When commissioned to build a new website for the freshly rebranded Natures Way Foods, we jumped at the chance to get creative with the ‘nature’ element of their business, and play on the fact that they grow and distribute fresh produce all year round.
Background / Objectives
Our client’s brief for the website was to create a more consumer-focused online experience that emphasised their strong environmental and sustainability policies, and their contributions to the local community in their beautiful South Coast location.
As well as being engaging and educational for consumers, the site also needed to be straightforward and information rich and remain relevant to the wide range of NWF’s stakeholders, including the local community, suppliers and wholesale customers.
The Solution
These core business themes of nature, environment and produce all year round inspired a site that displays in four (virtual) seasons, acting as a backdrop for promoting different produce at different times of the year.
After reviewing all the other work we’d done for Nature’s Way, we were inspired by the colour palettes used in the packaging of different flavours of Naturo fruit pots, and came up with the idea of designing a site that could be viewed in 4 different colour-ways, to represent spring, summer, autumn and winter.
The all seasons website dynamically displays in the current real-world season by default, while allowing users to choose another season, triggering a switch in scenery, weather and colour palette throughout the site. Our design and build team incorporated bespoke illustration and Flash animation with clever use of CSS, JavaScript and ActionScript to allow the Flash area of the site and rest of the site to “talk” to each other, facilitating synchronised season change of all areas of the site. Try it yourself! www.natureswayfoods.com
Another important part of the brief was to ensure that there were plenty of ways for people to find content they might be looking for, and cross-promote other content.
The page tagging system in our content management system, V:CMS, allows the categorisation of pages and news articles with topics that dynamically form a tag search facility, as well as method for cross-promoting complimentary content throughout the site.
Our super-user friendly in-line CMS interface allows clients to edit pages, insert and resize images and documents on the fly, while navigating the site as it appears in a web browser.
We’re so proud of this site that we thought it was a definite candidate for the Outstanding Digital Design category of the Digital Media Awards South (DiMas) so we await the judges’ decisions with baited breath. You can see our entry with some further demonstrations of V:CMS in the awards entry PDF.