Adobe Success Story

Best known for its Crayola crayons, Binney & Smith manufactures hands-on products including markers, chalk, colored pencils, paints, and activity kits.

Challenge

To quickly build a secure Web site that is easy to update and maintain and supports user registration, community, and personalized services, while complying with the Children's Online Privacy and Protection Act.

Benefits

· Accelerated production—three developers, without previous ColdFusion experience, built the site in six weeks
· 150% increase in unique visitors and 150% increase in page views (since relaunch)
· Reduced maintenance cost—non-technical employees, instead of costly developers, can update and maintain the site
· Easy to update—staff can frequently update the site to address products and themes that suit holiday and seasonal events

Project Details

From its early days producing pigments and carbon black in 1903 to its role today as the leading manufacturer of children's arts, crafts, and stationery products, Binney & Smith is a company with color at its core.

Binney & Smith—the maker of Crayola®; products— is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hallmark Cards, Inc., employing more than 2,000 people worldwide. Crayola® branded products are sold in more than 80 countries and in over 12 different languages.

As the leading producer in the children's arts-and-crafts market, Binney & Smith might be tempted to let its strong Crayola brand sell itself. But the company decided to take its marketing to a more sophisticated level, and set out to promote not just its brand, but also the intrinsic value of the arts.

With a new Crayola® brand advertising campaign for television and print scheduled for release in March, the company knew it had to update its Web presence under a tight schedule to support the campaign. The Web site needed to convey Crayola's commitment to the power of creativity and the value of art and creative activities in children's lives.

Using Macromedia solutions, Binney & Smith quickly transformed its Web presence from a static identity site to a rich, interactive, artistic experience for children, educators, and parents.

New Site Drives Year-Round Sales

The redesigned site is an instrumental part of Binney & Smith's five-year marketing plan to bolster year-round sales. Crayola revenues have historically been cyclical, spiking for the back-to-school and fourth-quarter holiday seasons.

According to Gregg Dixon, vice president of the company's Internet Services Group, Binney & Smith sees the Internet as playing a key role in its five-year strategic vision.

"Today we are primarily a product manufacturer," he said. "The Internet allows us to expand and strengthen our relationship with parents, educators, and kids and create new business models that support corporate strategy.

"Previously, our Web site was more of a static identity site and we didn't have a lot of interactivity for our audience or give them reason to return. The new site provides solutions that meet the needs of our consumers and provides us with a platform for relationship marketing that drives the usage and purchase of our products."

Crayola's revamped site provides a rich resource of arts-and-crafts ideas for all visitors, and its content is constantly updated. "We see the Internet as a great medium to provide our consumers with new ideas, projects, lesson plans, and activities. For instance, we wanted to create ideas and activities around holidays like Halloween or Hanukkah that would be engaging and educational and appropriate for the home and the classroom, online and offline," explained Dixon.

Small Team, Short Timeframe, Big Results

Crayola's team of in-house designers and developers, with help from an outside development firm, developed a beta site in just six weeks using Macromedia ColdFusion, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks.

The team tapped the powerful template and Roundtrip HTML features of Macromedia Dreamweaver to code HTML pages, and relied on Macromedia Fireworks for creating sophisticated graphics and complex tables, which were then exported to Dreamweaver. The site's design was mocked up in one night using Fireworks.

"I consider Dreamweaver and Fireworks like having an assistant: the assistant starts and preps the project, so that I can add the polish toward the end," said Justin Knecht, manager of Internet Technology at Crayola.

The Crayola team turned to Macromedia ColdFusion, the solution for building and deploying powerful Web applications, to develop the site.

"We needed a development platform—an application server—that we could take out of the box and hit the ground running. And that meant a solution that was easy to learn and yet powerful enough to help us meet our deadlines," Knecht said. "We briefly considered building the site in ASP and JSP, but without needing any formal analysis, we could see that ColdFusion would be a far better choice."

Only six weeks after selecting ColdFusion, Binney & Smith had a complete Web site up and running—complete with user registrations, activities and projects, electronic greeting cards, and administrative applications.

"The development process was hectic, to be sure," said Knecht. "We had only three full-time developers and we were creating specs from ideas and implementing them on the fly. As far as I'm concerned, we couldn't have built this system without ColdFusion."

Recently Binney & Smith upgraded the application server to ColdFusion 5. "The new release has a number of features, such as query of queries and application deployment services, that will make our development more productive and deployment easier," said Knecht. "We've also seen very strong performance increases for applications that have been migrated to 5."

Binney & Smith employees used Macromedia products regularly, long before the site redesign. "Before launch, even the secretary in the group was using Dreamweaver in order to make HTML changes to the site. We had quite a few people updating the site with Macromedia products," Knecht said.

Easy Site Updates—Empowering Non-technical Employees

Fresh content is key to getting repeat visitors, so Binney & Smith created applications that make it easy for non-technical employees to administer and maintain the site.

"Our site is predicated on fresh material for new seasons, holidays, and events," said Knecht. "We had to ensure that lots of people—even those without technical experience—could add and modify site content. Forcing the technical staff to do content maintenance would be extremely unproductive."

Using ColdFusion, the team created a series of administrative applications that empower users throughout the company to add, remove, and modify all aspects of the site's content. "This saves developers tons of time," Knecht said. "For example, one of our managers can upload dozens of Inspiring Ideas or our designer can add 30 new Electronic Greeting Cards."

Other capabilities enable the marketing department to generate reports based on site registration statistics. "These reports help us understand what portions of the site are being used by which groups of users," Knecht said.

The development team is also beginning to use Macromedia Flash and Generator to update some of the content. "We built a whole administrative interface with ColdFusion, and we are hoping to incorporate similar functionality using Macromedia Flash and Generator," Knecht said.

"Everyone is really excited about using Flash and Generator. We should be launching a newly revised, first version of our kids section in August 2001 that is going to include a lot of Flash ActionScripting and Generator templates," he added.

Features including a quote of the day, and an inspirational idea, can easily be updated every day using Macromedia Flash and Generator together.

The Crayola site will also offer an electronic greeting card in the form of a jigsaw puzzle that was created in Macromedia Flash. Using the power of Generator templates, visitors will be able to upload their own images and send the jigsaw puzzles to friends.

"We obviously want to keep kids engaged and keep things interactive. Flash is the only way to go," Knecht said.

Sophisticated Site Engages All Users

The Crayola site must satisfy a wide variety of users, from children to teachers and parents. Children want to play and listen to sounds and click around, while adults are looking for information. If the content does not change often for both segments, users will lose interest.

"Acquisition is easy. We want to focus our sites on retention," Knecht said. In order to build a community, offer personalized services, and encourage repeat visits, Binney & Smith built a registration system to gather information about and track users. The site now has upwards of 600,000 registered users.

"This module had to comply with the Children's Online Privacy and Protection Act," Knecht explained. "Under those provisions, you cannot collect personal information from or contact any child under the age of 14. We had to structure it to collect information from parents and teachers. And we use that information to analyze demographics and psychographics of our site members who can also opt in to receive monthly newsletters."

Binney & Smith can also track the movements of registered users and link their activity back to their demographic data to uncover hidden relationships and preferences of different types of site visitors. "That helps us continually refine and improve the site," said Knecht.

A Successful Site

"Everyone has been thrilled. We've been getting great feedback from the public. We have an 80% opt-in rate for our monthly newsletters. Obviously people are receptive to the content. I think it speaks to what we're doing from a content perspective," Knecht said.

Popular area of the site include:

Inspiring Ideas

Activity Book
Visitors can choose from hundreds of pages to print and color offline.

Electronic Greeting Cards
Visitors can select, customize, and send colorful, age-appropriate greeting cards to any Internet user in the world. The site currently has more than 40 cards from which to choose.

E-Commerce
The site includes a gift selector and complete online e-commerce store for buying arts-and-crafts supplies, including user-selectable, customized collections of Crayola crayons.

The Results

User traffic has climbed substantially as the site continues to grow. "We've seen 150% growth—in both unique visitors and in page views—since we launched the site. We've also experienced 70,000,000+ branded impressions, 600,000+ registered users and 80% of our customers opt-in for a newsletter," said Knecht.

According to Knecht, Macromedia products were instrumental to the success of the project. "I don't think it would have been possible to put together all of that functionality in the same time without Macromedia solutions," he said. "We were at beta in six weeks and launched the site commercially by July—with all of those applications, e-commerce, and administrative modules."

Site Summary

Macromedia Products:
Five Macromedia ColdFusion Studio 4.5, 4 Macromedia ColdFusion Enterprise 4.5.1, Macromedia Flash, Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver UltraDev, Fireworks, FreeHand

Hardware:
Three Compaq 1850dual-processor Pentium III 500 MHz servers

Operating System
Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 sp6a

Database:
Microsoft SQL Server 7.0

Development Team:
Three full-time developers, three full-time designers

Site Traffic:
Traffic has grown 150% since launch. Site has more than 600,000 registered users.

Benefits of Macromedia:
· Time savings—"Rapid development. Beta in six weeks."
· Products—"All these products benefit from having a single company focusing on them from end to end."
· Accelerated workflow—Macromedia integrated solutions make working across applications easy.
· Simplicity - "Even novice HTML programmers can pick up ColdFusion and build useful, robust applications in days."

Do you have a story you would like to share? Join the Adobe Customer Reference Program.