Pike Research
Pike Research, based locally in the Boulder area, provides Cleantech market intelligence and research. Pike Research worked with the Slice of Lime team to created the strategy, design, and development for their new website.
Strategy
We began our planning of the Pike Research site knowing that we would need to account for later growth phases. The first phase would include several levels of registered users, content available only to registered users, newsletter content, and a user experience that would allow for e-commerce integration in the future. Another major goal was to create an attention-getting and informative homepage. The research topics covered by Pike can be expansive, so giving the user a quick glance at the major topics was important. We accomplished this goal by creating a five-tiered focus area that the user could interact with to learn more about the five most current research topics.
We identified two main types of users for the new Pike site; Registered Users and Non-registered Users. Registered users would have full access to report summaries and details with the option to obtain both Free and Paid reports. Non-registered users would only have access to limited information and to the free reports offered by Pike Research. Of course, registration is free, but required for full research access.
Apart from the research reports offered by Pike Research, the new site is also home to news, blog posts, and consulting information.
Design
The design we created needed to speak to the environmental aspects of Pike Research. The final design’s colors, white space, and minimal environmental illustrations effectively communicate their ‘green’ message. This allows the research to speak for itself with the design in a supporting role. Choosing the perfect set of icons is both fun and challenging. We went through multiple icons sets using both stock and in-house created options. The task here was to find something that was a balance between industrial, illustrated, and tech.
Development
One major requirement was to make the site scalable, allowing the Pike Research team to update and grow not only their offered reports but the overall page content of the site. We were able to completely mask the fact that the site completely is driven by WordPress, which involved some tweaking of WordPress code in a several places. To create the home page focus area, we customized jQuery code to rotate between the five research topics until the user interacts with the 5 buttons below – at which point they gain full control. Several custom WordPress plug-ins were also created to handle aspects of the report detail pages. This was a first here at Slice of Lime in creating custom WordPress plug-ins, and something we will be doing more of in the future.
It was a pleasure working with Clint of Pike Research and we look forward to continuing to grow the site in the future.
Tags: wordpress
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