What do we offer?
Site redesign accounts for the bulk of our work and is our core speciality. We provide a full redesign service, including those activities listed here. Please be aware that not all projects require all these steps, so don't be intimidated by this long list: we'll shape your project to fit your needs and to make best use of your budget.
- Assessing the strengths and weaknesses of your current design.
- Performing a content audit to assess what should be kept, modified or removed.
- Running internal workshops and brainstorms to help you flush out the real needs and aims for the project.
- Running customer focus groups to establish what your customers are looking for, and to test out early ideas for future developments. We can even develop rapid visual prototypes to assist in this process.
- Helping you articulate and document a strategy with sensible objectives and a practical programme, and share it with your organisation as you need to.
- Planning the information architecture of your site to ensure it is structured and organised in the right way for your customers.
- Defining your online brand language to ensure that you have a distinctive visual appearance.
- Defining standards for written and visual content, including high-level messages, main copy style, photography, and illustration.
- Designing the entire customer experience, from wireframes to completed visuals.
- Developing standards-compliant code ready for integration with back-end systems where required.
- Testing design schemes with customers, from paper prototyping through to full lab testing and focus groups as required.
- Producing guidelines that help you ensure that you can keep your site at a high standard.
- Producing templates and supporting printed materials that help you integrate your site fully with other forms of communication.
- Managing the entire process for you, including commissioning external suppliers and directing related activities like photographic shoots as required.
- Briefing your internal teams and running internal workshops to ensure your entire organisation is fully behind the new design.
Why should you redesign?
There are numerous reasons for redesigning your existing site. In our opinion, even a highly successful site will benefit from a periodic redesign, as we have yet to see an established site that cannot be improved.
Some of the more common reasons are:
- Legislation: bringing your site in line with current accessibility legislation will often mean a complete redesign, as few sites can be retro-fitted with an accessible design.
- Business or brand repositioning: as your business changes its focus (or its personality) your site needs to adapt to reflect that change.
- Merger or acquisition: bringing two companies together usually brings significant changes to the website, and it is often better to redesign than to graft on new sections or apply a new 'look'.
- Organic growth: many sites suffer from over-expansion or a continuous addition of content and ideas in their lifetime. Most will require periodic redesign to simplify them and to improve their usability.
- New ideas: perhaps you feel that you should be doing more with your website, or have ideas for new services that can be offered online. Redesigning is a more successful approach than 'adding on' and is usually more cost-effective.
- Outdated: whether because the site has not been maintained properly, because the design feels out of touch with modern sites, or because the coding is causing problems in newer browsers, simple old age is a regular cause of redesign.
Frequently asked questions
- I need to make my site accessible to comply with the Disabilities Discrimination Act. Do I need to redesign completely?
Normally, yes. To comply with accessibility legislation, your site needs to be planned and designed carefully, and built using modern development techniques. Remember though, fully supporting accessibility legislation will also improve the performance of your site for every customer, will ensure that your site is compatible with future browser software, and will make future developments cheaper and faster. Some sites can be 'fixed' but they will usually only be sites that were developed recently, to modern standards.
- Can you work with my in-house web development team?
Yes. Many of our clients have their own technology teams, or an existing relationship with a technology partner. In fact, we believe that this is the most cost-effective way for all organisations to work as you only pay for the services you need when you need them. We have a long history of working with in-house teams successfully.
- Can you manage the entire site design, build and hosting?
Yes. We are happy to manage an end-to-end project for you, but we will introduce you to specialist partners for back-end technology and hosting. You can then choose whether to work with them directly, or to have us manage the entire relationship transparently. Either way, we don't charge any kind of markup on partners services: if we manage them for you, we simply charge you for the time it takes us (which is generally very little).
- Can you use my existing content?
Of course. If your content is good, and appropriate to the new site, we'll use it. If we feel the content needs work, we'll make our recommendations on where and how it should be improved.
- Can you create new content for me?
Yes. We can produce anything from a few key messages, to editing existing content, to creating everything you need. We can help with messaging, written content, photography, illustration, sound, video, creating PDF's... pretty much anything you could put in a website.
