Industry: Advertising
Type of Site: Professional Directory of Commercial Artist Portfolios
Client: Creative Source
Timeline: less than 4 months to inital launch, then ongoing from 2003 to present
Budget: Approx $20,000 CAD, plus ongoing updates and hosting
Company Profile:
Creative
Source is a well-known company offering portfolio services to
professional Illustrators, Photographers, Designers, and
Stylists. They have been in business for more than 24 years,
publishing an annual portfolio book that is distributed to Advertising
Agencies, Art Directors, and anyone else seeking creative
professionals. They are very exclusive, proudly showcasing only
the best in the industry.
Problem:
Creative
Source wanted to convert their print business into an online business,
to save costs and keep up to date with new market trends and growing
Internet usage. They already had a good-looking website, which
was re-designed each year, but it was serving only as an add-on to the
print publication, and was not providing enough value to generate any
revenue of its own.
Solution:
We
produced a totally custom website and CMS solution that has
successfully achieved all of the client's goals, and resulted in their
profitable conversion to a web-based company. The website has
been extremely
well-received throughout the creative industry, and is renowned for its
clean interface and intuitively powerful features.
The
frontend website interface fulfills strict design objectives, including
pixel accuracy and very clean, ultra-simple user interface. The
sophisticated artificial intelligence is all hidden behind the scenes,
producing an interface that is so intuitive and satisfying that most
user can't explain why they like it so much!
On
the backend, the weboffice CMS integrates seamlessly with the website,
offering powerful Content Management with 5 user levels. First,
and most importantly, the artists are able to completely manage their
own portfolios. This is not a simple CMS matter, because many of these
200-or-so artists are not technically savvy, and ALL of them require
extreme attention to detail, especially for how their images are
displayed. Since the website is so exclusive and high-end, the
account managers must have control over every aspect of the website and
control over the content that is added by the artists, and the CMS
delivers this functionality, allowing them to run a slim and efficient
company while maintaining the highest levels of service in the industry.
Another
important note is that as a design-centric website, the MAJORITY of the
users are Mac-based, so every aspect of the frontend and backend must
work flawlessly on Mac platforms. Many websites and CMS solutions
fail to provide Mac users with the same privileges afforded to PC
Internet users, but our solution has fulfilled this need with flying
colours.
Additionally,
the website owes much of its success to ongoing marketing. Our
solution supplemented Creative Soruce's traditional marketing methods
(such as email campaigns, print and web advertising, etc.), with
ongoing SEO services (Search Engine Optimization), including a unique
system that creates a subdomain website for each artist. This may
sound commonplace, but in fact the website headers are all dynamically
powered, and editable by the artists. What this means is that the
artists control how the search engines perceive them, and each artist
portfolio is perceived as its own website! For example, go to
Google and type in the keyword "interaxive". After the first
page, you will see more than five pages of results for different
artists from Creative Source. Notice that they are not grouped
into one listing, because the subdomain system is so efficient at
convincing Search Engines like Google that every portfolio is a
separate website.
Since
the website launch in 2003, we have continued to update and maintain
the website and CMS weboffice, while also hosting web servers, to meet
the growing and ever-changing demands of the
client, the artist members, the website users, and the entire creative
community.
Canada