Proposal for Schürch Woodworking

Their main website address is www.schurchwoodwork.com

Scope.

Paul Schürch presently has a website at www.schurchwoodwork.com. His website presently features his fine furniture, workshops, tools, supplies, and videos. He shared his desired to redesign and redevelop his website and talked at length about his ideas regarding his where he would like to take it. His presen website is about 10 years old, and it contains a great deal of content under a variety of pages and links. He presently has someone maintaining the website entirely by hand. It is not a database driven website.

His vision is to take his present website and break it out into three specific websites. The first website would include his work with fine furniture. We were discussing the possibilityof using the domain name furniture.schurchwoodwork.com. This website would serve mostly as a portfolio of Paul's work, a resume and experience section, an artists statement, exhibitions, articles, and purchasing information. We could also include the ability to have a blog exist on this portion of the website as well. However, that may be better suited to the next of the 3 websites.

The second website would deal with seminars and education, possibly using the sub-domain education.schurchwoodwork.com. Paul presently has a seminar schedule online and travels to various cities to conduct one-day, or multi-day seminars, private tutoring, and lectures. Paul also has DVDs and books available on decorative veneer, marquetry, and furniture design. These areas are presently in his seminars and education area of his current website. He would like to keep these elements and add online classes and downloads. Paul envisions using online videos as a tool for giving these lessons. He presently has PDF files that he has for free download. We discussed the possibility of using these as “give aways” to people in exchange for their e-mail address. These email addresses will be collected for his yet to be determined e-mail newsletter.

With regard to access of online classes and/or downloads, we will need a subscription-based set of tools to manage access to this private area. Visitors will require a subscription to access any of the content within this “walled-off” area of the website. This functionality will be part of a later phase as we will explain later.

The third part of his current website that he would like to break out under its own subdomain website is tools and supplies at supplies.schurchwoodwork.com. Paul presently sells a variety of tools, adhesives, and veneers to people that are interested in woodworking. The online store uses PayPal and offers a PDF form for people to download mail in if they are not comfortable using e-commerce. Paul would like to continue this part of the website.

In front of these three subdomains would be a landing page that would allow people to go to the marquetry section of the website which contains Paul's high-end furniture for sale, or go to his seminars and education website, or go to the tools and supplies website.

All of this content presently exists on his current website. It is very dense with many links that some people find it confusing as he's been told this by many visitors. It is our job to separate these three areas and make them distinct yet have them all fall under the same umbrella.

That “umbrella” will be an aesthetically pleasing landing page allowing visitors to navigate to any of the three subdomains. We need to cleverly employ navigation on this landing page so that visitors may access content that is stored deeply within the website.

A fourth website, that we talked about Paul referred to is veneerconsultant.com. This website will be targeted at clients looking for expert consulting with regard to very specialized high-end furniture and craftsmanship. Paul imagines this website being extremely visual using beautiful imagery, simple content, and support information. The objective of this website is to entice people to make direct contact with Paul to start the project process. This website is more a digital brochure and lead generator. He has a timeframe for this website to be completed by the end of the year so presently it is not a priority.

Proposed Development Tasks

We propose the following:

Remap content on present website. We need to clearly define what content lives in each subdomain:

furniture.schurchwoodwork.com

education.schurchwoodwork.com

supplies.schurchwoodwork.com

Design new landing, or splash page, for www.schurchwoodwork.com

The landing page will allow visitors to navigate to one of the subdomains based on their interests

Visually redesign entire website. Visual design we establish will carry throughout all three subdomains to present consistency and dependability

Programmatically put entire website on a content management system (CMS)

Setup and establish simple e-commerce solution for supplies.schurchwoodwork.com

We are stopping short of establishing the private member area on education.schurchwoodwork.com. Reasoning is that the tasks above are substantial and will take some time. Not only to execute and deliver, but also for you to understand the new way to update and publish to your websites.

Some Details.

Web Hosting.

We may need to consider website hosting in the development process for two reasons.

We are not familiar with the current company that hosts your website

The technologies we recommend and need specific hardware and support

Changing website hosting may involve a slight hiccup in email as we transition the site, but the change happens quickly and as long as we plan ahead properly we should actually see no issues.

Content Management System (CMS)

Great strides have taken place in the software development arena with regard to managing content on websites. There are a wide variety of possible solutions to help manage the content on your website. Based on the needs of your website. we'd recommend using WordPress, www.wordpress.org. WordPress is a simple content management system that is open source, meaning it is free to use, and is widely supported in the web programming and development community.

Placing your website on a CMS provides you benefits, too numerous to mention. However, probably the single greatest benefit is putting the power of publishing and editing your website in your hands. All you need is Internet access, username, and password that you can change the content of your website as much as you like. Your concern is only with the content, text, on the site. There is no way for you to alter the visual design.

Redesign – Information and Visual

Aside from the technical advantages we propose taking advantage of in an information redesign, we need to revisit the organization and presentation of the information on your website. When we refer to the term redesign we not only mean the visual appearance of the website, i.e. graphics and colors, we also mean the placement and relationship of pieces of information to one another.

Internally, we will need to explore a few options with how content is accessed and presented. Once we have developed what we feel is the right approach we will share it with you for feedback.

Production and Implementation
Once this project gets underway and we have established web hosting, moved over your current website, and installed WordPress, we will bring over all your existing content. Once this content is inside of WordPress we will give you the “keys” to the website. You may then add, edit, or delete any of the content on the website prior to the completion of the design as WordPress separates content from presentation.

Costs

Hosting:
Dependent on provider chosen. The choice is between MediaTemple and AN Hosting.

(Can you pull annual plans from their sites?) I think AN hosting is $85 a year.\

Technical Setup:
Establishing hosting, transferring current website, installation of Wordpress, misc technical tasks: $600.00

Redesign:

Designing new “look and feel” to entire www.schurchwoodwork.com website. This includes both information and visual redesign. We'll go through two rounds of revisions to the design tweak it to your liking. Once the design has been locked we will then programmatically create a template to work within the WordPress content management system. This part of the process is the most time consuming, and therefore costly part of the process.

We are including design for:

landing page

furniture.schurchwoodwork.com

education.schurchwoodwork.com

supplies.schurchwoodwork.com

$6,500.00

Proposal for the food partners

Bert Mahoney

2009-03-23T14:31:00