State~by~State Gardening

{Website & Blog Design,
E-commerce Integration }

State-by-State Gardening is a division of The Team Advertising & Publishing. It publishes 15 regional gardening magazines over 16 states.

Web Design

When I arrived at The Team, State-by-State Gardening (SBS) had different static websites for each publication. The sites were arduous to update and were also unfriendly to search engines. These websites were seldom updated and lacked incentives to generate new and repeat traffic. To encourage regular updates of site content, I wanted to make updates easy. For this I recommended the CMS, Expression Engine.

Expression Engine (CMS)

Through Expression Engine, I redesigned the SBS family of websites. The new design vastly increased the features offered on the website, allowed for greater accuracy in analytic research, increased search engine visibility and made it possible for bloggers from each of the SBS publication regions to post to the website without any advanced computer knowledge.

E-commerce

I recreated the existing SBS bookstore using ZenCart. The new store offers improved security and better functionally than the solution SBS was previously using.

Blogs

SBS highlights three staff bloggers for each of the 15 gardening regions they cover. I created unique blog headers to fit the theme of each blog. The headers are compilations of stock illustration altered to fit our style guides. For some blogs, I illustrated the header from scratch.

In addition to creating the look of the blogs, I also wrote and designed a user guide explaining how to blog within the State-by-State blogging system. I provide phone and email technical support to our staff bloggers and maintain an updated copy of the user guide to address common problems.

Staff Participation

As part of the redesign, The Team staff can access an internal company website. From this restricted-access portion of our site, employees can interact with the various components of our digital offerings. Staff can: submit error reports, submit feature requests, see visitor statistics, view start and end dates of any ads entered into our CMS and download copies of various company documents.

Additionally, the different departments of The Team can take responsibility for managing aspects of the web properties. For example, the advertising representatives can upload and schedule their own ads, the bookstore manager can change which books are featured on each website and the editors can make corrections to articles and blog entries.

Live Site: statebystategardening.com