Tell us about yourself.

Joelle Reeder: I’m a partner and creative director of Moxie Design Studios. I’ve been working in the web design industry since about 1999, but have had experience in one way or another with the web since 1996.

What’s Darby Creek Dog Bakery all about?

Joelle Reeder: Toward the end of 2005, we were contacted by Rich and Joanne Ottum to brand and design their logo, website, and labels for their product packaging. They create gourmet, homemade biscuits for your lovable 4-legged best friend!

Rich and Joanne wanted something fun, colorful, perhaps with a slightly “retro” feel to it that would make customers feel invited and encourage them to stay and click around their site. After creating a few different concepts and logos, we decided to lean toward more of a “bakery” concept than the traditional “bone and paw” concepts that most dog bakeries utilize. While still including those assets, we incorporated bright, attractive colors and an adorable puppy, along with a cupcake to make their product clearly recognizable as a dog treat and fun, not just as a novelty, but as a viable brand.

The site features a custom shopping cart integrated with Paypal Merchant Features and we did it all with the help of ExpressionEngine. We posted a blog entry with more information on the site.

Why did you choose ExpressionEngine for this project?

Joelle Reeder: We choose ExpressionEngine for just about every job, as we have yet to find a job it’s not perfect for!

We utilized ExpressionEngine’s “custom fields” features extensively with this project, allowing the client to update their shopping cart, blog, frequently asked questions and most of their other site maintenance needs without ever having to know any code tricks at all.

How do Rich and Joanne like using ExpressinEngine to manage their site?

Joelle Reeder: Well! I asked them directly. Here is the email they sent me.

Here are a few insights regarding our experience with Moxie and ExpressionEngine.

I work as an online marketing consultant. Earlier in my career, I personally directed the development and launch of half-million dollar, enterprise-grade websites for other companies, but my personal website development experience was limited to the defunct Adobe PageMill, Frontpage, and more recently a variety of blogging tools.

To help my wife Joanne launch a website for her dog bakery, we came to Moxie with a site I built from a Frontpage template. Frontpage is without a doubt the most unintuitive piece of software ever conceived… As such, Joanne and I decided we needed professional design help and a new publishing platform. I thought one of the available “blog only” tools might work, because it is easy to use, and we wanted the bakery to include a blog.

Joelle recommended we consider ExpressionEngine because it offered a content management system, a blogging platform, and the benefit of various add-on modules for communication and other functions. While I was unfamiliar with ExpressionEngine, we decided to defer to Joelle’s experience. After all, we knew Moxie Design Studios used ExpressionEngine for their own site.

When Joelle delivered our site for review, we were excited to discover that in addition to her outstanding design, she had provided a robust, yet easy-to-use content management system with the ExpressionEngine platform. Joelle built in a personalized ExpressionEngine Tip Sheet which explained how to update content, how to add new dog biscuits to our product database, how to manage the dog blog, and how to alter page-specific HTML as required. I immediately played around with the ExpressionEngine interface using Joelle’s Tip Sheet, and did not even need the ExpressionEngine documentation. I was easily able to test new product additions, add and alter HTML. Right before launch, I added javascript tags for website analytics.

Our Moxie Design Studios ExpressionEngine site is perfect for our application. We have a fanciful and functional design which we can easily modify as our business grows. I recently registered with the ExpressionEngine Community Forums to learn how I can take advantage of more ExpressionEngine functions. With regards to our biscuits, I am partial to the aroma of the Hearty Vegetable Medley. Joanne loves the crusty texture and fruit flecks of our Blueberry Banana Biscotti. To be safe, we urge dog lovers to order our Darby Creek Gift Pack which includes both as well as Hometown Peanut Butter.

Are you using any plugins, modules, or extensions on the site?

Joelle Reeder: The client was very interested in the “tell-a-friend” feature to recommend their biscuits and we modified the built-in ExpressionEngine contact form to create a kind of “refer-a-friend” structure so that friends could recommend the site as a whole to others.

We also maximized the use of the built-in mailing list feature to create snazzy customized HTML templates so the client can keep interested parties apprised of new items.

We used the Extract URL plugin in conjunction with open-source PHPThumb and ExpressionEngine’s custom fields to create the thumbnails in the shopping interface.

The Link List module is also implemented for the client’s Dog Blog links.