The Brand Tree

3Com Corporation : Web Redesign & 3Com Park Kiosk

3Com Corporation (NASDAQ: COMS) is a leading manufacturer of networking and communications products, an industry that is experiencing both high growth and a rapidly changing environment. 3Com Corporation engaged Brooks Cole’s team for the complete redesign and restructuring the graphical user interface and backend support system for its corporate Web site.

Just after the dawn of the web itself, our team created a pioneering Web site architecture, visual design and navigational structure for 3Com that were highly flexible and extensible. Launched in October 1995, 3Com’s redesigned Web site ranked second in Networking and Communications’ 500 that year.

We also created a look and feel for the 3Com Web site that facilitated a significant improvement in both visual appeal and performance — the maximum download time per page was 10 seconds on a dialup connection. We developed a library of site tools to help users find the information they need, such as a system of data type icons for easy navigation, an interactive site map with pull down menus which are connected to the 3Com search engine, and a metatagging tool for search visibility.

The First Internet Kiosk in a Major Sports Complex was designed by Brooks Cole for 3Com when Candlestick Park became 3Com Park. We collaborated with the venerable and world famous aerial photographer Robert Cameron, author of the successful “Above” series including “Above San Francisco.”

For the back end, our team designed a Lotus Notes-based content creation, management, and Web publishing system. This system enables the process of “create once, publish many” for marketing communications content at 3Com. With this system, 3Com marketing program staff needs only to create a piece of content once, which can then appear in many forms, such as white papers, technical briefs, and news letters. This system saved 3Com time and money devoted to content creation and publishing. In addition, since 3Com has many localized sites that needed to convert to the new Web system, we developed a metacrawler to automate the process of site conversion and maintenance. This metacrawler facilitated the site migration process for many geographic and product divisions with over 3000 pages in less than three months.

3Com negotiated the rights to turn San Francisco’s Candlestick Park into 3Com Park later that year, and our team was tapped to design the user interface for first touchscreen internet kiosks in a major sports stadium. We worked with the noted aerial photographer Robert Cameron of Above Books fame to create the main image of the park from the air – complete with a montage of the playing field from Super Bowl XIX in Stanford Stadium to fill Cameron’s Candlestick Park photo full of people and players using PhotoShop wizardry.

3Com Project Lead : Eric Romanik
Creative Director : Brooks Cole
Senior Designer : Ed Sultan
Designer : Leslie Wimber
Illustrator : Rebecca Chan
Programmer : Tom Caleshu