LimeRed Studio

And then there were three: LimeRed hires Erik Kraft

HI EVERYONE.

Please join me in welcoming our newest staff member, Erik Kraft. Starting September 8th, Erik will join LimeRed Studio with some serious design skills and invaluable programming expertise. Kristi-Lynn and I are thrilled for him to join us as our fulll-time Art Director and EE Programmer. We are excited for the shape of things to come and anticipate BIG things continuing to happen!

Headshot forthcoming…

Erik comes to LimeRed Studio with 8 years of experience as a web designer and front-end developer for higher education institutions, not-for-profits, and small businesses of various stripes. While working for the University of Chicago, he redesigned the university's central homepage and College Admissions website. Following these formidable projects, he struck out on his own as a freelancer, and spent three years working directly with clients to design and build beautiful, functional websites. Erik has done freelance work for LimeRed for the past several months, and is thrilled to be coming on board as a full-timer.

When not pushing pixels in Photoshop or turning out well-crafted code, Erik is likely to be found with his nose in a book or taking Gemma, his beloved half-Rottweiler, half-Australian Shepherd, for a walk. He trawls used bookstores for vintage Penguin paperbacks to add to his collection, and his Ultimate Design Hero is Max Huber.

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So now we're up to three full timers and a handful of contractors. Here's to job creation, small business growth and keeping it local.

Why we write user guides

In 1999, I bought a manual transmission car without ever driving one before. It was small, black, shiny, had a spoiler and I was sure I looked great in it. The salesperson showed me how to drive it in the dealership parking lot and somehow I made it home. The next day I drove it from Des Moines, IA to Chicago, IL.

It was exciting to buy something expensive, shiny and pretty. It was frustrating to learn how to drive the thing. See where I'm going here? Remember that LimeRed builds websites…

You should be able to drive and maintain your site. Unless you're a massive corporation with a massive budget who can afford hours upon hours of web maintenance, you should be able to add content and do general things yourself. Fire your web designer if they hold your content or your site hostage. And then call me. 312-238-9070

When we build a site, we're either using Drupal or ExpressionEngine. One is free, one is not. They're pretty much the same thing, with a few different out-of-the-box features. More on EE and Drupal later, my friends. The point is: they are both Content Management Systems (CMS) and they do what the sound like they do: they help you manage your content.

And with every site we build, we write a user guide that covers the genernal maintenance and content management tasks you're going to want to do in the near and distant future. Tasks like:

• Changing and adding copy
• Updating images and videos
• Adding blog posts
• Adding and removing products
• Updating your store locations
• Adding news items or featured events
• Adding downloadable items, like PDFs
• Managing your newsletter subscriptions
• Managing your user comments and reviews
• Add and update your keywords and page descriptions for SEO

Now, this user guide isn't going to make you a webmaster. When you have structural changes to make, large features to add, major functions to build, then you call us. But when you need to change a headline, or add a new staff member's bio, you should be able to do that without knowing code, without even knowing how to design.

Why would you ever pay thousands of dollars on a business asset like a website without learning how to use it? Back to the car analogy: Would you spend tens of thousands of dollars on a car and have no idea how to drive it? You wouldn't. (Unless you were me, at 21, with a penchant for sporty cars.) Would you pay someone every time you had to open the door, adjust a mirror, change the radio station, or check the wiper fluid? No. You'd do it yourself.

We designed this site for Northwestern University

Many thanks to development partner Arlo Media for the referral and awesome work on this one.

We designed this site for a grant program at Northwestern University. It's a three-part program, each with a different audience, under one big brand. We took the staff through a design process that included research and branding exploration in the form of moodboards and a wordlist. What came out of that design process was a clearly-defined visual direction that we then applied to logo and the major pages and templates in the site. NU has full control of their content — it's all in Wordpress with a few extra pieces to make it work.

Here's the link to our portoflio with more images.

High Hopes for Pets: Another successful Chicago business

We designed and built this e-commerce website for High Hopes for Pets, a local Chicago company that makes the BEST dog treats with the BEST ingredients. We love our pets! And we love what High Hopes does. In addition to making great treats, High Hopes also give a percentage of their profits to their nonprofit, The High Hopes for Pets Foundation to support local pet shelters.

And now they are in Whole Foods! So go look for them or buy online. It's great to see another local company in super growth mode. (Like us!) They are in a number of local stores too.

This site features:

• Ecommerce store with variables like multi-ship and personalized cards
• Nutrition blog
• Decorating and party tips
• ExpressionEngine CMS, so they can edit everything
• Full integration with third-party shopping cart and gateway
• Feeds order information to external distribution facility

LimeRed Studio is a nationally-certified WBE (Women’s Business Enterprise)

We're 100% woman-owned! We made it!

LimeRed Studio, inc is proud to annouce our certification as a women's business enterprise through the Women's Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC), the national's largers third party certfified of businesses owned and operated by women in the U.S. The WBENC is a resource for the more than 700 US companies and government agencies that rely on WBENC's certification as an integral part of their supplier diversity programs.

WBENC's national standard of certification implemented by the Women's Business Development Center (WBDC) - Chicago is a meticulous process including an in-depth reiew of the business and site inspection.

We're ready to walk through some newly opened doors!