Rainbow Worm Farm
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Rainbow Worm Farm :: www.rainbowwormfarm.com ::
is one of the oldest, biggest and most respected worm growers in the world. They also custom make worm harvesting and casting bagging equipment.
When the Rainbow Worm Farm approached me to redesign their site they had an interesting problem. The web designer who had been doing the work for them claimed partial ownership to the web site and the pages themselves. I have to admit that it was news to me to discover this to be common practice. It is left up to the wording in the contract as to whether the pages will belong to the person doing the work or the person hiring the worker. I have always given ownership of the work to the people who paid me to do it. After talking with me, Rainbow Worm Farm paid their web designer to release their domain name and their pages to them. I helped them transfer their domain to a much better provider as quickly as possible. Their site was now ready for the redesign that they desired. They had tried to get the former web designer to change some things but he would never respond to their requests.
The Rainbow Worm Farm wanted to clean up their product listings and add some features that they saw on other sites. They wanted their own worm discussion forum and they wanted to use the logo from the previous design. That's the only thing that remains! Other than that I could reorganize as I saw fit. Their pages were not much more than a catalog and there wasn't very much information available on their site. As I organized it into sections I was struck by the fact that the majority of the things that they sold were intended for other worm farmers. Besides the worms themselves and a small home vermicomposting kit, everything else would only be used by a professional. I realized that if they just put up another worm forum that they wouldn't stand out in the crowd. I had to convince them to refocus their site and their worm forum to cater to people who want to know how to start a worm farm. They eventually agreed with me even though the bulk of their sales had been coming from selling the worms themselves. By repositioning themselves in this way they are not one among many, but they are the sole provider of this service to my knowledge.
I wanted the design of the site to be pure, clean and simple. It is a natural to use a rainbow theme throughout the site. A group of no more than seven choices is the best number to present to a person. There are seven colors in a rainbow. The seven major categories of goods sold on the site are each given one of the colors of the rainbow to use as a design element in their sections. When a visitor sees a particular color then they know what section they are in.
I tried to use graphics sparingly if at all on the site. Besides their logo and a small cartoon worm mascot the only other graphics are for the products themselves. The rainbow at the top of each page is accomplished using colored table cells instead of graphics. This accomplishes two things: the rainbow doesn't have to download separately from the page and it can shrink and stretch to fit the size of the screen without any overlap or underflow and with no horizontal scrolling.
I redesigned their site..and then I redesigned it again! Shortly after I redesigned this site for them and Rainbow Worm Farm had paid me for it, I read a book by Kevin Mullet and Darrell Sano called "Designing Visual Interfaces, Communication Oriented Techniques". This is a very good book to say the least and I was immediately unhappy with my design. I gained permission from Rainbow Worm Farm to redesign the site once more, which I did at no cost to them. There wasn't anything particularly wrong with the first design but this design is much better now. I'm happy with it and they are too.
In 2000, the owners of Rainbow Worm Farm retired and requested that I take their site down.
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