S8080 Blog

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

Via I believe in advertising.

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.

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.

Back in August, we announced that S8080 were asked to help with the redesign for the newly launched 10 Downing Street website, http://www.number10.gov.uk/ built in WordPress – the open source web publishing platform. It’s a high profile, high load open source website.

We were absolutely delighted that our modestly sized regional agency was awarded the contract, managed by COI, for what is arguably one of the most high profile Government websites in the world. We have worked hard since starting S8080 in 2000 to build up our experience and reputation and to be recognised at this level makes the whole team very proud.

A very agile and hands-on project management style was called for, to help with the quick turnaround and very busy client!

After visiting the historic office of the British Prime Minister, our User Experience (UX) team set to work refining the way the wealth of information was presented, taking into account the needs of the varied audience types.

We worked hard providing recommendations on the restructuring of the website based around the audience’s needs. This involved prototyping ways of presenting the serious business of the Coalition Government’s policies, ‘Take Part’ initiatives as well as the interactive elements of the website including the history of the building, a timeline of Prime Ministers and much more.

Once the website blue prints (wire frames) had been designed, S8080’s creative team took over. The team visited Downing Street a couple of times, immersing ourselves in the history and details that make this one of the most recognisable buildings in the world. We wanted to show it as a thoroughly modern office but also as a building steeped in history.

We took hundreds of photographs, including the classic ‘10’ that is used on the masthead of the website – an icon that is recognised worldwide.

It was a nerve-wracking couple of days waiting for sign off from the top, but we were confident that we had provided a very well-considered and user centred design. We feel we have achieved the sense of gravitas that the office deserves without it looking like a tourist attraction.

At the end of the day, it’s just another very busy office with lots of toing and froing, as we found out when trying to photograph the door in the gaze of paparazzi on Budget Day!

From The Sun website… a great photo of David Cameron sitting in front of a graphic our creative team designed for the Department of Energy and Climate Change.

I wonder if he looked at it when he walked in to the room and said to himself “Hmm, that looks like it’s from the same team who designed my website”.

No. probably not.

Nice to see our work under the gaze of the World’s press though.

At last, we’ve put together a brand new WordPress site to show off our illustration work.

Under the brand Redseal, we’ve been doing this stuff for years and have agents in London, US and Australia who get us some amazing work.
Take a look at the new site and some of the new styles our creative team have been experimenting with.

Loving the Glasto’ 11 image!

www.number10.gov.uk

S8080 are incredibly proud to announce that the new Number10 website was designed in Wales – by us!

The new site, which uses the WordPress platform, was launched a couple of weeks ago after an intensive UX, design and build phase.

More info soon.