What do you do with an MBA and a desire to avoid working for the man? Build a business on the internet, of course. If there’s a niche you can find that hasn’t been filled before, that’s a pretty good place to start too and we think VegetarianWellness.com is poised to explode.

This brainchild of Sina Ghaboussi is a great example of what happens when a group of talented people really come together to execute a great idea. Sina came to us with a desire to make the lives of vegetarians healthier and simpler, to build a store with a bit of conscience and a desire to inform. We have helped him fulfill a part of that dream using great design, straightforward site architecture and a solid technology base to build from. The result is a great looking site that functions well and is easy to navigate but contains a depth of information that belies the overal simplicity.

So what’s so special about this site… how did we make it special? We designed it. We built it. We even created new technology for it. From the logo design & branding, through site architecture, page design and development, we were there every step of the way, right down to the custom technology we built for the shopping cart.

It’s a poorly kept secret that we’re building a super-awesome shopping cart framework for the ExpressionEngine content management system called CartThrob. VegetarianWellness.com is the first (of about six) ecommerce projects we currently have underway that use CartThrob, and its this technology that let us take an uncompromising attitude towards design & site structure that we could not have had with a standard off-the-shelf system like OSCommerce, Magento, or X-cart, at least not without an incredible amount of time, money & frustration for all involved. For VegetarianWellness.com Sina gave us his laundry list of wants & requirements for the site and CartThrob and ExpressionEngine were flexible enough to make it all come together in just a few weeks time, for a reasonable budget.

More important than the parts of our design & technology, is that we’ve been able to build a very cohesive, user friendly, flexible and scalable application for our client that he enjoys and is proud to share. This was truly a Barrett Newton project, a fusion of a great client idea, and our group of committed web peeps to make it all happen.