One of our latest web development projects was for Project7, a Global Consultancy company. Project7 is a progressive company who offer training and consultancy services in Leadership, Management and Lean Manufacturing.
The company selected Studiowide as a preferred partner to take them through a complete re-brand, including website development, video production and all of the day-to-day sales and marketing collateral.
Challenges
Our general remit was to visually reposition the company – making them stand out from the crowd. Project7 typically operate in a technical market space, dominated by business consultancies with no real visual differentiation.
The specific goal for the Project7 website was to provide a brochure style site that was fully mobile optimised and could act as a hub for all future marketing activities.
In an endless jungle of websites with text-based content, beautiful imagery with a lot of space and colour can be like walking into a clearing. It’s a relief!
Solution
After thorough market research, we decided to make our pitch based on a web platform that was predominantly 80% (high impact) image and video-based, with the remaining 20% dedicated to copy/text.
This approach is a bold move for any organisation, particularly those in the traditional online mindset of writing content for search engines – and therefore designs their website with the search-engine-first in mind, not the customer.
As a forward-thinking agency, we are always seeking the next big thing. Recently we have experienced great success with content focused websites, predominantly imagery and video.
With Google’s ability to read web user signals from a number of channels, the algorithm is now capable of detecting the popularity of webpages/sites with such predominant image and video content much better than it ever could. This means more engaging content (yay for the user), and less dribbling on.
The first step in our strategy is to put ourselves in the mind of the customer. In this instance the Project7 customer. Thinking about what they want to know – not what we want to tell them.
This is a well-proven technique that we undertake for all pages of a website. When undertaking this task we ask ourselves:
- Why is the visitor here? (Do they want to buy a service?)
- How did they discover the site? (Via a search engine? Or one the landing pages)
- What will they want to do whilst on the site? (Research? Hire a consultant?)
- What information will they need? (Testimonials? Reviews?)
- And the most important question: How can we make it as easy as possible for them to do all of the above?
The other consideration for any customer-centric website project is when our design consideration put the mobile user at the forefront. When creating the Project7 website we addressed the mobile user through the use of responsive design.
Put simply, responsive web design is when a website adjusts accordingly to fit on a desktop, tablet, and on smartphone browsers.
Results
The final consideration that we had to make on this project was the inclusion of an international marketing strategy. In addition to this web development project, we are also commissioned by Project7 to develop and deliver a Marketing Strategy for North America.
This website will be the key focal point and marketing hub for all future promotional activities including landing pages. We built a number of peripheral features into the website platform, such as SEO tools and shortcode forms that would enable more effective and productive marketing campaigns, regardless of the future market needs.
