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Tall Grass Toffee Co.

Lead Designer: Austin McDaniel
Client Name: Tall Grass Toffee Co.
Owner: Jim Ladd
Web Address: www.tallgrasstoffee.com

WHAT THEY DO:
Tall Grass Toffee is a small business located in Lenexa, KS, a suburb of Kansas City. They make and sell toffee, and ship their product all over the world.

SITE ANALYSIS:
The web solution that Vie Media has created for Tall Grass Toffee has been the most extensive one we’ve made to date. Not only did this site get a complete design overhaul, but we also brought Tall Grass Toffee one step further into the 21st century by integrating an online shopping option to his current “brick-and-mortar” location. First, let’s take a look at the overall design. The website had to be completely reworked from the original one in place. While the site was still informative, it didn’t stand up to today’s standards and quality of similar sites. The first step was to pick out an effective color palette to work with. Tall Grass Toffee prides itself on producing “all natural” toffee, a trait that is increasingly rare in today’s food product industry. Because of this we selected a visual bouquet of natural colors, from lush greens, to the subtle beiges, the entire site has a fresh organic feel to it. These gentle colors are very relaxing to the regular visitors, as well as newcomers who are unfamiliar with the business.

Another large aspect of the design is the imagery throughout the site. Jim Ladd made a very wise move here and hired a professional photographer to create the images of the toffee he produces. These vivid pictures make our mouths water just from looking at them and really capture the attention of the average browser. Wanting to make the site as captivating as possible on a natural color palette, the lead designer selected to make the images more of a slideshow that would show various toffee flavors. If the friendly and natural atmosphere doesn’t capture the potential clients, the outstanding imagery does. Tall Grass Toffee also indicated interest in creating a more effective online ordering option for their clients. Never one to turn down a challenge, the project’s lead designer quickly looked into possible methods for creating such a system. Currently, Tall Grass Toffee is using a version of QuickBooks to do their orders and accounting, while this system works great, it typically requires the users to enter the invoices separately. After Vie Media completed the online ordering storefront, we were able to integrate code from third-party companies that would be able to collect the order information and download it directly into QuickBooks. From there, Tall Grass Toffee would be able to quickly and efficiently see orders that needed to be completed, and print out shipping labels for these online orders.

Tall Grass Toffee is slowly being able to evolve from a physical business to an online one. Future plans are to include scheduled “seasonal” updates (i.e. Valentine’s Day, Easter, Mother’s Day, Christmas), and a regular newsletter to coincide with the online advertising already being performed. Only time will tell if Tall Grass Toffee will continue with its huge success, but with their new web solution, and monthly website maintenance, they’re definitely taking a step in the right direction.