Late last year, Brew North Roasters came to us in need of a website. They were a new coffee roaster that had a visual brand and little else. At the time, they were still finalizing the roasts they would be selling. Their hope was to launch an ecommerce website that could start selling products as soon as they were ready to be sold.
After an initial discussion, it became clear that they could use some assistance with content strategy and copywriting as well. They had a great vision and a clear understanding of their identity; they simply needed help translating it into written words.
Together, we created a brand-new ecommerce website built on WordPress, filled with on-brand content and clear pathways for their ideal userbase.
Today, we wanted to take a deeper dive into what this project looked like from start to finish.
The Challenges of Building a New Website
Despite what every website platform ad tries to tell you, building a new website isn’t easy. It’s not just the designing and developing. Before you even start the creation process, you need to decide where you’re building it, what the domain will be, what functionality is needed, and more.
While today’s tools do allow you to build a website without having to actually code anything, you still need to figure out UX and design. Pre-existing templates can be helpful…until they’re not. And you run the risk of looking exactly like someone else, rather than representing your brand.
And then there’s the content.
I’ve worked on over 100 websites, and I can say without question that content is consistently the biggest challenge. First, you need to decide what pages your website needs, and then you need to actually create unique copy for each page that’s informative and on-brand.
This is a little easier when you have an existing website to pull from. When it’s a new website for a new brand, it can be a challenge just figuring out where to start. At This Blank Page, we always start with a content workshop and the creation of a brand voice document.
Finding Brew North’s Voice
There are a lot of coffee brands out there. If a new coffee company wants any chance at succeeding, they need more than a good product. They need to stand out. Thankfully, Brew North Roasters already had their niche figured out.
Brew North Roasters was started by Matt Olsen. Matt loves the outdoors. He loves camping and hiking almost as much as he loves coffee. But there was a problem: he found himself having to choose between going on an outdoor adventure or enjoying a great cup of coffee.
He also found it increasingly difficult to find quality coffee that was consistent and affordable.
So, he set out to build a brand that would not only help people find their coffee, but enjoy it no matter what setting they were in. This idea became the foundation of the content strategy and brand voice that we created with Brew North.
For all of our content strategy clients, we start things off with a content workshop.
Using StoryBrand principles and our own custom framework, we walk clients through a series of discussion points. Rather than telling them what they should say, we’re able to extract the ideas, expressions, and passions that they already have inside of them.
Brands often think they don’t know what to say. In our experience, that’s not true. They simply don’t know how to convey it.
Our content workshop left us with more than enough information to craft a brand voice for Brew North Roasters. This comprehensive document established who they’re trying to reach, what makes them unique, why their audience should trust them, and how someone can move forward with them.
With the brand voice finalized, we could move forward with creating wireframe layouts for each page. These wireframes not only determine the layout of each page, but also contains the copy they will use.
As we got approval for each wireframe, we started building the pages out on the website.
Leveraging The Visual Brand
Designing a website can be difficult. Designing one without a visual brand is extra challenging. Thankfully, Brew North Roasters had a visual brand created by Ali Peters. More than just a logo, this brand package gave us colors, fonts, patterns, and more that we could pull from.
With the brand and a few quality images, translating the wireframes into actual web pages was relatively straightforward. Rather than creating designs and then manually coding those designs into webpages, we’re able to save our clients time and money by designing directly on the website.
We then revise as needed.
Of course, all of our websites are designed responsively so that they can adapt to large monitors, laptops, smartphones, and everything in between.
Integrating Commerce
Ecommerce adds an extra challenge to every project, even when the needs seem relatively simple. With any ecommerce website, there’s a whole new series of questions to be answered like…
- How much is shipping?
- Who are you using for shipping?
- How are you handling taxes?
- Are you managing inventory?
- What variations does each product have?
- What are the dimensions and weight of each product?
- What payment processor are you using?
- And more.
For Brew North Roasters, their immediate needs were fairly straight forward. They had four roasts, each of which come in different bag sizes, as well as ground and whole bean varieties. However, we knew their needs would grow as their business did, and there might be requests for more complex functionality in the future.
Because of this, we integrated WooCommerce into their website. WooCommerce is a very popular plugin for WordPress that adds all of the basics for ecommerce. While its base functionality is free, there is a massive library of both free and premium add-ons that can implement virtually any additional function and/or feature you can imagine.
In other words, WooCommerce took care of everything they needed up front while preparing them for whatever the future held.
Once we got their products added and connected the site to their payment gateway, we ran a few test orders, and then we were ready to launch. The Brew North Roasters website went live just in time for the Christmas shopping season.
Expanding the Strategy
No website is ever really finished. This is especially true for an ecommerce website. Even as we began the project, Brew North had a list of future needs they wanted to discuss as soon as the initial site launched.
Since launch, we’ve been collaborating on search engine optimization, ongoing blog content, new ecommerce functionality, and more. We’re excited about what the future holds for Brew North Roasters, and we’re confident in their passion and their product.
If you’re looking for a new coffee to fall in love with, we highly recommend checking out their products. They also have a range of brewing products designed with travel in mind. And for those who want a simpler way to enjoy coffee on the go, they have travel pour-overs that are pretty amazing.
