Website Redesign Services - Case Study

The Client:

Speak Out Media is fast developing Video production company in UK. Due to their growth in business it has outgrown its initial website. They needed a website that could handle an increase volume and sophistication of content as well as a website which can provide a vastly improved user experience. Website is a crucial part of the company’s worldwide sales and communication effort.

The Challenge:

Speak Out Media turned to us to provide a comprehensive web design strategy with a new look, a user friendly organisation and a technological foundation to efficiently handle site’s current requirements and future needs. IN particular the company was struggling with the old site’s inflexibility – it was difficult to add up to date videos and product information. Old site was completely Flash based and was performing very poorly in search engines.

The solution:

To start with we started looking at existing website in detail in order to understand it’s mechanics, which bits were working and which bits needed an overhaul and it was pretty obvious that whole website needed restructuring from bottom up in order for it to work successfully.

We decided to have a clean layout and clear navigation structure for the website. It was required that all the pages will have some space reserved for embed videos. We decided to have it right below in the navigation with a supporting message to specify what the video will be about as well as giving us position of h1 tag for SEO purposes. Initially we have envisaged to host the videos on our own server but later it was decided to host the videos on Vimeo server and show reel then on website using Vimeo player. This was good to save some bandwidth and also we didn’t have to design custom web player for the web site. However, there was a technological integration issue and different media types to accommodate.

We initially came up with design above:

The colours we used across the site were very clean and simple from the beginning. However Speak Out Media decided to redesign their logo and we needed to adjust the layout accordingly. Also we decided to reduce the width of layout by 50 PX to 950 PX. This is to accommodate users with wide range of screen resolutions.

We built practical, efficient navigation elements into Speak Out Media website, so users always know exactly where they are on the web site and how to get where they want to go. We also decided to bring the main content in two column lay out to left and using right column for additional service links etc.

We used BLUEPRINT css frame work to keep the lay out robust and keeping video content in the fixed position across different set of browsers.

The Outcome:

The end result was a fully functional, search engine friendly website that offered targeted experience for users. Feedback from Speak Out Media Clients were overwhelmingly positive; they commented on site’s updated look and feel and improved user experience.