Case Study: Ice Energy

Ice Energy

With our long standing agency partner, Litos Strategic Communication, we planned and built a site that allows Ice Energy to present its innovative technology and deliver its thought leadership to target audiences while tastefully facilitating user engagement. The information architecture is clear, and users consuming new information are encouraged to learn more from suggested resources and tagged content.

Industry:
Energy

Price Range:
$35k- $50k

Agency Partner:
Litos Stategic Communication

The Client

Ice Energy is a leader in intelligent energy storage technology. The Ice Bear system stores electricity for cooling during low demand hours (as ice) and then cools buildings from this store during peak demand hours, saving energy and, of course, money. Ice Energy sought to engage some key personas: the utility industry, policymakers, building operators, architects and the construction industry, among others. They needed to succinctly explain the Ice Bear system and other sophisticated smart grid technology to these segments and to continue to establish themselves as a future resource center for valuable new information.

“We were anxious to satisfy a new cleantech client who needed an online presence reflective of a market leader. Working together with Newfangled and on an aggressive timeline, we delivered a site that exceeded expectations by a mile. Anything we didn’t think of, Newfangled took care of. Thanks, guys.”
Mark Litos, President, Litos Strategic Communication

Planning and Prototyping

During the prototyping phase we refined the architecture, starting with a preliminary site map and ending up, after our series of collaborative meetings, with a navigable model displaying all calls to action, related content widgets and other specialized functionality. In advance of any programming, we worked through the newsletter and blog tools in the content leadership section, designed the product pages to feature key downloadable resources, and planned the functionality driving the related content system. Because the prototype serves as a functional specification document and is visually interactive, showing exactly what information will be on each page, it made Litos’s visual design process much more efficient.

A considerable part of our planning (and of course our CMS's design in general) goes toward making a site easy to maintain and publish with. If any specialized functionality is not seen on prototype pages, decisions about back-end functionality are noted so that menu pages, content types, and categories are easily handled by site administrators once a site is live.

Design and Agency Partnership

Litos Strategic Communication brought a deep understanding of Ice Energy's goals from the outset of this project and, having worked with Newfangled on many sites, the Litos team is also now thoroughly familiar with our prototyping process. Once the Litos/Ice Energy/Newfangled team completed the prototyping phase, Litos had more than enough understanding of site functionality to be able to design key templates needed for site skinning.

Functionality

The home page marquee was planned to highlight the who, what, when, where and how of Ice-Energy's innovations.
Solutions pages we can point these key groups to relevant site content and downloads--some lead-generating, some not.
Suggested Resources boxes can feature all the information types (Newsletters, blogposts, etc.), that are related behind the scenes by tags.
Tag cloud
Intelligent search. Specific content types are suggested in response to search queries.