital photography had just started to take off, and issues of how to upload, access and manage digital media assets were fast becoming urgent.

With few solutions available, Nick created custom content management systems to fit client needs. Unfortunately, these systems often didn’t work in the long term. “Hand-coded CMS systems only work for a short while,” says Nick. “As businesses change and grow - and they always do - the system isn’t able to grow along with it.”

Today, as companies approach Neoteric with tremendous volumes of content and media assets, Nick’s CMS background comes in handy. “Our clients have complex needs, and they need ways to aggregate and manage their assets without a long or painful process,” he says. “We are often called in on emergency projects, where our clients need smart solutions fast. That’s our specialty.”

The Solution

Nick discovered Movable Type in 2003, and quickly came to appreciate its flexibility in generating all kinds of internet documents, including web pages, HTML emails, iCal or vCard downloadables, XML documents and more. The firm is now using Movable Type Pro, and is currently debuting multiple sites built on the new platform.

“Movable Type is shockingly flexible for us,” Nick says. “It allows us to solve a wide variety of content management problems and to produce all kinds of things.” Today, over 80% of the websites that Neoteric produces are based on Movable Type.

Most clients approach Neoteric for help in creating thoughtful, user-friendly websites; the majority aren’t initially interested in blogging. “We tell them that Movable Type can be a blogging tool, but that it does so much more,” says Nick. The firm begins each project by stripping out the standard Movable Type templates and using the software’s ability to work with pages and assets as a framework. “95% of our content management challenges are solved with the core Movable Type platform,” Nick explains. “We rarely have to rely upon custom plug-ins.”

Many of Neoteric’s clients want content-rich sites that seamlessly aggregate lots of information in different ways - without a complicated administrative process. “Movable Type is the glue that allows us to create web pages that reveal multiple client content resources, and integrate outside feeds or widgets, while managing it all in one place,” says Nick.

For clients like TVWeek, Movable Type’s ability to create both static and dynamic pages was a key factor in the success of the site. “In static publishing mode, Movable Type creates pages that Apache can serve up fast, and that’s very important for a high traffic site like TVWeek,” says Nick. “They get tremendous traffic spikes; the static pages help keep the site stable. Movable Type does significantly better than other systems that serve only dynamic pages.”

When it’s time to hand the new site off to clients, Neoteric does a 45-minute training session to familiarize them with Movable Type, and leaves a set of screenshot-filled visual documentation that orients clients on where content management and administration features are located. “Our clients remark that Movable Type is far more flexible than they had expected,” Nick reports.

Client Showcase

TVWeek.com serves as a comprehensive guide to the people, events, and programming that make up the world of television. Given the fast-changing nature of the site’s content and the many different sources of information it draws from, TVWeek tasked Neoteric with designing a content platform that can publish enormous amounts of news, pull in outside feeds, highlight up-to-the minute breaking stories, and manage multiple media assets with ease.

Neoteric used Movable Type to aggregate news articles, RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, Flickr photos and more. Traffic to the site has steadily grown, averaging 40,000 unique page views per day and spiking significantly at times like the Emmys, when TV Week writers live-blogged the event and produced multiple content feeds throughout the evening.

Museum of Contemporary Photography
Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography contacted Neoteric to help them redesign their site so that they could archive their photography exhibits. The site previously lacked a consistent archive of past exhibits, and didn’t have a streamlined way to display photographs. Neoteric used Movable Type to handle all of the site’s essays and media assets, allowing MoCP staff to add new content quickly and easily. Today, the site is easy to navigate, with event listings, photographs from current exhibitions, and a rich resource of scholarly input on featured artists. Readers can navigate the museum’s permanent collection to see sample images, or can browse by exhibition date or title. The museum plans to add a blog to the site in the near future.

Blåkläder Workwear
Blåkläder is a Swedish company highly regarded in Europe for creating work wear engineered for endurance. When the company approached Neoteric, the challenge was to create a site that would introduce the company to the Northern American market, both US and Canada, and give retailers and consumers several ways to become familiar with the Blåkläder product line.

Neoteric used Movable Type to manage a high volume of image assets, and to create a comprehensive online catalog where customers can download images for use in promotional materials, emails, mailers and the like. The site has been successful in supporting the North American sales effort and in helping Blåkläder gain traction in a new market.