Pinckney Street Kitchen
I’ve all but made my finishing touches on the new website for Pinckney Street Kitchen. This is an important shift in doing business, as they are the first McClellanville restaurant to have a website. Owner Sarah Nell Scott wanted to promote both the restaurant and her catering business and I explained to her that an online presence is a great way to spread the word about your business and also validate your business as a viable option and make it worth the drive for the out-of-town diners and those needing catering services.
I started with a premium wordpress theme called “Cafe Press” which was already very clean and loaded with lots of built in options. I changed the background and fonts to play off the picture of the outside of the restaurant and spent a lot time making sure the catering and lunch/dinner menus were styled correctly.
A bulk of the design time covered 2 things that I felt were crucial to the success of this website; ease of use and social media integration. I don’t think enough designers take the end consumer into mind enough. Wordpress is a very powerful platform that can be shaped to do almost anything, but if it is too complicated for the user than they simply won’t do it and the cardinal rule of blogging is “be consistent”. I’ll tell you honestly that it takes a lot of effort to write on a consistent basis and keep doing it until you start seeing results, which may be 6 months to a year for some. So I knew that I had to make this something that everyone at the restaurant could quickly and easily do.
I mentioned earlier that right out of the box the design had a lot of great built-in features. Unfortunately while the features might make sense to regular wordpress users they were a little bit daunting for someone who had never used wordpress before. You had to go 5 different places to change things on the front page alone and I thought that it could all be simplified. So I made some changes and simplified the whole process.
Central to the simplification of the site was incorporation of my second goal; social media integration. When you’re up to your eyeballs in she-crab soup and crab and shrimp sandwiches and are busy taking lunch and dinner orders and preparing for the next catering job you don’t get a lot of free time to play around on the internet. I felt the ability for the owners to send their daily specials and catering news out to whoever might want to know would be a valuable resource. We call this “permission based advertising” and the premise is that instead of sending out 1000’s of postcards to potential clients and knowing that a very small proportion of them will be well received or running an expensive ad in the yellow pages, where fewer and fewer people turn for their information these days, we can present a location where everyone can access the data and those that are interested can volunteer to have it conveniently delivered to them. Social Media is the term that we use to wrap up all these idea and at the head of the class are Twitter and Facebook which are growing at an astronomical rate across all segments of the population. Taking this into account I implemented a tool created by the Real Estate Tomato that allows whoever is at the restaurant to login to the site and on the very first screen simply type in the daily specials and it appears instantly on the website and is delivered to a twitter and facebook account where those who have subscribed will receive the news of the specials and can salivate on the thought of eating them for a few hours until they are ready to eat.
Finally, because the site will be updated by several people, I created one page of simple directions to help them know how to change and add new content to the website so that it will grow with their business and always have fresh information for their readers. It was a real pleasure working on this project and I know that it will lead to even further success for Pinckney Street Kitchen.
Carolina Coast Furniture
This week I launched the first, of what I hope to be many, artist and craftsmen websites. CarolinaCoastFurniture.com is a website showcasing the custom built furniture and woodwork of Monty Foss. Monty builds magnificent furniture using reclaimed wood and was looking for a way to get greater exposure and have a way to showcase his pieces to people he meets.
I was surprised to see that after sitting down and showing Monty and his wife how to add new material to the website for about 45 minutes that they were able to add 5 more pieces of furniture unassisted that same evening.
This website is designed to allow easy navigation for the clients by presenting them with multiple terms to search and sort furniture. There is also a Gallery page that displays a thumbnail image of each piece to showcase all of his works in a clean and professional manner. You can click on an individual image and see a larger version with a link to the detailed information about that piece.
In the coming months as I create more artist and craftpersons sites, I will introduce a site that will showcase all of their work in one location. The artist will have the option to submit their work to the site on a case by case basis, but this will be free advertising for them so I’d think they’d want to. My thinking is that rather than each person advertising their individual site in a limited manner, the advertising dollars can be pooled and a higher rate of return can be achieved. If you’re a McClellanville painter, photographer, sculpter, woodworker, craftsperson, or writer and want to get in on the ground floor with a new website please contact Daniel for details.
Carolina1670
I’m proud to announce my first official MCVL.net website. Carolina1670.com is redesign of a site for Susan Bates (my mom) and Cheves Leland, who are co-editors/authors of a series of books about geneological and historic records of colonial South Carolina. They came to me seeking an updated look and better performance in the search engines and I was happy to oblige.
The great thing about this project is it displays my two favorite features about wordpress: it’s userfriendliness and versatility. I don’t think that my mom and Cheves will argue when I say that are not the most technologically savvy people, but they were able to control the content of the site with a few quick lessons. The versatility comes through in the sense that wordpress is a blogging platform, but as you can see, I was able to create a traditional looking “static” website while also being able to include a “blogging” option (called “News and Notes” on this site) for the owners to post occasional updates about the books and their research.
I chose a pre-designed template (known as a “theme” in wordpress) with the scroll look to portrays the old English aspect of their research. My customization of the theme actually included removing a good bit of information to make the site appear more static. I added the seal and a few special touches to personalize the site. Finally we were able to include the index from each of their book allowing visitors to see if the book contains information on a particular person or family that they are researching.
If you have any questions about the site please leave a comment below or if you would like your own custom website / blog please feel free to contact me.
