Great clients bring great products and ideas. The founders of The Duffer Snuffer, Troy Thompson and Eddie Parish, came to us with their product, and a business model that made us jealous. Scheduled to be at the PGA Expo in a little over a month, they needed to deliver a rich online experience to their customers and vendors. With the freedom to expand on there ideas and current branding, we launched out on a vigorous mission to bring this product to every golf course in America and Britain.
View Duffer Snuffer Project Details
Branding Analysis
Eddie and Troy had already dove into the exact demographic targeting of their product, and Byron Baker Design’s goal was to deliver to that demographic the Duffer Snuffer. As a new brand, we arrived at a clean slate. The Duffer Snuffer is targeted at men and women, aged 18 – 70, who are avid players of golf. Secondary targeting is to the actual golf courses, to clean up the mess of cigarettes left behind by golfers on the tee boxes, fairway, roughs, and greens. To deliver the Duffer Snuffer brand to our target, we wanted to develop a clean, easy to navigate site that emphasizes the importance of the Duffer Snuffer to the golfer and the coarse. Heavy consideration was also placed on SEO and easily modifiable meta, title, h1, and copy to optimize any digital marketing campaigns in the future. As we set out on our mission to establish the Duffer Snuffer brand, we also noted the importance of social media, email campaigns, online advertising, and the use of video.
Competitive Analysis
When asked “Who is your Competition”, Eddie and Troy replied “Nobody!”. This placed added importance on the branding of this product to the consumer, and developing a satisfying experience on the buyers first discovery. We took a quick look around at well established golf brands, their use (and over use) of green, and how they establish their conversion process for digital advertising, branding, and sales.
Intro to the Solution
We started with a lot of media material provided by Eddie and Troy of Fairway Innovations, LLC. Using this material, we began from the ground up on design with our wire frame. We chose a static, non-scrolling layout that would occupy the landscape of a minimum 1024×768 canvas. We chose a two row, offset column design for the index, a three column layout for the purchase page, two columns for the about section, and a three column weighted center for the news. This layout was chosen based on the content needed and some assumptions about how the end user would interact. The index page contained a large Flash movie with an introduction advertisement for the Duffer Snuffer, and an interactive description based on the product packaging.
The Framework
Byron Baker Design uses a custom PHP framework based on the Model-View-Controller pattern. This pattern is ideal for most websites and digital applications and has the huge advantage of separating the data layer from presentation. We created several custom PHP classes to handle bringing in RSS feeds from our WordPress news platform, adding image support to the RSS files, and displaying them on our home page. We also made heavy use of the jQuery javascript API, as well as a few selected methods from Scriptaculous.
A Lot of Flash
Using the Adobe Flash production environment, we created several custom AS3 classes to handle repetitive code, and keep the timeline clean. For any developers out there, if you have ever had to scrub a timeline looking for code, you know what we mean. Using object oriented AS3 makes your production file clean, and allows you to organize your code so that you can make easy modifications in the future. We also used the Grant Skinner package to provide easy effects and event handling between our tweens, and utilized the new TLF text within Flash CS5. We always provide alternative content for iPhone and iPad with the use of SWF object, and some neat tricks for delivering content to the search engines, as we know they don’t read Flash movies.
The Design
We created all of the graphics for this site from scratch, with the help of a few elements from Fairway Innovations. We choose a subtle gray theme for high contrast with the branded logo and the use of green in the headers and copy. We also created all of our buttons in a sprite file, for a more appealing user interface that was easy to use on touch devices such as iPad and iPhone.
WordPress News Platform
We stressed the importance of new content to Fairway Innovations in helping establish their brand, and to do this we used our favorite publishing platform WordPress. We took our HTML and graphics, and created a custom theme to mimic the other pages of the website. We integrated feeds from Twitter and Facebook, as well as social networking buttons for each. With the ability to auto post to both Facebook and Twitter, we helped Eddie and Troy reduce the time it takes them to post to both of these networks. Additionally, we have the ability to extend the News section to do anything required by Fairway Innovations LLC in their publishing needs and beyond. As an added feature, we used cron jobs to limit the pull from Facebook and Twitter to one per hour, and set up a specific cron job for database backup, which also emails the database to Fairway Innovations once per week.
Email Campaigns and Facebook Customized
We wanted to deliver the same experience for the Duffer Snuffers email campaigns as we did for their website. Using our favorite 3rd party software, we generated custom branded HTML email templates for use by Fairway Innovations in marketing their product. Additionally, we created custom Facebook tabs, to show much of the same content that was included on their website through their Facebook page, increasing their ability to obtain customers through social sharing networks.
Video
We emphasized the importance of using video as a channel to communicate the Duffer Snuffer product to Fairway Innovations customer base. By using YouTube, we created a branded channel where viewers can subscribe to the latest videos on the Duffer Snuffer. We also created a plug-in for WordPress that would deliver YouTube content through the Flash Player to users on PC and Mac, and as an MP4 file to users on iPad, iPhone, or mobile devices.
Fore!
“Fore!” is shouted as a warning during a golf game when it appears possible that a golf ball may hit other players or spectators. Our goal was to extend the Duffer Snuffer brand to the demographic brought to us by Fairway Innovations for their product, and we don’t mind hitting anyone when we launched the brand either. We accomplished this with our vast knowledge of the online marketplace, extensive background in developing digital applications, and latest design trends such as CSS3. Furthermore, we empowered Fairway Innovations with the ability to post the latest news on their product (even via mobile phone), use social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter to market their product, launch email campaigns targeted at specific audiences (think customers, golf courses, vendors), and do this in all in a very time efficient manner. It was a pleasure working with Eddie and Troy from Fairway Innovations, LLC. I once heard: “To be the best, you have to surround yourself with the best”, and in this is the perfect case in point to prove that.