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Buoy Beer
Meet the Partner
There’s little better than enjoying a cold Buoy Beer, on a hot day. The Astoria, Oregon craft beer company and taproom with restaurant, contracted with Revere, a Vancouver, WA based design firm to redesign their website. We were called in to do the web development.
Opportunities
When Revere came to us last year with a fun new design for Buoy Beer Company and asked us to develop the site, we couldn’t turn it down. They are a favorite collaborator of ours, and their designs are always first class, but this one really blew us out of the water.
The new design had three things a great web design should- it was unique, it was user friendly, and it captured the brand, transporting us straight to the foggy Oregon coast. Our Devs couldn’t wait to get their hands on it to start building.
Strategy
At Intuitive, we always look before we leap, that’s why why every project gets strategy work first. For Buoy that meant working with Revere to walk through each page as a user would to determine the functionality needed, and how the site would flow.
Buoy wanted users to be able to find a beer to suit their taste based on things like beer style, ABV level and seasonal availability. They also wanted to showcase their Taproom menu, and have it easily updated by staff.
Aside from beautiful design and UX, a site needs to be functional for its backend users, especially with a team as hands on as Buoy’s is. Their team is in the site daily and needs to be able to add new content safely without compromising the design of the site.
Because the design was so unique to Buoy, right away, we knew we’d be using a custom theme for this build.
Execute
We built custom blocks for WordPress’s page editor Gutenberg that allows the Buoy team to easily edit existing pages and create new pages in-house, while keeping their site design consistent.
To showcase the Beers, we used a custom post type that allows for easy upload and categorization on the backend, but pulls information into a beautiful page layout for each beer.
We created custom filtering to allow a user to find a particular beer based on things like Beer style, packaging and availability throughout the year.
We all know nothing pairs better with beer than good food, and Buoy’s beer is no exception. They’ve got a very tasty menu at their Taproom in Astoria, Oregon that changes seasonally and they need to be able to make frequent updates to their menu items.
We built another easy-to-use post type for the food menu on the back end of the site. We made sure the Buoy team could categorize each item and drag and drop it into a particular order. On the front end, this meant a beautiful and organized menu categorized between Big Bites, Small Bites and a section for the kids!
A Highlight
One of our favorite parts of this site is the bobbing Pilsner can on the home page. Our Devs used CSS animations to mimic the motion of a real buoy out in the ocean. Special touches like this can bring a design from good to great, and help a site to stand out from the crowd! We appreciated Revere’s choice to limit animation to this design element, because there’s a fine line between too much animation, and doing it just right.
By the numbers
At launch, the new site scored 99/100 with a Google Lighthouse performance audit.
In a Google Lighthouse audit, the web page is analyzed and given a performance score between 0 and 100 in relation to how good the end-user experience will be while browsing the site. Markers in the audit include things like page load speed, whether images are sized appropriately and code quality.
The End Result
We brought Revere’s design to life with a user-friendly site that functions just as well on the back-end as it does on the front. Buoy Beer now has a site that truly represents their passion for good beer, food and their community.
In the end, Buoy sailed away with a beautiful new site that highlights the strength of their brand that they can continue to build on as their business grows.
Our Thoughts
This site was truly a pleasure to build. The designs were eye catching, and intentional which led to a beautiful and functional site. Buoy and Revere were a dream to work with, and I look forward to our next collaboration!
— Piper
Working with Buoy and Revere was a treat because it was such a fun and cool site to build. All three teams worked together well and the site turned out beautifully.
— Anish