Case Study for:
Old Charleston History Expeditions

 The Company

Old Charleston History Expeditions offers expertly curated, interactive walking tours through Charleston’s rich history, led by historian Cole Davis, whose deep local roots and academic expertise provide an unforgettable journey through the Holy City’s past.

 The Challenge

Like any new business, the proprietor is starting from scratch – or as we like to view this challenge: a blank canvas for our customer to carefully ideate and present their desired online presence from the very beginning. In Cole’s case, this was a website that not only effectively drove customers to his services, but painted a picture of the rich history of Charleston to entice and excite with visions of the past.

 The Process

The Colophon team met with Cole to understand his vision for the website – initial brand guidelines, color palettes, a logo, necessary pages, inspiration websites or competitors, and necessary key features. All of these are key components to incepting the initial design for a great website so that the customer can establish their brand right from the start.

Cole was exceptional to work with in the design stages, highly organized thoughts with a clear-cut idea of what the website should be and how it should look. Incorporating our design and WordPress programming best practices, our team went to work to design, program, and optimize this site to bring this idea to life.

At Colophon, you dream it up, and we build it!

 The Solution

As web developers, pictures are certainly worth a thousand words, and stock images can be used to provide messaging of a website to the audience, especially for newer websites. However, sometimes in niche cases stock images are lacking. Artificial intelligence (AI) is certainly a hot button topic right now to say the least, and at Colophon, we believe there is a time and place to utilize these as tools instead of crutches. AI certainly has its strengths, and we were able to employ a very unique use-case to fill the gap of stock images.

Colophon’s lead designer, Ramiro Modica, was able to use an AI tool and a sharp prompt to create colonial downtown Charleston, SC photos within the website’s color palette to set the stage for the design and engage Cole’s customers. Tools in the hands of skilled people are paramount to success!

The Colophon programming & content team, led by Branislav Parchekliev and Jeferson Uchak, then programmed and optimized the website to prepare for a smooth launch.

Optimizing the website not only includes optimizing the structure and content of the website and all pages, but ensuring the server and its technologies are well-engineered and fine-tuned for WordPress. At Colophon, our talented Systems Administrator, Alex Khodachenko, engineers our servers to be ultra-fast by ensuring each are “low-tenant”. We don’t cram websites into small spaces to cut cost. High-performance of a website is integral to our customers to guarantee the site is reliable, delivers results, and holds customer engagement via near-instantaneous response.

OldCHSHistory.com is LIVE! Here’s to future success for a historical business!