New Country Harvest website launches with social media extensions

Last week we launched the new Country Harvest website at http://www.countryharvest.com – our third major launch in the last 4 months!

This time our assignment was to completely refresh the Country Harvest website to align with new branding and packaging initiatives. Although BSTREET had been actively managing the website for the last few years, we had inherited the site from another agency and it had become a bit of a franken-site as the site grew to over 100 pages with some of the richest content buried 3 or more clicks deep.

Our approach?

Create a fresh & updated user experience built on a content management platform so that we can manage content and features efficiently and cost effectively moving forward.  Once again, we decided on Joomla – an open CMS platform to build our site.

Our Objectives?

1. Create refreshed user experience that is best in class and aligned with the new Country Harvest brand
2. Enrich content and tools and make them more findable in search engines
3. Extend online experience to other digital platforms in order to engage the target demographic
4. Create an experience that will generate word of mouth (WOM) awareness and advocacy for the Country Harvest brand
5. Differentiate from competitor websites
6. Ensure the most important content is available within one click – and nearly everything else within 2

The new site looks great and we have met our objectives!

There are a few category innovation stories with this website we are especially excited & proud of:

1. First integration of facebook connect in the category. This means when you write a  comment on one of the products, recipes, or in the community section your  comment will not only appear on the website but on your facebook wall. The comment on our website also pulls in your fbook avatar. This will help us with amplification for CH product and content
2. Innovative navigation / information architecture – in  order to make all content available within 2 clicks, we have created an  accordion style navigation system on our products and recipe pages
3. The website is optimized for content syndication  beyond fbook connect with RSS feeds and “share this”  widgets

Everybody on the BSTREET digital team contributed to this project, but special kudos to Jason Jang who was the glue between the front and back office teams and is the one who largely built the site using the CMS and the creative assets developed by Michael Palmer.  Also thanks to Robin Judge who was the IA on this project & created our detailed spec document and wireframes.

This is only the first phase of the new website with more features, functionality, and content coming over the next few months. We’ll also be launching a facebook page this Fall to compliment a community outreach project called the Harvest of Hope.

What do you think?