Name:
Pariah S. Burke

Services:
Print and web design, periodical design and makeover, illustration, creative workflow consultation, consulting and training in design software

Practising since:
1987

Country:
United States

City:
Portland, OR

URL:
portfolio.iampariah.com

Email:
Pariah

Selected client list:
Playboy Enterprise, International
Time-Warner
Upscale Magazine
Designorati.com
QuarkVSInDesign.com

Success story:
Downtown Music Gallery

A hip New York City music store, which sold the newest and hard to find vintage music, enjoyed a strong following and great in-store experience, but their lack of time to devote to the website presented a fly-by-night face to Internet customers. The store's employees had neither the skill nor time to learn how to properly manage their website; instead, new content was slapped up in a rush, leading to a miasma of differently sized and colored text with no flow or hierarchy.

The website newsletter was designed to be as easily updated as possible for non-HTML-savvy store employees. The site was designed as templates that draw the site's articles and calendar content via PHP includes from text files automatically generated by an easy to use, cross-platform FileMaker Pro database. Employees merely typed new information into the database and click the "publish" button, which generated the text files and activated a script to upload them to the Web server, replacing the previous content.

Customers responded with kudos letters to the store, and the monthly readership nearly doubled the first month after the redesign. Sales increased around 25% during the same period. Although the site was now more technologically sophisticated, the maintenance experience was simplified, decreasing employee time spent updating it and freeing store personnel for other tasks.