By Lyndsay Rush, Content Consultant at centresource
At the start of every campaign, we do a lot of work researching our client’s target audience. We want to know who they are, what they care about, where they communicate from, what things influence their everyday lives, where they sleep and what they eat for lunch. Seriously.
So when we landed work with technology behemoth, Adobe, to develop a community site for software developers, we were delighted to discover that we were in fact their target audience. Turns out, our internal development team that would be working on this project is made up of the exact people that Adobe’s site is geared towards. The site itself is a community site for developers using Adobe’s Omniture product suite–basically a collection of forums for questions, code samples, and opensourced plugins; a fantastic resource for software developers. Thus we began an interactive way of developing the site. Adobe empowered our developers to create and construct the site with themselves in mind. Essentially asking us, “What changes need to be made so people like you actually use this site?”
For example, a service like Adobe Ominiture has an enormous amount of documentation. If printed out, it would fill tables upon tables with thick binders. The trouble is that the documentation is also constantly being revised as new features are added or changed. When you have print documentation and a web resources, keeping those two in sync is critical. That’s where centresource came in. We developed an importer that will automatically create new documentation quickly, and update existing documentation on the fly. The styling and standards are set by Adobe so that it is a consistent experience whether a customer is reading the documentation in a PDF file or in the online resource.
So the outstanding aspect of this project was not in the way we won their business (which, for the record, was due to our reputation as Symfony experts), nor was it in the specific techniques used in development. Rather, the extraordinary thing about our work with Adobe was the open working relationship that allowed for us to provide targeted insight on the site as it was being built. For this, we are extremely proud of the project. And while this is not a standard glimpse at creativity as most understand it, it is undeniably innovative.
