The homepage features a dynamic accordion billboard slider that reveals an intro to the company and their two target markets; those seeking research and those providing it. A dynamic scorecard on the slider displays the total awarded to researchers to date. The way Article One Partners works is visually explained in a custom infographic, also designed by Slice of Lime.

The website allows potential researchers to register, dive into their researcher community, and browse past and current studies.

While reflecting on her experience working with Slice of Lime, Article One Partners’ Founder and CEO, Cheryl Milone, noted:

“The Slice of Lime team was professional and nimble when working to understand our needs, and they exceeded our expectations. They have a strong design sense, and the feedback we’ve been given confirms that the new site design is a trillion times better than the old. We have appreciated working with them.”

Article One Partners’  Vice President of Technology, Eric Baer, was an integral leader on the project. He reflected:

“The site turned out just as I envisioned it.  We had big goals for the new site and I think Slice of Lime delivered a project that’s meeting all of them. The quality of code implemented is something that really sets Slice of Lime apart from other web agencies.  It was not an easy implementation into our existing site and they pulled it off on-time.”

To find out more about Article One Partners’ services and success, go to www.articleonepartners.com.

Users can easily browse the site using the top navigation or the billboard call-to-action buttons. Diving deeper into the navigation takes the users to details about CloudArray™ and the solutions it provides.

To find out more about TwinStrata’s addordable enterprise-class storage solutions, visit www.twinstrata.com.

The main navigation allows the user to quickly browse the current and upcoming Standing Cloud products and to sign up for the free trial edition.

Slice of Lime leveraged Wordpress to provide content management tools to Standing Cloud, making it easy for their team to update text and images on the site.

To discover the easiest way to deploy, manage, and scale applications anywhere in the cloud, visit www.standingcloud.com.

Users can easily browse the Incentium overview and products through a rotating billboard on the hompage. Diving deeper into the navigation takes the users to details about the product offerings and the support services Incentium provides their customers.

To offer your recipients the industry’s widest selection of redemption choices, or treat valued employees or customers to a shopping spree wherever Visa is accepted, visit http://businessdirect.incentium.com/SMB/.

Slice of Lime developed a design for the Pennyberry site that uses imagery of small business owners, Pennyberry’s main customer. The three-page website shares the Pennyberry story and entices visitors to call to find out more.

If you want to find a more effective way to advertise your products and services locally through special offers, promotions or coupons, visit www.pennyberry.com to find out how their dynamic solution can work for you and your business.

TechStars is a summer program that helps get a small set of startups funded and off the ground while learning from the best. Slice of Lime has worked closely with TechStars for the last three years, including doing a previous version of the website. Slice of Lime re-invented the TechStars website this year to reflect the hands-on “getting things done” mentality of this summer program.

Design

Familiar graphical elements associated with a busy workplace are used throughout the site. Scotch tape holds up a list of mentors, a Polaroid photo highlights featured stories, a torn piece of paper with duct tape shows a list of the latest things happening at TechStars. Hand drawn arrows and whiteboard markers sitting at the bottom of the design help continue this theme.

Development

TechStars is completely driven by Wordpress. Every time a “mentor” is added as a page to the website, the small photo of the mentor automatically shows up on the homepage.

Similarly, as new companies are added to the site, they show up in relevant places throughout the site without any extra coding needed. With the flexibility found within Wordpress, TechStars founder, David Cohen, had no problem keeping the site updated with fresh data throughout the year.

We had a wonderful time building this site and working closely with the TechStars teams this summer. We made some great friendships and look forward to continuing our support of the program in future years.

Gnip is radically simplifying the way companies access and integrate the web’s data for use in social and business applications.

Strategy

We began the Gnip redesign with a focus on target demographic and goals. While it was clear that one goal was to maintain the playful spirit that is part of the Gnip culture, it would also be important to attract CTOs and CEOs to Gnip’s solutions and products. Therefore, the old site’s homepage tagline “Making data portability suck less” and complicated chart needed to go (see image below).

We replaced the headline with the more straight-forward, “Data for the Real-time Web” and focused on guiding the user to try Gnip for free and to learn more about how Gnip works. A step by step animation on the homepage would help to tell the Gnip story progressively while keeping the amount of viewable text on the homepage to a minimum.

Design

While the headline had changed to be more corporate, we maintained Gnip’s fun culture through the use of cartoon imagery. In-page navigation allows users to learn more about Gnip without leaving the homepage. A character on the homepage gestures to all of the services that Gnip can easily tie into. Icons were used to illustrate Gnip’s features and benefits (see image below).

We refined the Gnip logo, added the tagline “Delivering the Web’s Data”, and chose a new color scheme to bring a more professional feel to the website.

Development

In order to demonstrate how Gnip works, we developed an application using jQuery, AJAX, and XML to show activity that is happening on Gnip’s servers in real time. This not only shows that there are many transactions happening through Gnip, but also highlights popular companies that Gnip works with such as Flickr and Twitter. The end result is a module that captivates both the CTO and the CEO of a potential new client.

It was a pleasure working with the team at Gnip. They have a powerful set of solutions and products and the new marketing website has lead to a boost in new leads interested to learn more.

Foundry Group is a venture capital firm focused on making investments in early-stage information technology, Internet and software startups. Their passion is working alongside entrepreneurs to give birth to new technologies and to build those technologies into industry-leading companies.

Slice of Lime was responsible for the strategy, design, and development of the new Foundry Group website.

In order to achieve Foundry Group’s goal to become a valuable resource, we created “The Foundry Group Blog”. Using the blog, any one of the partners can create articles related to the venture capital world.

Another way to achieve transparency was to put Foundry Group’s team front and center. A photo of the entire team is featured on the homepage and the “Team” page offers each partner’s direct email address and full bio.

This was a rewarding project for us to work on and a great opportunity to work even closer with the extremely intelligent folks that make up Foundry Group. It put a smile on our faces to see, just after launch, PE Hub named the site “the best VC website…ever.”

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.

From pilot projects to distributed, multi-team programs, Rally Software Development’s family of Agile lifecycle management solutions gives teams the visibility and collaboration needed to formalize and scale Agile development practices that deliver high-value software in rapid iterations.

Slice of Lime is responsible for the strategy, design, and development for the new Rally Software Development website.

We started with a strategy process around the new target demographic and goals of the website. One of the core takeaways from this process was that Rally needed to appeal to a broader range of audiences, or “personas”. The main personas that were identified were:

• Project Managers
• Developers
• QA/Testers
• Product Managers
• VPs of Development

We also decided that it was important for the website to not only pitch Rally’s products, but to also be a resource for people to educate themselves on what “agile development” really means and how it can benefit a company.

Once the goals and target demographic were established, we began an “Information Architecture” and “Wireframing” process.

The information architecture helped us identify the core pages of both the website and the content management tool that we would be building to manage dynamic content.

The wireframes helped us identify core elements that needed to exist on each page and the priority of those elements.

Once we were in agreement on the information architecture and wireframes, we moved into design.

We went through several rounds of design and candidly discussed which elements from the designs were working the best to match the culture of Rally and to speak to their goals and target demographic.

One of the major design elements on the homepage was the option to browse by “personas”. Using a dropdown menu, a user can view a version of the homepage that speaks to who they are using real Rally client testimonials:

Rally’s product pages offer clear calls to action to Buy, Sign Up for Free, or View a Demo:

Additionally, these pages show relevant links at the bottom for classes, services, blog posts, and downloads that apply to the product they’re learning about at that moment.

Slice of Lime built a custom content management system to control documents, events, and news (among other things) that show up on the Rally Software Development website.

The “Downloads” section of the website doubles as a lead generation tool, passing contact information through SalesForce before allowing visitors of the site to view a document.

Slice of Lime worked with Rally to make sure reporting was setup on each page to track the path users were taking through the site and at which point those users opted to sign up for a free trial or download a document.

The site was coded using “web standards” making it fast loading, easy to update, and indexible by search engines like Google.

There’s plenty more to discover at Rally Software Development and new features are being rolled out almost every week. Check out the site and let us know what you think. This project was challenging and one of our favorites to work on this year.