Case Study : Website Redesign

Client: The Société Culinaire Philanthropique

Category: Culinary

Website: www.societeculinaire.com

Challenge

The Societe Culinaire Philanthropique is one of the oldest chef organizations in the United States with a mission of promoting French Cuisine in the United States. While their circa 1998 website structure and visual design needed to be updated, the project wasn't just about aesthetics or modern web standards. We needed to maintain time honored traditions while taking into account a shift in the needs of the organization, the membership base and their website users. A tight budget meant finding creative ways to make use of elements we already had.

Results

The website successfully facilitates navigation, highlights special events, provides instant access to client publications and showcases the skills and culinary creations of both professional and student chefs.

Creative and thorough site planning saved time and money. Although the site specifications called for a wider page width, we kept the left sidebar and footer area practically the same. The addition of a right sidebar area was perfect for making use of the additional space to hold slide shows, media content and feature boxes. A brand new masthead and state-of-the-art menu system made a world of difference.

Not only did the redesign meet and surpass client objectives, the infrastructure is in place to easily support future expansion.

The Work

After consulting with Société Culinaire to establish a realistic set of website objectives for the project, Barbara specfied design and development guidelines to keep the project on track and on budget.

Although we had designed and developed the original site, the 13-14 year old website had used and adapted to the prevailing technology of it's time: HTML tables, emedded presentation styles, navigation link images and narrow page widths. Over the years, the site had become a hodgepodge of old and newer code. It was way past time for an update and the client was ready for the overhaul.

Working within the established guidelines, we worked closely with the Société on visual layouts and the information architecture. Great rapport facilitated a professional and productive exchange of ideas that resulted in a final color scheme, interface design and a menu hierarchy that everyone was happy with.

Lynn Creative constructed the site's framework according to current web standards using CSS/HTML to position and style the content with a minimal amount of coding. A text based navigation system was built with dynamic drop down menu items. Programming was implemented to call in repetitive elements dynamically. This resulted in a flexible, faster loading, easier to update website.

Rotating slide shows and video were added to key sections of the site to balance textual content, enhance the user experience and capture attention.

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