Outdoor Living

Whether you’re building a fence, a deck or just decorating your backyard, chances are, you’re using a Barrette Outdoor Living product. When it comes to outdoor do-it-yourself, no one offers more options. But having more options available can also mean having more headaches to deal with. How do you make finding hundreds of products quick and easy for the consumer? A simple website won’t do. What Barrette Outdoor Living needed was an online sales center, storehouse and information center all in one. After working with {e}house on the Barrette corporate website as well as the Homestyles Outdoor Storage website for Barrette subsidiary, U.S. Fence, Barrette turned to {e} house for a third time and asked us to build a successful Outdoor Living website.

Tell us to build our own fence or shed, and we may have had a problem. Fortunately for us, there is one do-it-yourself project we know how to do quite well: website design and programming. Having already established brand standards for the Barrette corporate site, we were able to work closely with the Outdoor Living division to put together a highly functional website that more than met their needs. Using a simple, intuitive information architecture, we designed the site to ensure consumers have quick access to the specific products in which they are most interested. Since one size doesn’t fit all, we also helped develop content tailored to the target consumers of the four main Outdoor Living product types.

For content management, we had a ready-made solution. We turned to the customized version of Expressionengine developed for the corporate site which allows for easy updating and allows different departments within Barrette to create their own publishing workflow. The support staff can publish support documentation while the marketing department manages the rest of the site. This is all part of a bigger plan. With every Barrette company website integrated into one content management system, the next step will be to simplify the updating process by allowing Barrette staff members to post an update once and choose to have that change populated throughout all Barrette sites. Think of it as a form of virtual DYI. Ultimately, updating, maintaining and finding support documentation will be as simple as possible for both Barrette and their consumers.

The number of Outdoor Living products available from Barrette is impressive. Gathering all those products into one coherent website was impressively challenging. Fortunately, our previous work with Barrette and our commitment to finding new solutions to big problems allowed us to bring all of Barrette Outdoor Living’s products into one easy-to-navigate, easy-to-use website.