What do you do when life gives you a new beer can design, curbside pickup and community in love with your craft beer? You bring the elements together like a Hazy IPA to launch a new website and online store.
SiteCrafting, 7 Seas and Blind Tiger design launched the brewery’s fresh new look and set them up for success with an updated website and e-commerce capability – in just two and half weeks and under Covid-19 conditions.
Website Goals
- Reveal 7 Seas Brewing new brand and product offerings with a responsive website
- Add an online store to provide 7 Seas customers a way to order Beer-To-Go
The Tasting Notes of a Great Partnership
- 7 Seas Brewing – A hub in our community and local provider of great craft beer.
- SiteCrafting – Passionate developer of digital experiences that delight people and empower businesses.
- Blind Tiger Design – Purveyor of great design and brand execution for the craft beer industry.
Our partnership with both 7 Seas Brewing and Blind Tiger was strong from start to finish on this quick project. Each team brought a key ingredient in the creation of the 7 Seas website and store. When working with multiple teams, immediately identifying roles and ownership allows us to move quickly to produce a great customer experience.
Recipe for Success
- Break down barriers that impede communication. We relied on Slack, a team messaging tool, to collaborate shared work between Blind Tiger and our team. Setting this up from the beginning made it easy to share ideas, report progress and facilitate feedback during the design and development phases.
- Don’t wait until the end to create content. Due to the short timeline, we didn’t have the luxury of waiting to add images and website copy until the website was fully complete. As a team, we defined content patterns and were flexible for various options of copy and images. As the content was created for each page, our team could quickly add it to the website and test it within the CMS.
- Be ready to adjust the recipe. When you’re cooking you may realize you’re missing a key ingredient. Be quick to accept the challenge and define a substitute solution to solve the issue.
Sync the Systems
For e-commerce websites, it’s important to understand configurations between your store and payment software. One of our challenges was that we realized the Square payment software configuration didn’t match the WooCommerce store configuration. This prevented the two systems from syncing important product information from being managed in the payment software. Our team set up a separate online store configuration within the payment software that matched the website’s store configuration.
Take Time to Taste
In this case, tasting is testing. Testing doesn’t have to happen at the end of a project. And it doesn’t have to go through a formal process during development. Anyone can test a piece of functionality or stress test a user scenario. Test often and stay nimble.
Reflect and Celebrate
At the end of any project, look back on milestones and celebrate what you crafted — together.
Here are some of our highlights.
- We had three companies all working together toward the same goal
- Everyone participated in creating content and adding to the website and online store.
- We understood that challenges and changes were inevitable and we stayed flexible.
- Some things got left on the chopping block, knowing they can be explored in a future iteration of the website and store.
All this reflection about beer makes me thirsty. Head on over to the 7 Seas website to check out the new digital experience. You’ll like it. Cheers!
