Clickfarm Makes Website Project As Easy As Learning How to Ride a Bike For Kansas City-Based Architecture Firm

BlueBike Architecture, Inc. is a Kansas City, Mo.-based firm specializing in entertainment architecture and design for restaurants, theaters and resorts.

After seven years in business, BlueBike decided that it was time to take a look at its brand identity and embark on a new campaign to “re-introduce” its professionals and services to the marketplace.

“We conducted an audit of all of our marketing materials—from our logo to our business cards to our brochures to our Website—and decided that we needed to go in a new direction,” said BlueBike Art Director Matt Mills, who oversaw creation of the company’s new Website as part of the overall rebranding process.

“It was clear that our old Website was not getting the job done,” said Mills, “which was not good because it’s one of our most important marketing tools. In fact, we like to think of our Website as another employee, whose job is to sell our business to prospective clients.”

BlueBike wanted to create a Website that they could use to support their brand identity for many years to come, but would also have the functionality to enable members of the team to upload fresh content on a regular basis.

Design also was vitally important (after all, it’s one of BlueBike’s core competencies), but containing costs was also a key consideration when building the new Website.

“As a designer, I had a general idea of how I wanted the site to work and what I wanted it to look like, but I was also very realistic about my limitations,” said Mills.

Mills said he interviewed a handful of firms to help BlueBike create its new Website, but settled on Kansas City-based Clickfarm on the strength of a personal reference and after his initial conversations with the Clickfarm team.

“A lot of Web developers will have an attitude that because of their expertise, the client knows nothing,” he said, “but with Clickfarm there were no egos—just regular guys wanting to do good work.”

“What I liked about the Clickfarm team was that, while they were clearly technologically sound, they had a laid-back approach and talked about our project in very understandable terms.”

“The Clickfarm team knew that staying within our budget was important and were helpful when it came to recommending strategies that would not only make the Website look and perform the right way, but would also help us cut programming and development costs,” said Mills.

“The Clickfarm team is very knowledgeable about new programming techniques and technologies that are out there, and they realize that it’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel in order to create a solution.”

“When we’d meet to discuss an issue, the Clickfarm team was quick to show me examples from other Websites of techniques that we could use on our own site, which helped me to understand how our site would look and how it would work,” said Mills. “It really provided me with a level of comfort knowing that our site would do what we wanted it to do.”

Mills said that Clickfarm was also able to adapt his own graphic design sensibilities from a static, “print only” format to one that would work well for the Web. “I am accustomed to designing for the printed page and I tend to be very picky about the way things look,” he said. “Clickfarm was able to incorporate some design elements that kept the integrity of my design while ensuring that the site would look and perform correctly no matter what kind of computer or Web browser the visitor was using.”

Mills reports that the “Project” section of the new Website is most popular with the firm’s clients and prospects. “We wanted to make this section was highly interactive and presented our work in a format other than a collection of thumbnails or a laundry list of projects,” he said.

And Clickfarm equipped the BlueBike Website with their Content Management platform, which allows Matt and other members of the team to upload new content to the Website with ease. “It’s good to know that if I needed to hand this task off to an intern, that he or she could handle it—it’s very easy to use,” said Mills.

“Overall, we couldn’t be more pleased with our new Website,” he said.

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