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Hunter Qualitative

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Hunter Qualitative Image

We feel a kindred connection to Hunter Qualitative, we are both creative firms with a love for telling people’s stories. We both take an obsessive approach to getting to know our client and we have fun doing it! As with all of our projects, we took the time to understand their business, we analyzed the competition and made suggestions to give Hunter an edge. Their work is informative, artistic, insightful and engaging. Needmore set out to make a website worthy of the clever crew at Hunter Qualitative.

We took time getting a feel for Hunter’s personality: meeting with the founder Jon McNeil, reading Hunter’s published work, watching their documentaries and brainstorming the most creative ways to showcase their work on the website. Case in point, Jon referenced the movie Rushmore as design inspiration. That very night our designer, watched Rushmore for homework and came back in the mooring brimming with ideas to implement into the site design.

What can we say, design is serious business folks. If you are hungry for the details, please take a look at our portfolio.

Think Before You Share That Screenshot

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As web designers, we work with a number of businesses that offer various types of hosting. One of them specializes in WordPress hosting, emphasizing on their website that everyone at their firm is a “WordPress specialist.”

Fair enough. If you’re going to make that claim, however, you should be careful what’s in the screenshots your support specialists share with customers. To verify that our site was back up, we were sent this screenshot:
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The Farm Café

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The Farm Cafe's responsive website Visiting The Farm Café has long been a celebrated experience for us. Our visits have spanned the gamut from romantic dates by candlelight to celebratory nights out with friends, sitting on the patio and gazing up at the clear Portland sky. The Farm has been around for years, they’re famous for their seafood, and they are located in a unique and memorable building in SE Portland.

When we first spoke to Fearn last year, she mentioned that she was drawn to the clarity and focus we brought to our designs. We in turn wanted to bring that same focus to a café that has meant so much to us. We came away from that first meeting with a prioritized list of goals. The chief among them: a more mobile-friendly site. She wanted visitors with mobile phones to get a streamlined layout that brought them straight to the important information and cut down on unnecessary calls.

We’re thrilled with the results. But don’t just take our word for it (we are biased after all). Go on, take a gander.

Redesigning Needmore

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We love to start the new year with a redesign, and this year we’re not going to disappoint.

Visitors will doubtless have noticed that we have a brand new, partly-finished website up. No, it’s not ideal. Yes, we’d love to show you a fully-finished, feature-complete site.

Heck, we’d love it if the page you were reading right now was using the grid structure we sketched out, but we’re not quite there yet!

Tell you what: we were seriously fed up with the old one. It was based on a template of questionable quality… goodbye to that. Most importantly, it didn’t show our nice new look, featuring a logo designed by our friends at Factory North, and we didn’t have a good way of showing all the nice things our clients have to say about working with (the five of) us.

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Stumptown Website Version 6.0

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The New Stumptown Coffee Website

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:

  • Mock Up Version 1
  • Mock Up Version 3
  • Mock up Version 4
  • Needmore Stumptown Mock Up Version 5
  • Needmore Stumptown Mock Up Version 6
  • Needmore Stumptown Mock Up Version 7

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.

Back to School: A Responsive Website for Progressive Educators

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Just as our own little one heads off to her first day of preschool, we put up a new website for Children’s Community School, a progressive elementary school in Van Nuys, California.

Progressive, indeed! This school year, the teachers at CCS will be blogging. And, parents can now easily follow school events via the new integrated calendar and completely responsive website, which looks great even on mobile devices.

Better Together Website’s Secret Recipe

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The Better Together Baking website redesign updated an existing website using the same tools it was currently operating with, meaning WordPress and the popular WP e-Commerce plugin. The previous version of the site had been up for several years and had become a bit neglected over time. Additionally, much of the site’s content was not accessible the Bake Shop —many of the site’s two column page layouts, for instance, had only one editable column. This simply wouldn’t do!

We intend to provide our clients with a different experience, handing over as much control of their site as possible. With that in mind, we built two custom post types and a slew of custom meta boxes for the WordPress edit screens. These additions will not only make for a more easily editable site, but also help make clear to a user where and how they need to enter content for it to show up and work properly on the front-end.

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