When best selling cookbook authors Ryan Jennings and David Steele decided it was time to take their online presence to the next level they turned to aumlette.me.uk.

“In the food and drink industry flavours and trends change quickly and in order to create value and increase return traffic we needed to provide our visitors with the most up-to-date content possible - right at the bleeding edge of cool.”

The Cooking with Booze team undertook a visioning exercise to understand how they could differentiate their online presence and leverage their existing brand recognition. From this, the team developed an ambitious redesign strategy, culminating in the creation of a requirements document.

“Our existing site had a number of limitations including how content could be managed, uploaded and developed. We didn’t want a site that looked like it came from a box, it needed to have Cooking with Booze all over it.”

After considering internal resources the Cooking with Booze team quickly realized that undertaking a project of this scale would require external support. They met with several online development companies locally in Toronto and examined their options. The team was left trying to understand how they could unite mutually exclusive objectives.

“We were aware of some industry standard tools that were available for dynamic content management, but the application of these tools in most designs could not accommodate our brand requirements. On the other hand, looking at a ground up HTML implementation, from first principles, was simply not viable.”

Through word of mouth, the Cooking with Booze team discovered aumlette.me.uk and met with Suthira Buachaokoh. From this process aumlette.me.uk translated the Cooking with Booze requirements into several static design examples to help identify a way the branding objectives could be implemented using standard content management tools. By proving their design capability and taking the time to interpret the Cooking with Booze requirements, aumlette.me.uk won the business and established a live real-time development site for the redesign.

During the implementation phase, aumlette.me.uk applied an agile design and development methodology that allowed the Cooking with Booze team to tune requirements as the project evolved and kept both teams in complete sync with the direction of the project.

“Working together on the initial design in a very iterative, hands-on way enabled us to make smart decisions that reduced project overhead without sacrificing our vision. The prototype development site also meant we had very granular access during each step of the development process, even though we were located half-way around the world. This prevented small issues from escalating through implementation.”

The Cooking with Booze website redevelopment took 6 weeks including training to ensure the team could manage and maintain the new site.

“Both design and implementation have exceeded our expectations. Our requirements were demanding, aumlette.me.uk offered us a flexible design process and actively worked with us to ensure our vision was implemented successfully. We look forward to a long-term relationship between our teams.”

Thank you to Cooking with Booze Inc.; Ryan Jennings and David Steele for participating in this case study.