The Secret Labs’ Web Design Portfolio

Client

Camp Whitman logoCamp Whitman on Seneca Lake — A boys and girls Christian summer camp

Contact

, Camp Director

Involvement

The Secret Labs re-engineered, hosts, updates and maintains campwhitman.org.

Launch Dates

  • February 2005 — Redesign for 2005
  • June 25, 2004 — Added Photo Gallery
  • June 7, 2004 — Re-engineered site for 2004

About the site

Camp Whitman is a not-for-profit summer camp for kids. As such, the budget cannot be described as huge. So our goal became to deliver a first-class look and feel on a bargain-basement price.

Research is cheaper than mistakes

After nailing down and prioritizing the client’s requirements, we hit the books. As an accredited member of the American Camping Association, Camp Whitman supplied us with the ACA’s marketing research reports.

The most important piece of information was that parents, not kids, do the shopping. So a site that appeals to parents should do a better job of making the sale than one that’s “kidsey”.

That set the tone for the site’s look and feel. The site clean and uncluttered, gimmick-free, easy to read and information is quick and easy to find.

Search engine friendly

Next we poured through the server logs for the preceding three months. We learned what parents were searching for and repeated their searches to see what else they found.

From that research, we built our list of keywords and key phrases and made sure to include as many as possible, as often as possible, in the page titles, headlines and body text.

Standards-compliance is cheaper than traditional design

When we re-engineered the site in 2004, we chose standards-compliant XHTML to structure the site and and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to control its look and feel.

As a result, the client saved hundreds of dollars when the site was redesigned for 2005. All we had to do was change the stylesheets, and voilá: Nearly instant new look. Of course content was updated and it got a few new graphics too.

Another benefit is that it loads quickly for those using traditional phone modems and a separate, reduced-color stylesheet for printing, saves on parents’ expensive colored ink.

Off-the-rack is cheaper than custom-tailored

One of the requirements was for a photo gallery. The client wanted to be able to update the gallery each week. There were three options:

  1. Have the client email us the photos and we would hand-code the pages
  2. Write a custom appliction
  3. Use an already-written application

Naturally, we chose the latter. Gallery is an open-source application designed for non-experts to create and manage an online photo gallery. It’s also one of the Ready-to-Run Web Applications already installed on our server and available to every client.

Off-the-rack, though it may be, Gallery is flexible enough that its onscreen presentation is easily integrated with the site design.

Results

Traffic to the site has increaded exponentially, but more importantly, even after adding new camps for 2005, Camp Whitman filled all camps and even had a waiting list.