Extra-U

Radiance Solar is a renewable energy company, providing its clients with fully customized Solar Energy systems. Fueled by the current trend towards investing in clean energy, Radiance Solar needed a website to promote their new services and to extend their brand. Their key requirements were for a fresh website design, lead capture through a Newsletter signup form, and the ability to add and edit content with an easy-to-use interface.

As a start-up, Radiance Solar's budget was limited and its aspirations high; Extra-U was up for the challenge. Following a brief meeting with the company's key stakeholders, our team brainstormed ideas for how best to incorporate the Atlanta based start-up existing brand with a clean and modern design that would help express its philosophy.

While our designers were going through a couple of rounds of revisions and approvals, our technical team installed and configured Drupal, our CMS of choice, with the necessary modules, including File upload, WYSIWYG editor, Search, YUI (Yahoo User Interface) libraries...the list goes on. We incorporated Google Analytics for better traffic analysis and a Google map to the contact page, and employed Views to filter key content such as press releases up to the homepage.

Content loaded, design approved and a little touch of Flash on the homepage and we were ready for final testing. Usually, we'll build for "decent" browsers first and then retrofit to IE6; this time was no different, and with a few tweaks to the stylesheets we were in business across major browsers.

Of course, we wouldn't launch a CMS without first training our clients on its use; thankfully, we find that most people get to grips with Drupal pretty quickly, and indeed Radiance Solar were quickly up-to-speed blogging and posting press releases.

It's been a little while now since we launched Radiance Solar's site, and we've been pleased to see that they've been able to take control of their site, making updates with the CMS with a minimum of ongoing support from us.  Which means it's time to talk about phase 2...