New Website for Signs Direct (Lincoln) Ltd

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Faye

A brand new site for Signs Direct (Lincoln) Ltd has just been launched by us and is ready for business! Designed around the font and colours within the Signs Direct logo, the site has bold purple and orange highlights but still remains an elegant commercial design. Within the homepage a manually rotating feature displays Signs Direct’s key products and services, and small boxes to the right hand side of the main welcome text are designed to look like signs behind glass. These boxes lead viewers to other pages within the site, creating a better directed flow to key pages and products. The footer also emphasises the range of products and services that Signs Direct offers, with each item linking to the relevant section within the Products & Services page.

The site has two main features: a portfolio of previous notable work, and online ordering of pop-up banner displays. The portfolio is found under the Products & Services header. This page is arranged as a series of galleries, each selectable by clicking on the relevant picture and with a small description to the right hand side. All galleries are scrollable and easily navigated, particularly as the viewer stays on the same page at all times, with only the gallery changing.

The Create a Pop-Up Banner Display is the online shop arm of the website, allowing clients to upload their designs directly and to make online payments, receiving their pop-up signs direct through the post. For this a specification was designed so that clients know the limitations they have to design to, which follows the colour and font theming within the rest of the site. This specification can be downloaded, so that clients can always have this on hand whilst designing. Once clients have uploaded their designs, they are taken through to a payment page, where they can opt to either pay by PayPal or contact Signs Direct to pay by other methods, such as by cheque.

The final page is a Contact page, which is a standard contact form that has verification added to it to substantially decrease and discourage spammers from using it to send mail.

Our client is very pleased with the resulting site and with our service throughout the design and development process.

New Website for Social Care Strategies

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Faye

Social Care Strategies, a Lincolnshire-based consultancy for social care and health organisations, has recently commissioned a redesign of their website from us, and their new site has just been launched this week. Based around their branding colours of white, light green and dark green, we drew inspiration from Metro-style tiling to create a modern, sleek and easy-to-use site that feels clean and minimal without being stark or boring. The traditional navigation menu has been replaced with a series of tiles to the top right that change colour on hover or selection, adding a feeling of movement and dynamism to a site that could otherwise feel fairly static. This is complemented by the news feed at the bottom of the page, which rotates through each news item on hover. This makes the site feel responsive rather than stiff. This feature is also present on the About Us and Services pages.

The colour themes within the site are consistent, from the navigation tiles in the top right to customised social media icons. Even the links page has taken the logos of each linked company and transformed them into a fully customised, consistent page of dark green tiles and white icons. Since Social Care Strategies has no logo per se, this helps to reinforce the branding of the company as well as keep a uniform feel from page to page. This approach was also taken with the two company fonts, which have been used as webfonts for a consistent feel to cross-company branding, from business cards and leaflets to the website itself.

In order to provide an effective, easily updatable Case Studies page, we utilised the blog not only to feed into the home page, but also to filter posts that were tagged as case studies appear on the Case Studies page. This kill-two-birds-with-one-stone approach allows the company to easily update and manage their site without needing any specialist or technical knowledge, and without the expense of having a complete back-end editing system built specially for the site.

New Website Design Lincoln for Style-Arrival

Posted on February 21, 2013 by Dan

Our new website for Style-Arrival has been launched this week, replacing their previous website. Style-Arrival provide a variety of chauffeur driven services across the UK, including airport transfers, corporate travel and wedding car hire. Style-Arrival approached us after receiving rebranding proposals from students at the University of Lincoln, of which Style-Arrival liked elements, but none of them provided the full package. We took the elements they liked and used them as a basis to create the new website. The design of the new website is stylish and minimalist, using semi-transparent panels over the large background image. The homepage is particularly minimalist, displaying only the banner (containing the logo and navigation), allowing full view of the background image. The banner is present across the site and contains the company logo, phone numbers, site navigation and a short piece of text that changes depending on the page being viewed. The colour scheme of the site is inspired by the background image, picking out shades of gold, silver and brown.

The page content throughout the site appears above the banner, covering the majority of the background image with a semi-transparent background colour. It was important to make the page content stand out from the background image, particularly as many of the pages contain photos. To achieve this, a shadow was placed around the content panels and filter was positioned over the background image. The content panels typically consist of a sub-menu on the left, a gallery along the top and text below. The sub-menu has the crown logo in the bottom right, slightly clipped, to match the company’s business cards. The content panels vary in size depending on the user’s screen size and to accommodate shorter screens (particularly widescreen laptops) the text area gets a custom scroll bar, which has a narrow track and replaces the rectangle with a miniature crown logo to tie in with Style-Arrival’s new branding. The circle element of the new Style-Arrival logo was also used to create custom social media icons for the Contact page.

The site posed a few technical difficulties, mostly due to the ‘scale to fit’ nature of the site and the support for transparent backgrounds varying from browser to browser. The site is fairly consistent across all major browsers; however, in Internet Explorer 7 and 8 often a choice had to be made between a transparent background and an image, leading to the logo being dropped from some backgrounds or slight differences in transparency levels (due to layering). The image below shows the Contact page in 3D, depicting how the site is layered.

Like all Mamu Computing websites, the new Style-Arrival site has been optimised for search engines and traffic is monitored so Style-Arrival can see just how many people are using their new website.

Unfortunately the existing WordPress blog was not part of our remit, although we did give it a bit of an overhaul: increasing the search engine optimisation, updating the navigation menu and providing guidance on effective blog writing techniques.

Style-Arrival have been very pleased new website and high level of service we provide, so much so they have already recommended our services.