The Co-op Food Stores

added 02/21/08

Once there was a website that developed much like a town without a Town Planner: Folks loved the location and thought it would be a great place to be, so it built up quickly. People moved in and told their friends. Their friends told friends who told other friends. And pretty soon the houses and skyscrapers and shopping centers were up before anyone had planned a proper road system or electrical grid to support it all.

Much like the metaphor above, the original Co-op website had thousands and thousands of pages full of great information—much of which was often hard to find and access. Over the years we attempted to help by adding navigational aids and other tricks of the internet trade to help our site users find what they were looking for. It worked for a while, but the myriad of hot buttons and drop-down menus soon added to the clutter, rather than help organize it all as intended. And eventually, a weary Webmaster and Education/Member Services Director grew tired of the cyber-archeological skills needed to help dig up the information our site visitors were looking for. We knew the time had come to develop a new site.

As websites go, image is important. And we’ve worked very hard at a visual style that we hope visitors will find appealing. But above all, we believe user-friendliness is paramount. Thus, when planning the new site, we decided to nix any ideas of fancy animation or other flashy extras in favor of crisp design, well-thought-out navigation, and ease of access for the user. We want a visit to our website to be like a visit to one of our stores. We wanted you to be able to drop in, know that you’re welcome, easily find what you’re looking for, and enjoy your stay.

So with the help of Triangle Park Creative, a Minnesota-based design and marketing firm that serves cooperatives and nonprofits, we developed the website you are reading now. When planning it out, we decided to start from scratch, to some degree. We included the most popular pages and sections from our former site, of course, but there are many other pages that do not appear here. It’s not out of laziness or lack of effort. Often our old pages had information that was current the day it was written, but very much out of date and inaccurate years later. We wanted to take advantage of the opportunity the new site afforded us and emphasize quality over quantity.

So poke around a while and see what you think. A new website is always going to be a work in progress, so if you have any feedback you’d like to pass along, we’d love to hear from you. Just send us an email and know that someone is on the other end who will respond with the same customer service you’ve come to expect from us. The website may be different, but the cooperative spirit of the people behind it all is still the same.