stuff to read, apparently/case study

how it’s done

don’t try this at home kids…

Sometimes I talk to people and they say “So how come a Flying Solo website costs quite a lot?” (Normally the second thing they say is “Ow!” because I’ve just poked them in the eye).

However my aggression-counselling therapist has suggested that I should try and explain more about what I do and the thought which goes into it. So, adopting a more positive approach, let me offer an insight into a fairly typical recent project. Afterwards, if you still think I’m expensive, email me your address and I’ll come round and poke you in both eyes.

Original site

HuntingTower Lodge. The ‘before…’

The client had a site which they felt was a bit out of date and didn’t really reflect their business nor attract their target audience. Additional problems were a] they had no idea how many visitors were looking at it, and b] they were reliant on someone else to update it.

Clearly this was far from ideal, because I wasn’t earning any money the client wasn’t getting any real benefit from the site. A quick search for ‘enormously talented web designers’ later and they found themselves talking to me…

And so to work… the logo and colour palette.

The existing site was very, er, purple. Nothing wrong with purple, but to convey the more upmarket feel required, a softer, more sophisticated colour palette was developed. The new logo design similarly needed to be more modern but still welcoming. I typically go through a number of variants on the typography when developing a logo, but in this case kept coming back to something based on an original scribble in my notebook. An additional graphic element, the swash ‘h’ is always used in a tint of the main panel colour.

Logotype variations

The original colour palette was perhaps a little too muted, so at the client’s request, a warmer red was added to the mix.

Colour palette and layout

Back to the drawing board…

Or at least the notebook, for some layouts for the website. Usually I’ll have a number of annotated thumbnail sketches (which a client normally never sees) exploring ideas for the site before I ever venture near the computer.

Depending on the complexity of the site, I’ll either develop a series of greyscale ‘wireframes’ to define layout and functionality – not needed in this instance for what is a relatively simple site – or produce some ‘comps,’ mock-ups of key pages of the site.

Comps are normally variations and refinements on a theme, the final layouts often incorporate elements of several of these.

Design Comps

Ah. The acronyms…

Once all the layouts and fancy graphic bits are finalised, the last step of course is to make it actually work, which means putting away the crayons and donning my HTML & CSS code-writing hat.

(Don’t worry, that’s probably the most techno-speak you’ll ever hear – I know a lot about the technical stuff, but I don’t normally feel it necessary to inflict it on you).

Next let’s try to break it.

A fair amount of time is spent testing everything in different browsers. Most people don’t realise there can be quite substantial differences between how different browsers show web pages. Modern browsers are more predictable, but a lot of users are still using older browsers such as Internet Explorer 6, which given it’s a decade old doesn’t have much of a clue about some of the cool new stuff you can do on the web.

Accommodating this kind of thing is a pain, but until the likes of IE6 disappears (and believe me, even Microsoft would be delighted if it buggered off tomorrow) or at least until its market share drops to a few per cent, it still takes up a bit of my time and your money

And what about SEO? (Search Engine Optimisation).

Some people have the idea this is something you ‘bolt-on’ to a site after it’s been built. Wrong. In many respects it’s simply a combination of building the site properly (to meet W3C standards) and common sense. I tend to address this stuff as I’m building your site, not as an after-thought.

Meta information

For example, the main title tag in the code and the main heading (h1 in code-speak) on the page should correlate. They don’t have to be identical, but the key words/phrases should match – essentially you’re clarifying what that specific page is about for a search engine.

The other thing worthy of attention is the description, which is what Google typically uses for summarising a page in search results.

On this project the client supplied the core copy, which I then tweaked slightly to break it into more bite-sized chunks with clear headings/sub-headings, which again is more beneficial for SEO (and people) than huge wedges of densely packed text.

God is in the details…

There are other touches one can add as well – title tags in the navigation menu, for example, contain code which isn’t directly visible on the page, although some browsers may show them as a ‘tooltip’ on mouse-over. But this additional info can be read by search engines and the screen-reading software a visually-impaired person uses. Most clients will likely never be aware of this kind of stuff, and it’s one of many small things, but the cumulative effect is worthwhile.

Title tags for additional info

The bottom line.

All this stuff does however take time (and the know-how to implement it in the first place), so inevitably there’s a cost element involved. On the other hand, if the site delivers tangible results then I’d contend it’s worth spending the money to do it properly.

The good news is it might cost less than you think. If you’d like to own your very own Flying Solo site, get in touch

And the ‘after’ – the finished article.

Like virtually all sites I build, Huntingtower Lodge is ‘client-managed,’ so they can update text, photo galleries etc themselves without a degree in computer science. Plus of course they have a real-time stats package which conveys a lot of useful info about who’s looking at what and where they’re coming from. At the time of writing (early May 2010) the site’s only been ‘live’ a few weeks but the quality and number of bookings has substantially increased and the clients seem genuinely delighted with the results.

See the ‘live’ site

I was just typing thinking…

corporate + brand identity | graphic design | website design | dog walking

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