What can you tell us about the team that built foxworthyoutdoors.com?

Caddis Interactive is a full-service advertising agency in the Nashville area that specializes in developing web platforms for consumer-based brands. Caddis handled the brand development, strategy, design, and development of Foxworthy Outdoors.

What can you tell us about the site in general? What are the goals of the site and the main audience?

Jeff Foxworthy has long been one of the most popular names in the world of comedy, but what most people don’t know about Jeff is that he has a true passion for the outdoors. Jeff wanted to create a brand that focused on that passion and his ability to connect with all outdoorsmen. Through Foxworthy Outdoors, visitors are able to learn what products he uses and why, read blogs on everything from his latest hunt to how he manages his farm, and watch videos that range from a Kansas deer hunt to the hilarious outtakes of his “Incomplete Deer Hunter” series.

This site was constructed not only to be an educational and entertaining site but also to serve as a platform to grow the Foxworthy Outdoors brand and its licensees.

What was your major consideration in using ExpressionEngine for this?

We are a shop that believes in the power of content and understand the importance of being able to add content at the push of a button. We’ve built more than 15 sites this year using EE and continue to use it for the majority of our CMS needs.

Were there any Commercial Add-ons that proved useful? If so, which ones? How did they help?

There are a few staples in many of our ExpressionEngine installs. These include Wygwam, Matrix, EE Hive Hacksaw, Low Seg2Cat, and CE Image. Additionally, for this project we leveraged Champagne by Natural Logic to interface with Campaign Monitor for both newsletter subscription as well as easy integration for sending and reporting on campaigns. A few other add-ons that proved helpful for this content-centric site include Tagger, Channel Images, and yet another Pixel & Tonic fieldtype, Playa. Hats off to all the talented EE add-on developers that put out such high-quality software.

Did you do any custom add-on development?

For this project we were able to stick with the core and existing EE add-ons. One of the great strengths of ExpressionEngine is the highly active development community which makes our jobs much easier.

What is next on the plate for foxworthyoutdoors.com? Any additional functionality you can tell us about?

The next step will be launching the e-commerce side of the site. With new licensees and partnerships really coming on strong, our focus moving forward will be to turn visitors into customers. There will be a great selection of products that Jeff uses that will range from hats and tees to outdoor heaters and food products.

Do you have any other information you’d like to share with the community? Tips from this project you’d like to share? Lessons you’ve learned?

This project was really on a tight deadline. We launched the brand and website at an outdoor trade show in August, so we really had to get things rolling once we had the brand positioning approved. Our team did a great job working with various vendors to ensure we had the content we needed to deliver the messaging that our strategy was built on.