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http://skateneon.com

Give us some background on some of the members of your team and the company that you work for.

Flia web design is a small design & development shop based in Montreal Quebec Canada. We specialize in web design, branding and ExpressionEngine development, We also do some consulting and print work. through the years we have built an awesome network of folks we like to work with depending on the scope of the project. At the moment we are currently looking to add a new PHP developer/designer to our team, preferably someone who is familiar with CI and the inner workings of EE.

Tell us about the site. What vision were you trying to fill for the client?

Skate Neon was a great client to work with, they gave us total creative freedom. The site was designed to highlight the content of the shop and ensure a great user experience. One of our main goal was to showcase the shop and its products with a fully detailed page for each product.

We worked with the Skate Neon team at creating an intuitive and interactive site to ensure user satisfaction when visiting the site. We spent a lot of time on research and wireframes. Building a modular system that can be reused throughout the entire site and an easy to use backend for the site administrators making updating the site a joy. Design wise the site is based on a grid that is very flexible and gives a consistency throughout the entire site. We are using a lot of CSS3 and Keith Clarke’s IE.js file is used for IE.

Instead of using stock photos, we wanted to create our own, so we had Jen, our go to Photographer, go in and set up 2 photo shoots with some simple directions that we gave her and she came through with some beautiful photos of the Neon Skate crew, and we used the photos throughout the entire site giving it a very unique, personal & Montreal feel which is something the client wanted. 

Was there a specific reason why EE was chosen for this project? Why?

A few out of the box solutions were mentioned during the initial meeting, but their limitations and the horrible templating system they rely on were a big no no for us on so many levels. We wanted to create a fun & unique experience, something that stood out from the table based out of the box change the logo and go templates roller derby shops out there, we needed flexibility and ExpressionEngine was perfect for this.

EE was a platform we had used quite a bit in the past and is always a joy to work with, it is very flexible, we can design what ever we want and we know it wont be a problem implementing a site in EE, the community is by far one of the best when it comes to support.

Another aspect of ExpressionEngine that we love is the way the system is built, with just a few add-ons we can customize the installation to our client’s specific needs and streamline their experience making using their website a customized experience and a joy to use. We also built a couple default templates,  that the admin can use when creating new pages. something that becomes quite a pain to do in other systems

What add-ons were used? and why?

We used several add-ons for this site. For the blog section we use Pixel & Tonic’s Matrix in combination with Levis’ LG Replace and nGen files to let the client post images in their blog posts and position them where they want, AJP wrote a great article on this. There’s also a video on vimeo. We’re using the ED Text Truncate plugin to control the output and create excerpt on the fly, we use this on every site we build. For the shop we used CartThrob to power the cart and loved it. Low Widon’t to control the titles in the products section and not end up with ugly trailing widows,

We used the Stand Alone Member Register add-on from IntoEEtive which was recommended By Chris Kennedy (@Onebrightlight). It was a joy to use and let’s us create a custom log-in or registration forms using the default templating system.

We are also using the (sometimes i work sometimes i don’t) twitter time-line plugging to show the latest tweets to the site’s visitor

Some other add-ons we used are Low no spam to control spam, Low title, Freeform for the detailed contact page, and EE Gravatar for the comment section

Most of the streamlining was made possible thanks to Pixel & tonic’s FieldFrames Matrix and nGen file which makes uploading new product or posting an entry a piece of cake for the site admin.

What difficulties did you encounter? How did you address them? Was there a particular add-on that got you out of a bind?

One of the limitations we ran into was the lack of real time shipping plug-in that works with the Canada post API. The CartThrob guys came through with a custom shipping module. Their support is top notch.

intoEEtive Stand Alone Member Register saved us a lot of time in developing and testing, a great little add-on that will now be part of all our default EE installs.

Other Add-ons

Stand-Alone Member Register
Low No spam
Low Widon’t
ED Text
EE Gravatar
Twitter Timeline
LG Replace
Edit Menu & Ajax Tab

Company: Pablo Boerr

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