S8080 Blog

I was in town yesterday for a few meetings.

Bumped into these guys while waiting to cross the road – something I haven’t witnessed since I was a lad.

Striking concept and illo’ for a advert for stretchy plasters.

Via I believe in advertising.

We enjoyed a visit from Business and Enterprise Minister Edwina Hart last week, who congratulated us on our Number10 open source WordPress website. You can find the full story on the WG News site, but she was kind enough to give us a comment on our recent success.

"Creative Industries is one of fastest growing areas of the Welsh economy and employs more than 30,000 people in Wales.  It’s always good to hear  when  a small  Welsh company  such as S8080   lands  and successfully completes   such   a  high profile contract.

“I congratulate  S8080 on  its  most recent success  and am confident that its work  on the No10 website  will help to  further raise awareness   of our dynamic  Welsh creative industries sector across the UK and beyond."

Thank you Minister!

You can read the Number10 story here.

As 2011 draws to a chilly close, we hope you all have a warm and wonderful break over Christmas. Thank you for your support over the past 12 months and we wish you all a Happy New Year.

It’s all over, but there is still quite a bit of facial hair around the office. I think a few of the guys have become quite attached to their lip warmers.

This week, Simon’s shows his considerable modeling talent…

Getting more hairy by the day.

Late last week, after many months of hard work, we launched the brand new website for the National Assembly for Wales.

Well, I say ‘new’…

Earlier this year, we won the contract to redesign and redevelop the NAfW website www.assemblywales.org, but instead of implementing a new content management system, we would be working into their legacy CMS system. This would give significant cost savings.

Usability

One of our tasks was to improve the usability of the website. We used many sophisticated techniques to ensure it would be easy to navigate. We started with a content audit of the existing site to help us determine the depth and breadth of the site and categorise the types of information that the Assembly needed to present (and the stuff they didn’t!)

Then we developed a suite of personas – based on real people who use the website – and scenarios of use and user journeys for each of these. This ensures that everything going forward is based firmly on a User Centred Design approach. We interviewed many types of users, including AMs, journalists, and members of the public to find our exactly what they needed and how they wanted to use the site.

Information architecture

Once these two stages were complete, we could then use the findings to redevelop the information architecture (site map) and create a set of wireframes that explain each key page in detail and the way the users will interact and travel through the site – making their journey as easy as possible. Wireframes really do help save time and money on all web projects as amendments can be made quickly and cheaply, before the ‘look and feel’ or coding is developed. It’s a very agile and cost effective approach.

Getting creative

Then we moved into the design phase. After consultation, we presented three distinct creative routes. The Assembly project team gathered thoughts and feedback and the final creative direction was decided upon. This design was then implemented into the CMS, and the resulting templates were accessibility tested to ensure everyone would be able to use and enjoy the content on the new site.

Then came the mighty task of applying the design to the content – thousands of pages of information.

After one more round of accessibility testing, the new site was launched without a hitch thanks to the hard work of many people from S8080, The National Assembly for Wales, and our project partners Method4. Thank you everyone, it was an immense task.

You can see the new website at www.assemblywales.org

“We’re very grateful to S8080 for the hard work they’ve put into this project, and we’re immensely pleased with the final product. From the outset, they stood out head and shoulders above their competitors, with their down to earth attitude and excellent project management skills. They took the time to understand our needs as an organisation, and now the result is a clean and crisp design and a new site architecture that is helping visitors to our site find what they are looking for and enjoy the site experience.”

Iwan Williams, Media, Brand and e-Democracy Manager

National Assembly for Wales

Our good friends, Dezrez, have just launched their brand new site.

And we designed it for them.

Dezrez have THE best software for estate agency sales and letting available. We’ve been working with them as partners for many years, designing and building the websites that house their technology. In fact, we were in University with the founders of Dezrez!

We’ve seen a real shift, estate agents are now embracing Open Source CMS platforms including Drupal, WordPress and Umbraco and well as S8080’s own .NET content management system if they really want to customise things.

We worked very closely with Dezrez, initially on their UX design and wireframes and then onto the creative phase of the project. they made very good use of our in-house illustration team to give the site a personality all of it’s own.

As always, it’s so satisfying for an agency to work with a client who is passionate about the project. Every meeting and session we had left us buzzing with ideas, it’s the very best way to work on a creative project like this. Everyone feels so involved and comfortable tabling their ideas.

The new site is a huge success – and a success they thoroughly deserve.

The last word goes to Wilf…

Wilf Lewis, Dezrez

Years ago, everyone marvelled at the glut of eZines that started to appear – everyone wanted their brochure converted to the fancy new ‘page-flip’ format that tried to replicate a paper based reading experience on screen.

Then the iPhone and iPad appeared, Flash suddenly became un-loved and everyone thought it was just a bit daft to try and emulate a magazine or catalogue on-line. Things needed to move on.

So we thought we’d give it another go for one of our clients, The Environment Agency. They have this exciting EU project,  ‘Wild Fishing Wales’, a truly amazing world class offering and they wanted to tell people about it in a magazine style format.

So we sat down and designed a new way of doing it for them, based on accessible HTML that works on PC, Mac,  tablets, phones and even iPads. We think it’s beautiful. And being HTML, we could feed in YouTube videos, Flickr streams and Google Maps.

Issue one went out via an email campaign using S8080’s broadcast platform. Our biggest broadcast yet, 380,000 people. It went down very well indeed, from an analytics point of view and from the comments we received – phone calls from perfect strangers saying how much they liked it!

Issue two is going out any day now but pop over to Wild Fishing Wales and take a look for yourself.