Today is a good day. Today, we attended the launch event for Think Salmon. Sure, we’ve launched websites before, but this is the first launch we’ve done that’s been attended by a government minister (BC Minister of the Environment, Barry Penner), with speeches and banners and buttons and more.
If it was up to me, I’d describe it as a kick ass site that lets people learn and share how important and cool salmon are to British Columbia and to the planet. However, the site describes itself as “inspiring individuals and organizations to contribute to the best possible conditions and environment for British Columbia’s Pacific salmon.” Same difference.
The site has been a long time in development, and it shows - even though it just launched, there’s some amazing Google Maps integration, a mailing list, customized site registration, clean URLs, a savvy RSS feed, and a bit I’m particularly proud of: Comment flagging, where users can participate in removing comments that are inappropriate. This was custom-built for the site’s ExpressionEngine content management system, and perhaps I’m overly proud of it, but there you go.
Of course, the design itself is also something we’re proud of; there’s an awful lot of work that went into making it so clean-looking. The site uses non-standard fonts and fairly complex layouts, but everything can be managed by someone knowing just a little HTML, and the home page can be edited and scheduled in advance, which is really nice when you want to keep the site fresh but don’t want to have to edit it every day.
Users can come to the site, sign up and be sharing photos, stories, events and more within minutes, and it took a heck of a lot of work to make the site registration system work so well.
Lastly, of course, there’s the data on the site. For one think, there’s a searchable index of all the projects funded by the Pacific Salmon Foundation in the past 15 or so years. There are dozens of stories, a whole section devoted to Salmon facts, and a section that highlights the latest salmon-related news.
We have a lot planned for the next phase of the site, but I can’t share that with you yet. Think: SalmonCast—oh no, I think I’ve said too much already!
It’s also important to note that this entire project was managed by the great folks at Work Industries, who connected us with the client, the Pacific Salmon Foundation, and guided the project canoe down the long milestone river to the ocean of launching, so to speak.
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