Thanks to Chris Miller, one of the creative geniuses behind the Coast Capital Savings Credit Union website we discussed a few weeks back. He’s their Web Editor, External Sites, and he graciously hooked me up with some answers as to what went on behind the scenes in launching their new website.

Trey Reeme: Chris, we’ve been doting over your new website since we first saw it. You worked with an outside agency on the project, I’m guessing?

Chris Miller: Yes, we worked with our advertising agency, Rethink, and their interactive design partner, Burnkit.

TR: Mighty fine work you got from both, at least from what I think the finished project says about the quality of their efforts. How long did the project take from start to launch – and how did you manage the creative process?

CM: The project took approximately one year from start to finish. Development and QA took approximately 3 months. The creative process started with a creative brief defining our current state and goals. We then worked with our agency to create the site wire-frames based on the information architecture created within my department (E-business development). Once the wireframes were completed the interface design was proposed, reviewed, revised and finalized.

Julie, our Online Greeter, was developed as a natural extension to our already established brand. We had previously created a micro-site targeting the youth market with a supporting DM piece and guerrilla marketing to drive traffic to the site. Julie also mirrors our approach to our television, radio and print ads.

TR: So, who’s the real-life “Julie” and is she being used in any of your offline marketing?

CM: Julie is an actor – Jackie Blackmore. We are considering possible offline marketing tactics for Julie based on the success of the site.

TR: Very cool. So how did you manage the redesign process?

CM: For the creative process for the online greeter development we created a list of products, services and top searched terms and popular pages to create skits. Scripts were provided by our agency on each topic for review, and once the content of the skits was finalized a three day shoot was completed to film the skits. The clips were reviewed and selected, edited and polished for audio and compressed for use with Flash video. Development for the greeter application was completed by Burnkit, which included a CMS tool that allows us to manage the skits and videos, search terms and promo links, as well as a robust reporting tool to gather stats on popular skits, search terms, user session data and more.

TR: Who actually wrote the copy (it’s absolutely amazing, by the way) – and how tough was it to balance entertainment and humor with professionalism?

CM: The copy was a joint effort with in-house subject matter experts and a writing committee, and our agency. Page content was reviewed for accuracy and broken down to its base message and content – a lot of unnecessary content was removed. E-business development worked with Marketing and our agency to create a writing style guide. From there our writing committee (made up of a member from marketing, communications, and my department) wrote most of the copy, and then sent it to our agency to add the humour. The balance of humour and professionalism has always been one that has tightly defined and executed with Coast Capital Savings, as our approach to banking has always been a little different. Our goal is always to offer simple financial help – breaking down our products and services to a base level and taking a light approach to topics that are often considered to be of a serious nature.

TR: What’s your member response been?

CM: Quite positive – as far as launches go it has gone very well, with a handful of issues and a small amount of negative feedback. We’ve had a lot of very positive feedback from both members and non members.

TR: Speaking of feedback, have you thought about blogging with your members or adding RSS to the site?

CM: Yes, both. We’re investigating both aspects and hope to implement both in the future.