Laughing Dog Brewing Website

Laughing Dog Brewing, based out of Ponderay, Idaho is a North Idaho business success story.  Started in 2006, the company has grown tremendously and won numerous awards, and when we first talked about their website, they were just in the process of moving to a new building with expanded capacity.

LDB commissioned me to build their new website to solve the problems of their first website: it was hard to update, lacked a solid e-commerce backend, and needed a major facelift.  We explored their needs in the nearterm, and longterm, as they were just going public with their growing business. After several meetings where they gave me their needs and wants, I presented a mockup and wireframe, then wrote all the copy, built the website, and delivered the final product.  LDB was very satisfied with the final result, and recommended me to their friends.

The feature they wanted most in the new design was a solid in-house inventory and e-commerce system, which could not only sell t-shirts, hats, and other merchandise, but also handle Club memberships.  Beyond that, they asked for strong social networking integration (which they lacked completely previously), many more photographs throughout to utilize the professional photographs they had already had done for them, and terrific presentations of each of their brews.

The e-commerce I was able to handle using a combination of the Ubercart and associated modules, and of course, a creative use of Views and associated modules.  There’s also a ton of custom css in there.

The brews was more fun to implement, because it was the first time I got to use the fivestar module, and we used it so that the brewer could define each of the elements present in each brew, which gives a visual presentation breakdown as opposed to just a description.  It comes straight from the brewer so the reader gets a terrific insight into the brew.

The design came about from a few different websites LDB liked certain elements on.

http://www.laughingdogbrewing.com
for: Laughing Dog Brewing
Backend: Drupal/MySQL
Design: CSS from scratch by me.
Features: E-commerce, Inventory, Dynamic Design, Photography, User-Logins, Special Login Directories, Advertising.