Tell us about yourself

Scott Jehl is a graphic designer with experience in website layout, UI design, and web-standards based development. Most recently, he has found interest in building web applications, including his own service, WriteMaps. He has worked with clients in various industries such as Visa, Fidelity Investments, Nymbler, Footjoy Golf, and Aspen Snowmass Resorts. Notable achievements include projects featured on Adobe’s Site of the Day and Communication Arts’ Site of the Week. Scott currently works as a Designer / Developer for Filament Group and lives with his wife Stephanie in Boston, MA.

Jon Reil has been designing for the web since 1996, first as an assistant art director at a snowmobile magazine in Minneapolis (where he’s from), to an Interactive Art Director in Los Angeles, and finally a Creative Director in Boston.

Some of his notable achievements include the MITX Best Creative Concept Award (2005), work featured on Adobe’s Site of the Day, Communication Arts’ Site of the Week, and various CSS galleries. Jon has also been featured on Design Interact’s Insights.

In his spare time, Jon likes to read about the latest trends in web design and development, write about what he’s working on or thinking about creatively, and relax with his family.

Jon is also the Creative Director and one of the founders of Outsight Interactive.

Tell us about the EnergyRace

Scott Jehl: EnergyRace is a website that allows users to learn about changes they can make to their lifestyle to reduce their impact on the environment. Upon signing up, users are asked for some basic information about their lifestyle, which is used to calculate their current CO2 emissions. EnergyRace then offers the user ways to reduce their emissions, and as they commit to changes, their reductions will be shown in their “Impact Tree”. Other features on the site include a video blog with wide-screen viewing and social tools, such as friend referral tracking by email and a custom blog badge widget. EnergyRace is built with valid XHTML 1.0 strict and is accessible by many devices including mobile phones.

Why ExpressionEngine?

Scott Jehl:  EnergyRace is a dynamic, data-driven site that requires a robust system for processing users’ information and providing personalized lifestyle suggestions. Prior to this project, we had never worked with ExpressionEngine and were impressed at the ease with which we were able to get up-to-speed and begin development. We were thrilled to find that much of the functionality that is shared by many web development projects, such as member registration and management, templating and SEO-friendly URLs, and a content management interface, is handled in a smart and flexible way right out of the box. This allowed us to focus the majority of our time on the more customized aspects of the site, such as the carbon calculators, lifestyle change suggestions, and social networking between members.

EnergyRace lets you choose how you live and comes up with figures based on that. How are you managing the default figures, and how is it retrieved from ExpressionEngine?

Scott Jehl: EnergyRace was founded by Jay Barnes, CEO, and all of the data and helpful suggestions on EnergyRace are the product of Jay’s intense research and devotion to the cause of fighting Global Warming. The default data used on EnergyRace was gathered by Jay from several resources including the Rocky Mountain Institute and the EPA. Since ExpressionEngine is developed using familiar PHP and MySQL services, we were able to build upon the standard ExpressionEngine tables with our own customized tables for both static data storage and user data tracking. Retrieving the data from these tables was a breeze with the use of the ExpressionEngine database class and its thorough documentation.

Having signed up to EnergyRace, I found it extremely easy to use.  How much planning did it take to get to this stage prior to implementation?  Do you have suggestions for others building sites like this?

Scott Jehl: We’re glad to hear you found it easy to use. The short answer is that it took quite a lot of planning. As is the case with many startups, EnergyRace was in the process of figuring out their business model and feature offering during most of the design and development process. This made it essential to go with an iterative design process that could be flexible and adapt to many small changes in scope. As for suggestions for others looking to build sites like this, I’d say it came down to intense attention to detail and getting into the mindset of the user. It was important to evaluate EnergyRace and its audience, as well as current design trends to provide a unique experience that was appropriate for this particular cause. On this project, Jon and I were fortunate enough to work on an application that we would have interest in using ourselves. This was nice because it made it easier to envision what the user would want and expect and work towards delivering those features in the most intuitive manner. As for design goals, we were given direction for a clean, inviting, and authoritative aesthetic, which led us to everything from the logo design to the look and feel of the site as a whole.

Clearly some of the features on the site are custom-built.  Did you do this all via PHP in the templates, or did you develop your own modules, plugins, or extensions for this?

Scott Jehl: For much of the site, we were able to use standard ExpressionEngine weblog entries tags, but some of the more complex functionality required the use of ExpressionEngine’s developer API. We used PHP on almost every template in one way or another and found it invaluable to choose the order of which the system would parse the PHP and ExpressionEngine tags. Although there were some areas which required entirely custom PHP scripting, we were able to save a lot of time using the database, session, and email classes.

EnergyRace is an inspiration for those of us trying to live in an eco-friendly manner. What was the initial inspiration and prompt to build the website?

Jay Barnes (EnergyRace Founder): Talking with friends and family and watching the news last year showed me that there are many people who want to do something about Global Warming but are not sure what to do.  And that if people could see the impact of the small changes they are making they would be more likely to act.  Yet even with a concern about global warming, experience tells me that you’ve got 1-2 minutes of someone’s attention to pull them in.  If the site is not easy to use, your visitor is gone.

Jon Reil: From a design and development standpoint, anything we can do to help the environment is a great thing and this team fully believes in it. You see a lot of eco-friendly design going on in the print world, and it feels good to be able to contribute to that on the web as well.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Scott Jehl: Thanks so much for the interview and to our client, Jay Barnes, for working with us and for his vision on helping reduce our carbon emissions. We hope your readers have time to sign-up and check out EnergyRace for themselves!