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ListenUp is a Colorado Hi-Fi retailer with a long history dating back to 1972. They were the first company to sell CDs or CD Players in Colorado and have been the leading high end custom system designer for many years. I've always loved their stores which blend a modern contemporary equipment and furniture with a relaxed and prestigious staff. Their stores were always a fantastic place to go just to wander around and listen to your favorite music on systems with incredible capabilities in sonic reproduction.
Sadly I always found their web site lacking, while the domain and site had been around for years the design was lackluster and really betrayed the elegance and prestige of the rest of the ListenUp brand. When I saw a crisis posting in May of 2008 to take over their web operation I jumped at the chance.
We began our redesign efforts in October of 2008. I found that all of our competitors such as Crutchfield, Vanns, OneCall, Abt, were using the standard white background, and often recycling product photos straight from the manufacturer. I presented a number of different designs to the company and we decided to play it a bit differently. We've gone with a dark gray background and focused a great deal of the site on imagery.
Rather than just take what the manufactures provide we've developed unique product images of every product online. I've extensively photographed all of the stores, and each page of the site has a large unique image. For those interested in Hi-Fi and custom systems ListenUp.com is a pleasure to browse through. I also implemented a drop down nav with large icons of each of our major product categories. All in all if it shows up on ListenUp.com I'm responsible for it.
We've got some exciting plans for 2010, I'm looking forward to tagging more of the products with separate attributes so that users can quickly find the products that exactly match their needs, I'd also love to expand beyond Miva and look at implementing a cart that uses a flex interface. There's also a digital signage project here for the retail stores that I'd love to get started. The idea will be to have a re-skinned version of the web site available to user through large touch panels in the stores for visitors to be able to select which speakers music plays out of and even select what music/video they want to play, then compare the product specs with other equipment that they've demo'd in other demo rooms in the store.
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While the ListenUpdate the ListenUp enewsletter has a devoted and loyal following I wanted there to be a way for people to subscribe to not only sales updates but also to have a way to hear the latest scuttlebutt on the Hi-Fi scene through ListenUp.
Wordpress once again proved to be a fantastic tool and within a couple of days of making the decision to have a ListenUp blog we had a site up and populated with a wide variety of content.
Joe Rassenfoss has done a really awesome job as our PR guy in keeping the site updated regularly with the latest news on new media releases, events at the ListenUp stores, music events and major industry events like CES.
The background is ListenUp's Laurie Cooper with B&W Signature Diamond speakers. We used this image as the cover of our 2008 sourcebook.
for the retail stores that I'd love to get started. The idea will be to have a re-skinned version of the web site available to user through large touch panels in the stores for visitors to be able to select which speakers music plays out of and even select what music/video they want to play, then compare the product specs with other equipment that they've demo'd in other demo rooms in the store.
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One Touch Intelligence is a competitive intelligence When I first arrived at OTI I led a massive internal audit on their existing portal application. I conducted interviews with their clients, performed a usability analysis and generated use cases for each of the principal audiences of the application. With those requirements gathered, I designed, and architected the Competitive Intelligence Management System (CIMS) to serve as the principal way for OTI to deliver it’s competitive intelligence analysis to it’s clients.
I designed a unique look and feel matching each client’s internal branding as well as a navigation that matched each client’s internal language. The redesign was a success and every client renewed their contract. After the launch of the system we performed additional follow up studies and collected additional clients for OTI’s premiere service. The second system that I designed for OTI was OneTRAK.com.
This site was meant to serve as a news and analysis portal for the telecommunications industry. I discussed the needs of the site at length with Matt Stump, a journalist with 28 years experience in the industry. We talked about what research tools were missing for the industry and how those tools should function. With these holes in mind we created the OneTRAK site and the DataTRAK tool. We also began filming regular news updates for OneTrak called VideoTrak. I would film all of these edit and publish them online.
While working at OTI I performed a number of additional duties including designing small marketing sites, flash presentations, and power point decks for sales presentations.
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I love a good story especially when it's accompanied with good imagery that pulls the reader along through the tale. One of my hobbies is to ride motorcycles avoiding mainstream routes of travel and instead sticking to the back roads and biways. I also enjoy mountain climbing, hiking, backpacking, snowshoeing, and a bunch of other outdoor activities. In an effort to try and catalog the stories of my pursuits I created 2wheels2boots.com.
Here you'll find photos, stories and guides of hiking trips, good motorcycling roads, and nice places to take a few pictures. I won't claim to be a great writer but I can tell a story. The longer and more detailed yarns can be found in the upper right hand links. This is also where you'll find collections of photos I've taken for clients and for personal use.
The design is a wordpress theme called autofocus which I've modified slightly. Wordpress continues to be a great platform for me to quickly publishing content under a strong design.