The Sefton Insulation scheme is funded by Sefton Council and E.ON, and administered by Energy Projects Plus. Studiowide were approached by Energy Projects Plus and commissioned to develop a dynamic website, including Content Management System, to be used as part of their home Insulation campaign.
This is our third home insulation marketing project that we’ve been involved with in the last 6 months. We’re getting to be quite the experts even if we do say so ourselves. Our previous projects were for Guardwarm (Isothane Ltd) and Warmer Wirral (Wirral Council). Both of these projects also included similar requests for us to provide web development services, along with video production, graphic design and direct marketing.
Stage 1 for any of our website design and development projects consists of detailing the brief with the client. We build up a picture as to exactly what the site requirements are as part of our initial tender/quotation discussions. This makes it easy for us to transfer the information into a formal brief document once the project commences.
Once the brief is agreed we set about producing a masterplan schedule, highlighting all of the important stage gates within the project. The client receives a copy of the masterplan. This acts as the roadmap for the rest of the project.
At this point we begin working on some design mock-up ideas for the home page. The homepage is the most important page on a website – getting more page views than any other page. Of course, users don't always enter a website from the homepage: a website is like a house in which every window is also a door.
The Sefton Insulation project was designed to fit around the marketing brochures which are currently used in the campaign. We lifted the colour palette from the brochures and adapted some other elements which we felt would work really well on the website.
Once the design mock-ups are completed we begin wireframing. This is the process of creating a basic visual guide to depict the layout of a website, its navigational properties and how each of its pages interacts with one another.
As soon as the mock-up and wireframe have been signed off we set about mocking up the inside pages of the site. Our web development team then began setting up the back-end content management system.
We use a number of content management systems depending on the functionality of the website and whether or not eCommerce will be a feature of not.
Sefton Insulation website project was built using the popular WordPress content management system (CMS). This open source software is extremely easy to use and has well documented guides all over the web on how to get the most out of using WordPress as a CMS.
Once the back-end of the site had been developed we moved over to the front-end. This process begins with the slicing up of graphics from the mock-ups and is where the first stages of a functioning website come together.
Once we have set-up the CMS and adding the functionality across the pages, we then begin the process of adding content. The Sefton Insulation site was a brand new website, so in this instance there was no previous content to use. Our client issued us with the content and we transferred this into the website.
As this project is only running for a limited period, the only interaction required is the facility to apply now! Blogs and social feeds were not required. The apply now function is handled by a standard form which posts the contents to Sefton Insulation ready for processing.
We really like this site because of its simplicity and ease of use. The message is clear and the information contained within it is just enough to guide the consumer along the decision making journey, when choosing a home insulation scheme.
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