Last week we launched a new website for the Bentonville Public Library. The library is one of the major institutions and destinations here in Downtown Bentonville, and we are honored to have partnered with them on this project.

Despite all of the library’s helpful programs and beautiful facilities, their previous website was sorely lacking. Our goals for the new site were many:

• represent the quality of the library
• showcase their many services and programs
• provide a portal into their comprehensive online research options
• make the content-heavy website clearly organized and easy to navigate

On top of these goals, we built the website on a content management system, allowing the library staff to take over the daily maintenance of the website.

We hope you enjoy the website, and I strongly encourage you to visit the Bentonville Public Library.

One of our most enjoyable projects from 2011 was a comprehensive mixed media campaign for Tusk & Trotter American Brasserie. Tusk & Trotter is a new gastropub that opened up just around the corner from our office in downtown Bentonville.

We started by assisting the restaurant in establishing their identity, including imagery and voice. The identity features bold and retro typographic elements that compliment the fun and sometimes tongue-in-cheek voice. We’ve applied that identity to just about anything you can think of — menus, kid’s menu, environmental graphics, website, coasters, print/web/outdoor ads, collateral materials, apparel, mugs, product photography, food labels, and more.

Here’s a sampling of our work for Tusk & Trotter.

Adair Creative Group seeks a web developer who will bring a high level of quality, consistency, and efficiency to web development and programming. The web developer will be looked to as a leader and expert on all items related to web development, and he/she is expected to deliver fully functional website and mobile solutions that meet and exceed project goals and client expectations.

Job duties:

• Create standards compliant websites and pages using HTML5/XHTML and CSS
• Develop advanced web-based applications including shopping carts / e-commerce, blogs, content management systems, and other interactive items
• Develop custom web-based applications
• Design and create databases for web applications
• Develop mobile applications; both web apps and native apps
• Perform maintenance on previously completed websites
• Stay current with industry trends and technologies

Qualities and Skills:

• Proficiency in HTML5/XHTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, XML, and AJAX
• Understanding of MVC programming, PHP frameworks, and JavaScript libraries
• Experience with CMS SilverStripe and WordPress is a plus
• Proficiency in Adobe Creative Suite, including Photoshop is a plus
• Experience with Sencha Touch and Titanium for mobile development is a plus
• Attention to detail in all phases of a project, including usability/accessibility, design nuances, and technical best practices
• Ability to work as part of a team in a fast-paced and deadline oriented environment
• Ability to receive and act upon constructive criticism from coworkers and clients
• Written and verbal communication skills

If you are interested in applying for this position, send your resume, qualifications, and examples of your work to david@adaircreative.com.

I’ve been way to quiet on our blog of late, but that’s certainly not an indication that nothing has been happening in the world of Adair Creative. Quite the opposite actually…here are the highlights from the past few months.

• At the beginning of May we added Nathan Brauer to our team. Nathan is a skilled web developer, and he works for us from San Francisco, CA. Nathan spent the month May with us here in Bentonville, but he’s back with his family now and will work from San Fran going forward.
• In addition to working on many ongoing accounts, we’ve taken on several new clients, including: MerchantView, Tusk & Trotter American Brasserie, Robinson Avenue Church of Christ, ForeverRed, the Kester Group, Highline Technical Innovations, the Bentonville Running Festival, and Blessings Unlimited (a subsidiary of DaySpring). I’m excited to show off some of this new work in the coming months.
• We continue to work on a little bit of everything – print design, logo and identity development, website design, mobile development, email campaigns, web application development, search engine optimization, packaging, and more.

Here’s a look at a few of our recent projects.

Highline Technical Innovations is doing something about high gas prices with their amazing Wildcat Booster series of products. The Wildcat Booster is a hydrogen injection system for cars, commercial trucks, and farm equipment that can greatly increase fuel economy. We launched this website this week.

The Kester Group is a small company that helps organizations get big results in the world of grants and fundraising. I have known the principal Cheryl Kester for many years, and it has been a privilege to help her craft a new identity for her company along with this new website that is hot off the press.

In the first part of the year, we created an extensive campaign for this Valentine’s Day event with Gary Smalley. The campaign included a website, email marketing, social media, billboards, online advertising, postcards, an event manual, and more. Pictured here is one of the billboards.

We’ve worked on quite a few email campaigns in recent months, including this split test campaign for DaySpring. This particular campaign featured a line of themed tote bags.

We recently launched this website for Robinson Avenue Church of Christ. The website is maintained by the church staff via a CMS and the site features sermon audio, an events calendar, and a password protected photo directory for church members.

John Brown University just announced their first ever online undergraduate degree in Business Administration. This is the cover of a brochure for the program, and we also shot the photography you see here.

Most of our time at Adair Creative Group is spent working on projects for our clients, but I’ve always had in the back of my mind that I’d like to try our own venture someday. Through a close partnership with Praisecharts and Fervent, WorshipVue.com has given us the opportunity to do just that.

WorshipVue is a new site we created that sells downloadable video and still media for use by churches and other ministries. The media ranges from background loops and still images to themed short movies and song tracks.

Just about a year ago, we began to brainstorm the concept for a worship media website with our good friends at Praisecharts and video-producer Fervent. We quickly recognized that we could pool our resources in an attempt to make the best media site available. Late in the fall of 2010, we began design and development on WorshipVue, and we’ve dedicated just about every spare moment around our office since then to its creation.

We’re excited to have launched the WorshipVue beta last week, and we’re eager to receive feedback from new customers on how we can tweak the website and improve the catalog to create a powerful ministry resource.

For me, I have learned so much in this process of creating a web-based business. This experience will prove so valuable as we work with clients every day who are doing the same things with their websites that we are doing with WorshipVue. I’ve got to give it to Nic, Tyler, and Mark on our staff for their dedication to this project, along with the many hours of work by Bryson Moore at Fervent and Ryan Dahl at Praisecharts.

Give the site a look and follow WorshipVue on twitter and facebook to keep up with where we go in the future.

Here’s a short video that highlights 3 websites for worship leaders that we’re proud to have created. Our good friend Bryson Moore produced this video to introduce the 3 sites at the ReCreate conference in Nashville this week. We relaunched praisecharts.com in late 2010, worshiptraining.com last month, and worshipvue.com is coming next month.

[vimeo 19338796]

At the beginning of 2010, my hope was that Adair Creative would continue to mature into a full-service digital agency. As I look back on the year, I see that we did just that. Our core services have always been graphic design and web design and development, but our expertise has continued to grow in a number of related areas.

In 2010, we:

• created our first iPhone app
• designed and developed other mobile applications
• designed and managed many email marketing campaigns
• assisted multiple clients in utilizing social media to accomplish business goals
• developed a diverse mix of e-commerce websites
• refined our Search Engine Optimization skill set on multiple websites
• developed new systems for incorporating large amounts of video and other multimedia into online applications

Every day that we’re at work, we learn. And everything we learn will continue to benefit each of our customers as we move forward in the rapidly changing digital world.

I am also especially grateful for our skilled, fun, and dedicated team at Adair Creative. In 2010, we did not lose or add any employees, and this stability is largely responsible for our success and growth this year.

As I look forward to 2011, I envision more of the same. But in our business, “the same” always entails learning, growing, and meeting new challenges. I want to continue to be the digital expert that you turn to as an extension of your team.

Additionally, 2011 will mark the launch of our first “pet project”. For the past few months, we’ve been working hard on a website idea that we will play a lead role in overseeing into the future. I won’t share all of the details just yet, but stay tuned for more on this in the next couple months.

Happy new year!

On October 1, we launched the new praisecharts.com. For over 10 years, PraiseCharts has served churches around the world by providing sheet music and other resources for musicians and worship leaders.

In March of 2009, we set out to redesign and develop the PraiseCharts website. At that time, we had no idea how complex of an undertaking this redesign would be. But the challenge has led to an incredibly fulfilling project and client relationship.

There is no way I could shed light on all of the hours of meeting, planning, dreaming, designing, building, and testing, but here is a glimpse behind the design and development of the new praisecharts.com.

Old vs. New

The old PraiseCharts website.

The new PraiseCharts website.

A New Identity

At the foundation of the redesign was a new graphical identity. After many rounds of logo designs, we settled on the new PraiseCharts logo.

Start On Paper

We always like to start on paper. Here is one of our early flowcharts.

We’d routinely leave a meeting with a flowchart looking something like this.

Here is 1 of about 10 diagrams our client submitted, outlining the checkout process. Simple, right?

Design

We began by quickly sketching out many different areas of the interface. In this sketch, we explored various layouts for the list of songs.

Wireframes allow us to quickly block out the design without getting bogged down in the details. We completed well over 100 wireframes during this stage of the project. Here are a few.

The concept really starts to come to life when we get to the design comps. I don’t know how many design comps we completed, but we went through at least 30 variations of the homepage alone. Here are a few of the homepage comps that led to the final design.

Development

Then we started coding. Early in the process, we decided to go with the content management system SilverStripe. This CMS has proved extremely flexible and effective for the project, but it was just the beginning. We had to fully integrate with PraiseCharts’ internal cataloging database, their external customer support suite, and their external email marketing software.

PraiseCharts content managers manage all of the standard content through the CMS.

Along the way, we built a completely custom blog and profile management system.

We’re almost there, right?

As one month turned to the next, our clients at PraiseCharts were extremely patient with the process. We did not want to replace the old PraiseCharts website until all aspects of the new site were fully tested and proven.

We began internal beta testing.

• Why does that look funny in IE 7?
• Why is the list of new songs showing the list of popular songs?
• Why is this page taking so long to load?
• Why is the PDF preview crashing my browser?

Each of these questions was important, and we addressed hundreds of them.

From our internal beta testing, we progressed into a time of public beta testing, slowly inviting in more and more customers. The customer feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and they helped us identify the remaining bugs to clean up prior to launch.

The Beginning

We’ve reached the end of 18 months of development and the end of this blog post, but we’re only at the beginning with PraiseCharts. The new PraiseCharts platform has opened the door to many other exciting possibilities, and we’re already hard at work on new developments. Stay tuned for much, much more to come.

Take a Look Around

Hop over to www.praisecharts.com to take a look around the new site. Additionally, the following video is a great introduction to the new site and many of its features.

We recently completed a multi-day photo shoot for Mercy Health System of NWA. We visited clinics, offices, and the hospital to capture portraits of the doctors and surgeons who serve Northwest Arkansas. Our goal was to photograph each doctor in his or her immediate environment. Here’s a small sampling of the many portraits we came away with.