It’s been a real pleasure to continue to work with the FastSpring team on this important launch and see SaaSy go from Beta to a full-fledged and incredibly robust subscription service, built on arguably the finest e-commerce backend in the industry. With SaaSy, FastSpring expands its e-commerce capabilities to enable businesses selling software-as-a-service to use an intuitive, full-featured platform and to enjoy phenomenal customer service. The end result is a drastic reduction in time-to-market for these companies, who traditionally have had to divert valuable development resources to in-house e-commerce coding, while simultaneously jumping through bureaucratic hurdles with financial institutions as well in order to start selling.

The goal with SaaSy.com was not to just promote subscription e-commerce as an add-on to FastSpring’s already rich set of features and services (that have made it the platform of choice for many very prominent Mac developers), but to give this part of FastSpring’s business its own identity—its own site and its own presence. In this manner, SaaSy could go head-to-head with other leading providers in the recurring billing space, while leveraging the mature platform it runs on.

The site itself is clean and informative—the latter perhaps to a fault. It makes tactical use of CSS3 and Typekit typography, without trying to reinvent the wheel in terms of design. The goal was information-rich content rather than minimalism, as you often see (sometimes for better, sometimes for worse) in recent web design.

Minimalist sites, some of which only offer slider images, social media icons and big typography dressed up in CSS3, may be pleasing to the eye, but they forget that users evaluating services are sometimes better served by being offered more in-depth content (even if it extends well below the fold). Why? Simply put, they need to make an informed decision—especially in a highly competitive space like recurring billing, which has seen numerous entries of late. SaaSy.com’s depth of content arguably takes a good portion of the guesswork out of this decision-making process for SaaS companies selecting an e-commerce provider.

“Life-Time Value” (LTV) of customers has become more and more the mantra for startups’ business models (ThinkVitamin, Freshbooks and 37Signals’ various properties are great examples) than the pursuit of pure transactional volume. The goal for SaaS businesses is to acquire a loyal rather than a one-time customer. The extensibility of the web and the capabilities of modern browsers have allowed incredibly feature-rich applications to find their home online rather than on the desktop.

In the holy-grail pursuit of the long-term customer paying for software or other services on a recurring basis, companies tend to fall by the wayside if their customer service is not on a par with their technical service. SaaSy goes a lot farther in getting both platform and customer service to the highest standards than your typical recurring billing company, as it inherits FastSpring’s much-heralded support (quick, informed and personable) and equally-lauded platform, SpringBoard—itself a truly great model of software-as-a-service.

Through several iterations, we were able to work with Juliana Minsky, PR expert extraordinaire (and WordPress evangelist to her non-profit clients), refining the interface to replace the company’s previous table-bound site. WordPress provided SurfMedia with a rich CMS for the many ongoing (almost daily, it seems) news updates that they file on work accomplished for their clients.

Part of the adventure of this project was delving deeper into some rather cutting edge functionality of WordPress: shortcodes, sliders, custom thumbnails per post, and video plugins, including playlist options that were able to make excellent use of real estate on the video page. SurfMedia gets its clients stories in the press—across all media—with deep expertise, relationships with local, regional and national news outlets (print and television), and great care and attention to messaging, placement and timeliness.

The new site helps to provide a flexible canvas for the depth of this work, and allow always fresh content to appear right on the home page. Other work involved use of contextual columnar layout and Cufon typography, as well as some tactical use of CSS3 to round corners without images and provide a subtle, effective sidebar on interior pages. Finally, we put some finishing SEO and analytics touches into the backend via useful Google-related plugins.

The site builds on some earlier work we did for BOCH and SurfMedia, a PHP and MySQL-based “Services Locator” that is a fast and extremely useful data-driven web application presenting  in one place over 100 service providers, each connected in some way with the mission of Bringing Our Community Home. This application has been given some additional styling in the process, so it lives happily side-by-side with the WordPress-based main site.

The Services Locator rests on a relational database that not only presents five discrete ways of searching for service providers, locations, service types and individual services, but also connects the service providers, showing how these organizations work together to form a larger network. The service provider pages are search engine friendly and data rich, so that information once scattered across many small sites or not even available on the web at all is aggregated in one place. Each search shows results and then opportunities to drill down to further related providers or search again in all five ways right from the results pages.

The BOCH site is one of several Silverthreaded has worked on as a sub-contractor to SurfMedia, a highly-regarded Marketing & Public Relations firm in Santa Barbara with deep connections to the local community. The strategic approach we’ve worked out is to put the tools for publishing into the hands of the organizations themselves, by using WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS); to develop child themes in WordPress based on a framework theme (often Thematic, one of the best framework themes around) customized to a revitalized branding effort. It’s a good process, as the end result is a rich site which updates the look and feel of the client’s web presence and allows organizations to publish news, events and other updates on their own, in a very timely fashion.

Another site we worked on in this manner with SurfMedia is the Rona Barrett Foundation site, www.ronabarrett.com. We are just launched a site for an innovative senior living facility called Friendship Manor. SurfMedia is phenomenal at getting organizations and other clients to leverage press coverage, video, photo galleries, testimonials and community presence.

WordPress is a good fit for non-profits in terms of budget, as much of the ongoing content roll-out can rest in the hands of the client. While requiring some focused WordPress and html training (along with some ongoing collaboration), it’s a  model we think will appeal to many types of organizations moving beyond “brochureware” sites, which tend to have static content that can quickly become out-of-date, limited functionality and cluttered or non-standards-based design. Leveraging the WordPress development community for plugins can mean getting navigation, social media, galleries, video, Google Analytics and search engine optimization in place in an extremely efficient manner. Customizing child themes enables designing sites that don’t have the feel of off-the-shelf templates; they are truly tailored for the client.

Though the myriad roles of crafting a website can be and often are delegated to distinct individuals, lets consider for a moment the designer as a renaissance person: architect, colorist, typographer and interior designer. What gives a site the stamp of its designer can be called a signature – a sense of fabric, of texture, of patterning, proportion and harmony that runs holistically throughout the site. The experience of entering into a site that has been crafted in this manner down to the smallest typographic, layout and navigational details can be a truly aesthetic experience, one that grows on repeat visits.

For the business owner, the content must be built too, from often very rough ideas and incomplete documentation – knowledge that hasn’t received full articulation – into coherent statements and presentations. Content development (best based on ethographic discovery), like CSS (the style engine of modern web design), is a key process of progressive crafting and polishing. I like to envision and note instances where the era of ephemeral and expensive marketing glitz finds itself slowly washed clean by the natural forces of craft, just as rocks are smoothed by a river over time.

Web designers have much to learn from both the history of architecture and from the study of nature. When we look at the artistic achievement of the painter Paul Klee, much of the lasting delight of his work, as it plays on our senses and invites revisiting and internalization, lies in listening to nature and channeling its flows, the relations of its many parts, and its proportions. We would like to build sites that attend to nature in the deep manner of Klee or Wright – sites that allow the user to feel at home and thereby arrest, even for a short while, the impulse to click through to some other site, some other fleeting entertainment in the vast landscape of the web. Let’s use texture and architecture to evolve the Internet into a more livable, breathable space. Let’s reach through the screen and touch the stone, feel its surface and ask about its story.

We have seen social connection sweep though the net like a virus, gathering people together under the umbrellas of mega-sites such as Facebook and Twitter. We also need sites for companies that dial back the frenzy level, that present a company or product or idea in a duration suited to its own internal requirements. We’re not talking about sites where you just hang out and meditate; rather, the sites we’re envisioning – and there are beautiful examples out in the wild that we will post on in future – carry the user to a desired action, epiphany or piece of information. They are not static destinations, but a set of interlocking flows. E-commerce is one area where flow is crucial; but successful purchase experiences cannot happen without an element of texture and architecture – without a bit of feng shui, if you will.

In these accelerating days of web design and development approaches, marked both by new technologies and a renaissance of graphic design and typography, the existing design of a company’s website can slowly but surely become a bit tired. What once was fresh becomes tinged with staleness. This is not necessarily bad news, as it pushes companies to rethink and rework their public presence on the web, to come up with redesigns or refreshes that take advantage of innovation and work to ensure success in business goals.

Silverthreaded helped FastSpring recently re-launch its company website (originally designed in 2007), taking the route of the refresh rather than the total redesign. We wanted something less boxy, a site that would feel fresh again, without breaking or abandoning some fundamentals such as ease of use and information-rich content.

Two of the phrases that capture the impetus of new approaches to web design are “progressive enhancement” and “graceful degradation.” These are complementary approaches, each term the flipside of the other. Progressive enhancement is achieved by taking advantage of increased support in modern browsers, such as Firefox, Chrome and Safari, for wider subsets of the CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 specs – rounded corners on boxes, drop shadows on both text and boxes, time-specified fades on elements such as links, and so on. The days of constructing both navigation and rounded corners on various elements through elaborate graphical and markup acrobatics are thankfully drawing to a close, just as table-based layout has widely become a piece of history. Progressive enhancement can be seen as a second wave of the web-standards movement.

Graceful degradation involves the recognition of the reality that such enhancements, when used, need to appear acceptably in less-aware browsers (yes, we are talking mostly about IE here) that do not yet support these programmatic ways of displaying style innovations. The goal is to achieve an “always acceptable” user experience, whatever the state of browser support for CSS happens to be. With this comes a renewed willingness to accept that designs will look different within different browsers. Content must remain usable and readable for all, even those surfing with JavaScript and images turned off. Content is still king, not least for SEO and accessibility reasons, but can be styled to accommodate innovation. One of the best books that explains this mental model is Dan Cederholm’s recent Handcrafted CSS.

One of the driving forces for the resurgence of JavaScript, and in particular cross-browser JavaScript frameworks with wide adoption such as jQuery, is the need for cross-browser, cross-platform behavior (as opposed to display) enhancement. With the advent of mobile browsing, and in particular the need to support the user experience on iPhones and iPads, JavaScript-based animation is gaining sophistication. We have used jQuery to create both simple things like cyclical image displays with fades and for more complex animations such as appears on the top of our home page, achieving some of the effects that could once only be approached via Flash.

Useful in this quest for progressive enhancement and graceful degradation is the ability to serve alternate content to IE via conditional comments. In this manner, a site can, in a few lines of code, target IE and provide it with both alternate CSS and alternate content, if needed. We have made use of this best practice in our refresh as well. Text content can be updated at the page level, and the CSS takes care of the rest, to lessen the maintenance headaches. The IE experience will be more boxy, less refined, but not broken. In general, it also serves to educate users to try other browsers and see what they may have been missing.

On our roadmap is a complete redesign of our demo movie to highlight the current state of the SpringBoard interface and its many new features, as well as to use codecs that play nicely with mobile devices. We will also be adjusting the look and feel of our blog to reflect the site refresh. In addition, we are keeping abreast of the advent of HTML 5, the next major revision of the HTML standard, which incorporates features like video playback and drag-and-drop that have to date been dependent on 3rd-party browser plug-ins. A good (short, informative and fun) early reference in this regard is Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers.

With the complexity of calls to multiple files – due to factors such as tracking includes, jQuery and its associated plug-ins, multiple scripts, and page-loading protocols – it is important in refreshes and redesigns to optimize pages and sites in a systematic, iterative manner. Luckily, today we possess web services such as Pingdom and in-browser plug-ins such as Firebug and PageSpeed that can aid performance and optimization.

It is not enough to assume everyone has broadband and pages can afford to be bloated. Performance optimization has even become a sub-industry of its own, much like SEO and SEM. Good sources for general guidelines and tools are available widely on the web. One useful starting place is Google’s “Web Performance Best Practices,” which focuses on five factors: optimizing caching, minimizing round-trip times, minimizing request overhead, minimizing payload size and optimizing browser rendering.

So we hope you enjoy our new site. It is certainly a moving target, and our optimization and video-enhancement efforts will bear more fruit as we progress, learn more, and incorporate our learning into design and coding practices.

These perspectives and enterprises are beginning to accumulate and spread. It would be easy to see this as a revival, but it is more like a renaissance. It would also be easy to see it as a response to the overwhelm of the digital universe that we have collectively created over the last decade, not least in the realm of blogs and social media – and this perspective would not be wrong.

But it is not necessarily a luddite reaction – the word response is more neutral, more open and better reflects some deeper ideas and needs that are worth investigating, along the thread of craft, bricolage and tactility. We would like to make this investigation inclusive of digital media rather than exclusive, as it points to a new plateau of creativity that does not exclude technical innovation in the least.

Rather, we are witness to an enthusiasm that spans disciplines and at times makes of hobbies a full-time engagement on the part of individuals. Etsy stores, Café Press and even the collective construction of Wikipedia could be seen as examples. The dysfunction of the corporate model of brick and mortor store replication and community invasion would be another area to pay attention to – for in the wake of closures of retail outlets, new spaces are appearing for local arts, crafts, markets, farmers’ markets, music and more.

This is, to our mind, part of the new world that bears nothing in common with the doom and gloom of the surrounding chaos; it has been prefigured in many films, fictions and personal wishes. When we see a blade of grass rising out of a tear in the concrete, we are seeing a phenomenon that has much in common with the renaissance of craft among today’s creative makers and bricoleurs.