http://www.KikkiPlanet.com
About the project.
KikkiPlanet.com is an online magazine centred on Edmonton, which launched on September 30, 2011. It focuses on the young, urban, up-and-coming, professional, and social media savvy population of Edmonton. KikkiPlanet.com is truly a team effort. While Kikki does the lion’s share of the writing, I handle the website, branding and associated print/promotional materials. We have photography by Photos With Ashley, and makeup design with Makeup by Lita. We feature profiles of young men and women who are making a difference in the city through their involvement with Edmonton’s social media community, with their professional accomplishments, with giving back through charity, non-profit and volunteer work, and who personify what makes Edmonton great. We also feature content on great things to do around the city, reviews of books and wine, and much, much more. The project is still in its start-up phase, but we plan to grow and expand steadily with new features, new content and the very best that Edmonton has to offer its vibrant population.
KikkiPlanet.com has come a long way from where it started. Initially, Kikki conceived of it as an extension of her Twitter persona, @KikkiPlanet. That persona was sarcastic, witty and outrageous, with a lot of tweeting about Masi wine, Smirnoff vodka, Lelo, and cabana boys. The site would be a personal blog featuring content in line with her tweets about her life as the stay-at-home mom of a 4 year old daughter and two teenage sons, and the wife of a successful lawyer. Kikki hired someone to design the blog and a photographer to take a few pictures they could use to build the template. But somewhere along the way, Plan A failed — and all for the better.
For one, Kikki’s vision for her creation had changed. She wanted her website to be about more than just getting tipsy and spouting off pearls of wisdom from the comfort of her designer sofa. She wanted it to be about the vibrant and exciting culture she had become a part of through Edmonton’s social media scene, and about the amazing friends, contacts and goings-on she had discovered there. As well, things with the development of her site weren’t going well. Kikki happens to be a close friend of mine as well as a client, and so because of my background in website development, we had been chatting about her project a fair amount off the books, even before she officially hired me. Eventually she approached me, hoping that I might be better able to capture her vision for her persona and her website. I was only too happy to join her team.
We scrapped whatever there was so far and went back to the drawing board with a new vision, a new website developer, a new photographer and a new passion. In the space of 4 weeks, we built the website, ran two sensational photo shoots, wrote 6 solid articles, planned/promoted and hosted a beautiful cocktail party to celebrate the launch of the site, designed and ordered business cards, designed and ordered custom shot glasses as gifts for our party guests, produced and posted a 3 minute video for the launch party, and a whole host of other tasks too numerous to list.
I can’t say enough about how much this project means to me. On a personal level, I share Kikki’s feelings on Edmonton’s social media scene and the amazing people I’ve come to know through it over the last 18 months. On a professional level, I couldn’t have asked for a better client. Kikki has a prominent voice in this town, and as a result of our collaborative partnership, literally thousands of people in Edmonton have seen my work on her site, many of whom are top level talent in Edmonton’s news media, marketing and communications firms, and independent business community.
Project scope.
I knew from the moment Kikki told me about her project that WordPress would be ideal for her needs. It allows for multiple contributors, a great deal of layout flexibility, a solid content organization method, a library of many open-source plugins to extend the site’s functionality, and would make it easy for Kikki to post her own articles once the site was fully operational. But KikkiPlanet.com was not just a standard WordPress installation, with a list of blog posts running down the page. We wanted to create a “magazine” feel to our website, with all the latest content available straight from the front page, where visitors could access what interested them in a single click. This required development of a brand new, from-scratch custom WordPress theme. Working with WordPress code and functions was very demanding in this project, and it certainly challenged me! Thank goodness for the WordPress Codex.
When we started, all we had was a concept in our heads and ideas for the content we wanted. But we had no branding yet. That’s where Ashley Green came in. We did a photo shoot with Ashley at several downtown locations designed to capture KikkiPlanet.com’s modern, urban flavour. The results were outstanding, and we built the site’s branding around graphic elements designed using Ashley’s photos of Kikki as a base. Kikki wanted the aesthetic concept of her site to be feminine and elegant, but still bold and attention-grabbing. I conceived of the site in my head as something like a fancy cocktail party in website form. When it comes to bold, feminine elegance, you can never go wrong with black, white and hot pink. I worked with one of Ashley’s photos in Photoshop, then built the website’s main logo header around this image, using both a scriptive font and an understated serif font for the logo’s text. When I showed this treatment to Kikki, she loved it immediately, and so I knew I was on the right track. From there, it was fairly routine to use the elements from the logo to accent the rest of the site.
Kikki and I really took a two-pronged approach to getting the website ready for launch. In one house in the West End of Edmonton during the month of September, I was clacking away at my keyboard and clicking away at my mouse to create the site’s layout and structure using filler text while I waited for Kikki, in another West End house about 30 blocks away, to complete the writing of her features. As she began to send me content, I slotted it in where it needed to go on the site. I wanted a really interactive experience for visitors, and coded the site’s theme so that each type of content would have unique sets of theme elements, sidebar features and intuitive clicking access for visitors.
In the meantime, there was a lot more work to do than just developing the website and its content. We ran two back-to-back photo shoots with Ashley in Edmonton’s downtown core mid-month to get stunning images of Brittney and Seth for our Woman to Watch and Man About Town feature articles. During the photo shoot, I had my video camera in hand almost the entire time, capturing footage I planned to use in a video montage for the site and its big launch party at the end of the month. Speaking of the launch party, was that ever fun to plan! We definitely wanted a fun, bold and elegant affair to capture the theme and style of our website, so we planned a stand-up cocktail party with trays of gourmet appetizers and a private bar. I accompanied Kikki every step of the way as we secured a venue (Daffodil Gallery), a caterer (d’Lish Urban Kitchen & Wine Bar), decor and made up a VIP guest list. I also designed and produced a special postcard-style invitation that Kikki could personally deliver to her VIP guests. While she handled online ticket sales to the party and procurement of items for the swag bags, and we both promoted it as much as possible on Twitter and Facebook, I also designed for her a simple but elegant business card, and had those produced by a professional printer. By the eve of the party, we were expecting around 50 guests, and Kikki had lined up a digital photo booth on site for her guests to create memories of the event. I also created a 3 minute video set to music designed to capture the story of how KikkiPlanet.com came to be, and the experience of working on the site for all the people involved.
By the time September 30 — the day of our big launch — rolled around, we were incredibly excited to see how our creation would be received and to celebrate a lot of hard work in a very short amount of time.
Project results.
Since launching KikkiPlanet.com, we’ve been overwhelmed by the positive response it has received. In the first 28 hours of operation, more than 800 people took a look at the website, and they spent a combined total of 78 hours browsing its content. Comments from our peers in Edmonton’s social media community were overwhelmingly supportive of both the site’s look/structure and its content. We’ve had lots of interest from the organizers of various events around the city about being featured in “#yegenda”, our guide to Edmonton’s hottest things to do. We’ve also had recommendations for people we can profile on the site, and requests to contribute content as well.
The launch party, too, was a roaring success. Our guests enjoyed delicious food and a signature “Kikkitini” chocolate cinnamon cocktail, and hammed it up in the photo booth until we had to shut down the event. But that doesn’t mean we shut down the party. Afterwards, those who wanted to keep celebrating moved over to 100 Bar & Kitchen and we were at it late into the night. Everyone who attended seemed to have a great time, and the launch party video was also very well received.
Client testimonial.
“In July of 2011, KikkiPlanet.com was at a low point. After months of no progress on the site and a lack of congruency between myself and the previous web designer with regard to the vision, I had become frustrated and disheartened with the project. Determined to bring the site back to the initial vision I had developed in the first place, I hired Kasia Gawlak to work both on the design and construction of the site. Kasia’s immediate enthusiasm for the project and comprehension of my ultimate goal and the audience I wished to attract breathed new life into our project. As a result of her hard work and dedication to a common goal, KikkiPlanet.com launched to acclaim, accolades and received immediate recognition in the online social media community, as well as in news media. Kasia is not only a gifted developer but also a thoughtful listener, and the blend of these two attributes helped KikkiPlanet.com become what it is today – a breathtaking website that appeals to the exact audience I had hoped to attract.” — Kikki Planet
Project future.
Though Kikki and I are just starting out, we have high hopes for where KikkiPlanet.com may ultimately take us. We definitely plan to expand the features, content and scope of the site over the coming months. We want to make it Edmonton’s go-to destination for who to know and where to go in this fantastic city we call home. So visit often for all the latest!
Project coverage.
- New Planet Discovered! The Unknown Studio s03e02, with Adam Rozenhart & Scott Bourgeois
- Social Media Roundup 19 by Karen Unland
Project extras.
Business card, 4-colour, 3.5 x 2″
VIP party invitation, 4-colour
Launch party video
