Yesterday I launched an updated version of the Powder7 homepage.  Powder7.com celebrated its first birthday recently (though we celebrated several previous birthdays under the MileHighAthletic name) and it was in need of a little refreshing.

I updated the graphics on the frontpage to include a very underrated but important element of e-commerce sites: people and faces.  A disadvantage to online shopping as opposed to traditional in-store shopping is that customers usually respond more favorably when they interact with a person.  This is the reason why you see a lot of “live chat” options on large e-commerce sites and also why we strongly encourage our customers to call or email us with any questions they have.  Human interaction is powerful, and though displaying a photo of a stranger isn’t quite interaction, it still provides a more personal feel than product alone.

Before:

After:

What are your thoughts?  What can we do better?

Next up for Powder7: 2011 inventory!  We’re anxiously awaiting our new 2011 skis from Nordica, Head, Icelantic, Dynastar, and Line as well as apparel from Patagonia.  Any day now…

Today one of my favorite training partners EVER paid a visit to good old Golden.  Erica and I both ran the 800m at BU.  It’s a lonely distance, we weren’t sprinters and we weren’t distance runners.  Most 800 runners come down from the mile or up from the 400, but we just ran the 8.  Erica is super speedy and she would crank out our 200 repeats, and I was more into the 400 and up repeats, so it worked perfectly.  Until I got mono, then she got mono, then I got injured, and she graduated.  Still though, when we were both “on” it was a beautiful thing, though those days were few and far between (much to the chagrin of our coach…whose patience I can now appreciate.  ..I once argued that it was silly for me to run more than 5 miles in training.  hahahaha!)

Erica, me (+ Marisa!) cheering on Jordan - Marathon Monday 2005. Yes, our shirts read "Jordan is my homeboy"

Erica and her boyfriend, Stephen, started Brooklyn Brew Shop last July and have had a lot of success in selling their compact brewing kits online and at markets in NYC.  They came out to Colorado on a business trip to tour around all of the state’s breweries. It was great to talk with them about the frustrations and triumphs of starting a new company and growing from the ground up.  Who would have thought selling skis and brewing kits could share so many similarities?  I had so much fun showing them our operation and swapping small business secrets and stories, it was sad to see them go and made me realize how much I miss running in an endless amount of 200m loops with her on BU’s indoor track.

It’s also looking like I’ll have a different former teammate from BU joining me in Colorado by mid-summer.  I won’t mention names until it’s official, but I will mention that she is one of the nastiest runners I know and though she doesn’t know it now, she’ll be joining me on Sunday long runs every week.  ;-)

The mystery runner logging some miles with me at Waterton Canyon last year.

From projects on the Boston Tea Party in 5th grade, to attempting to dupe my friends into thinking I found a real pirate map, when I was a youngin’ I was always in need of a way to make stuff look old.  My parents were smart to keep the matches hidden, and I was left with dabbing tea bags on crumpled and ripped up paper.  It was always a let down!  In the end it looked like I had left my notebook out in the rain, or at best, the cat had peed on it.

Now that I’m older and have access to things like matches and coffee grinds, it’s easy to make stuff look old, and you can too!

Supplies:
- paper (preferably with something cool on it, find some good old-looking fonts at dafont.com and get to work!)
- coffee grinds
- matches
- water
- shallow baking sheet (but make sure it has at least a 1/2″ edge
- oven

How-to:

1. Take paper and crumple it up.  Tear it if you want to, but I prefer not to put any intentional tears into it.  If you are going to burn some of the edges, this is a good time to do it.  You can also do it at the very end.  If you do light the paper on fire it’s important that you barely let the flame catch the edge of the paper, and then blow it out right away.  This is best done over a metal sink, with a ready supply of water nearby.  If you’re well practiced, you can also hold the flame close enough to the paper so it darkens, but does not actually light (I like to think of this as a very authentic effect, since real-deal pirate maps were quite obviously read at night or in a cave, by candle- or torchlight.)

2. Lay it on the baking sheet.

3.  Dump a serious amount of coffee grinds on top.  Put them all over the place.  Huge clumps add more color later.  Today I got lucky and had fresh coffee grinds, which worked especially well.  I just dumped them on and added enough water to cover the paper.  In the past, I’ve just made a really strong cup of coffee (so strong you wouldn’t even think to drink it).  Pour that on top and then you can also add the grinds too.

Today I was making a gift certificate for an event Powder7.com is sponsoring for a ski area in Vermont.

4.  Let it soak.  Go do something for a few hours.  The longer you can leave it, the better.  Today I let mine sit for about 5 hours.

You can see all of the grinds and just enough water to cover the paper. The more water you use, the more diluted the grinds will get, so you want to use the minimum.

5.  Carefully lift paper off of baking sheet and drain water.  Wipe baking sheet clean and dry, and place paper back on it.  It’ll have some stubborn grinds sitting on it, and that’s perfect.

6.  Heat oven to 200 degrees.  Once heated, slide baking sheet into oven.

7.  ”Bake” for 8-15 minutes.  Check frequently, I can’t stress that enough.

8.  It’ll start to curl up around the corners, which means it’s drying out.  It should feel pretty dry when it comes out.

Fresh out of the oven!

To top-off the presentation, I’ll either tri-fold it or roll it up, seal it with wax, and secure with a knot of twine.

I added a few more burnt edges, and called it a day.

One of the coolest things about our company is that we do almost everything in-house.  It’s pretty rare to find a small business with a decent amount of sales that has built their own site from scratch, without the aid of any templates or content management systems (Joomla, ZenCart, OSCommerce, etc.).  It’s like making brownies with Duncan Hines mix — it gets the job done, but can you really be proud of it since the brunt of the work isn’t your own?

Jordan built the first MileHighAthletic.com using some very basic HTML.  It was just for informative purposes, you couldn’t buy anything on the site.  Over the summer of 2007 he learned PHP and the site took a huge leap: customers could buy skis directly from the site and skip eBay altogether.

MileHighAthletic.com circa December 2007. Table-based layout, no CSS.

Aesthetically the site was still primitive, and so in January 2008 I started learning XHTML and CSS, and with our forces combined we churned out a pretty decent looking site.

An improved, CSS-based site. Circa February 2008.

Since then, Jordan’s PHP skills and my HTML/CSS skills have far improved.  Jordan’s PHP has allowed us to have a one-of-a-kind CMS designed specifically for  selling used skis.  From a design and user interface perspective, we knew what worked with the old site and where we needed to make improvements.  Thanks to Google Analytics, we know that a lot of our customers use our “Ski Finder” feature, a wizard that narrows down products we have available to what they are looking for, be it a price range, ski length, ski type, etc.  The overall navigation worked well too, the menu was easy to find and since it was chunked into smaller pieces, easy to find what you’re looking for.

One of the biggest problems with the old site was the landing page, or the page you first arrive on when you visit Powder7.com.  Instead of displaying our products (what we sell, what we do, a very important message to get across to customers, especially online where attention spans are very short), I had rotating graphics of some skis we sell.  The graphics were pretty dense, and though I meant well, there was no way I could keep updating them to coincide with what we have in stock at that exact moment.  I grabbed photos of of some of our best-selling skis and created a visual spread that placed each ski within a classification.  Jordan wrote some code that randomly selects three skis from each category and displays them under the category.

One of the categories, displaying our most popular women's ski: the K2 Burnin Luv.

The new landing page.

We also updated the item display page, making it easier to find the ski’s specs and replacing two medium sized photos with one big photo of the tops of the skis and a smaller one of the bases.  Clicking on the photos takes you to a giant-sized photo of the tops and bases that you can zoom in on.

Item display page - notice the navigation is consistent throughout the site.

Finally, since a site that is too bland can look a bit unwelcoming, I perked it up with a background:

Might be a bit hard to tell in this small image, but the background is our logo.

Next up: Part III - Our First Ad Campaign

It’s pretty amazing where you can start at the beginning of the creative process and where you can end up.  I’ve been working on our new website’s image and branding since February and it’s fun to look back and see what I originally planned for it.  Since I haven’t posted about anything work-related in a long time I figured it would be fun to take you through the steps of launching Powder7.com, not only the website, but all of the branding and imagery that goes into it.  Though this blog doesn’t reflect it often enough, there’s way more to me than running/biking/swimming/talking about my dog.

So, here is installment one in a series of building the brand.  Enjoy!

Before you can have a logo, you have to have a brand.  Jordan and I spent many winter weekends cozied up in the Windy Saddle, our brains brewing with all sorts of ideas.  I filled pages and pages of my notebook with every word that reminded me of skiing, no matter how obscure.

My notebook, filled with all things skiing related as well as winter animals and snowy adjectives.

Eventually we settled on Powder7.com, and secured the domain name.  Then I moved forward with creating a logo.  I came up with some stuff on my own before consulting with some trusty resources.  I wanted to play off the symmetry of the ‘P’ and ‘7′ and also build up the snow theme.

Some very random 'doodles' were followed by some more focus with the P7 outlines and snowflakes, both of which I was very keen on.

I emailed my favorite rough sketches to my brother, Tim, and sister-in-law, India.  India responded with a cell phone photo of a doodle on a napkin, where all brilliant business ideas are born!

India's sketch.

Another variation.

Immediately I knew we had our logo.  Turning the ‘7′ into the mountain - brilliant!  Tim didn’t even get a chance to send his submission in…next time!

I got to work on sprucing up India’s idea and turning it into vector artwork.

One of my first digital versions of the final logo.

At first I used gradients for the mountains, fading to a whitish, snowy peak.  Then I thought the better of it, realizing this would be a big pain to always maintain this exact gradient and really limit reproducing it in other colors.  So I opted for a solid color and changed up the font and word placement.  I also put a cross in the ‘7′ that India initially had.  It adds a little more dimension to the ‘mountain’ and makes it more recognizable as a 7.

The slightly edgier and cleaner final product.

Next up: Part II - Building the Website