This is the first of several posts, in which we’re writing about our experiences redesigning the Stumptown Coffee Roasters website. This is an overview of the project as a whole, and some ideas we had and things we learned along the way.

Keep reading… we’ve got lots of pictures for you!

First of all, let me say that we’ve had the good fortune of working with Stumptown Coffee Roasters for many years. We built their first website, before we were even Needmore. We built their second website years ago, when we were still young. In fact, in the first two years of their business, Raymond made many an ad, which ran in the Mercury.

We’re going to share a few of those with you as you read along.

The last version of the website was great. It was a big hit. The visual style was nice, the colors were sharp, and the look featured Duane’s photography really well. It worked out superbly for a good three years. It did, however, have some serious limitations.

First of all, it was built in Flash. This presented a number of serious drawbacks. For one thing, adding features proved to be quite a pain. It often required custom programming work, which discouraged growing and improving the site. Folks who didn’t have the Flash plugin installed couldn’t see anything. If you had a visual impairment, forget it. Search engines couldn’t find and index the text, so people couldn’t search for that particular coffee and end up at the Stumptown web site.

Secondly, it didn’t support e-commerce. This isn’t easy to do in Flash, and we didn’t even attempt it with Stumptown. Instead, a separate system was set up at a different web address. So while you could learn about coffees at the Stumptown website, you had to go to another website to buy them! Because we were going with a third party to handle the e-commerce system, it was very difficult to make it attractive. There were serious limitations to the way we could convey our information, and it was just not suited to Stumptown.

We decided that the solution was to build a brand new site, using HTML and all good web standards, that was chock full of information about Stumptown Coffee, and led you right to a place where you could buy the coffee, if you were interested. This is what Stumptown - and their customers - deserved.

We wanted our client to be able to update content at any time - add videos, add pictures, add the latest news, all on their own time. We wanted the videos and photography to be the absolute best quality possible. And we wanted lots and lots of details. Each coffee needed to have not just a picture and description, as before, but as many pictures as they wanted, details on which beans were organic and which were fair trade, and even a Google Map of where exactly the coffee was harvested!

(To see an example, visit a coffee and click on the latitude and longitude link on the right side. That’s exactly where your coffee comes from!)

So the stage was set. We were officially off and running, tackling one of the most exciting projects for Needmore so far. Tomorrow, we’ll begin talking about our design process.