We first built a website for Stumptown in the Fall of 2000.
Actually, Ray did, because Needmore hadn’t even been born yet. As you may already know, our Creative Director was Stumptown’s first Barista back when they opened their doors on Division in 1999. Ray has been designing their websites ever since.
Over the next dozen years, the site went through half as many revisions. For a while, it was built in Flash, then after the iPhone started becoming popular, a redesign brought it the smooth grey curves that lasted for three and a half years.
Finally, working closely with the Stumptown Creative Department, we embarked on a project to bring the website into a new era. Magento was chosen to handle the exacting needs of their sophisticated ordering system, while WordPress was ideally suited for the content-rich, education-driven site they really wanted. Stumptown feels that the better folks understand coffee, the more they’ll want to buy from Stumptown, and we couldn’t agree more.
Because we were building this site to last, we took plenty of time to get it right. This started with extensive planning meetings involving numerous internal Stumptown staff stopping by Needmore for half-day brainstorming and planning sessions. With the goals firmly captured, we moved on to a very productive several rounds of mockups, exploring several very different approaches before arriving at the direction you see now.
Here are some design mockups we considered:
Because we are anthropologists at heart, we are all about tellings people stories. We were pumped to tell the Stumptown story and show the faces of the people behind Portland’s favorite staple. This most recent iteration includes producer profiles, so that you can see the real people that harvest the beans for Stumptown, and see first-hand the process that goes into every Stumptown roast.
Overall, the project was a resounding success, and launched in December of 2012. It features hundreds of pages of content and thousands of gorgeous photos. A new highlight video is being prepared for the home page, and all of the ordering and shipping is coordinated by the Magento-powered backend. In previous versions, the Stumptown website was only selling coffee. Now, they are selling grinders, coffee filters, mugs, and of course their signature beans. Virtually every piece of content on the site can be updated by Stumptown in-house, and the staff has been trained to be comfortable working with these systems.
Visit Stumptown Coffee Roasters to see the results. We hope you enjoy it.
