Place of design

EmberJD is a small insurance brokerage company which formed in 1970 and is part of the T L Dallas Group of Companies. Their old site had served its purpose, but was quite dated. The company needed to call a web designer every time a page needed updating, which meant reacting to change was awkward and slower than it needed to be. We built their new a site based on WordPress which enables the company to update the site themselves in real time

The site
www.emberjd.com

The design
The design was fairly fluid process with the company. We presented a design which was then bounced back and forth until everyone was happy. This is a pretty typical method for the way we work. We designed the front page buttons in a PSD format which the company can amend the texts or inserted images as they need. This means in the future, the company can make a new graphic for any new products in minutes as required

Typography
We used a sharp defined typography, which allows the headlines to led the user. Within the forms, which are fairly long, we have used very user friendly typography, which is easy on the eye, and easy for users to use and read as they type

The build
We staged the site on our own servers, allowing us to present the new site in real time whilst the old site was still serving pages. This meant that the development could be an open and unhindered process. When the site was signed off, the DNS was swapped, and the site switched over gracefully, with a downtime of about half a day.

The build was in three stages. Firstly we got the look, feel, cosmesis and typography sorted. The second stage was adding the content. The third was testing and the minor administrative mopping up, and the general implementation of SEO across the site

The customers were existing Dreamweaver users, so we developed the forms, the CSS and the JavaScript in Dreamweaver locally, and then amended the site template (CSS and JS calls). The net result is that the customer can cut copy and paste out of their version of Dreamweaver into a “New page” in the back end of the site, knowing things like SpryTabs and SpryValidation will work as expected

This is a really important feature we added for the client – that is being able to have a local Dreamweaver view, and a site view that are pretty similar. This will mean the clients will in the future be able to develop and add complex forms that have SpryValidation themselves. Essentially we have added the necessary scripts and stylesheets into the site template to facilitate this.

The platform
This was based on Wordpress. We have not touched the core, so it is still easily updatable. We have however heavily hacked about a fairly standard template, knocking off the “blog” features that were not needed, leaving a really to use basic user updatable CMS behind. This is a concept that originally the clients were unsure of, but seeing the final results we are sure they are very happy with.

Using Wordpress instead of creating a static site for a small business is a very smart move – It separates the content from the design, and allows clients to have a site that they can keep updated, in real time themselves with ease. Adding deleting and editing pages is pretty much as easy as using your favourite word processing package

SEO
Like all of our sites, we provided on page SEO as standard – We will revisit this in a few months as required. Wordpress, with the addition of the correct plug-ins, lets us provide SEO in a systemic way, almost by design -is is important of any pages the client adds in the future will have a good framework for SEO in place

Feature list
- Multi user lightweight CMS site
- Clients can update content as needed
- Firewall, and other security features
- Complex forms and form handling
- SEO by design

CSS
We spent a lot of time setting up the cascading style sheets (CSS) for this site. This will provide a uniform framework for any additional user content. Typography was something we looked at carefully, designed the typography to convey a professional image, yet be user friendly and in the places where the users interact i.e. the long forms. Within the forms we used a proven easy to read and follow text, especially in the input fields

Technologies
This site uses PHP, SQL, CSS, HTML and JavaScript

Security
As per usual we have looked at the sites security, and added measures to prevent spam and the usual forms of hacking

We won’t discuss security details here, but would be happy to discuss the issue as a topic on the phone with prospective clients

Hosting
We are providing our unlimited commercial hosting package for this site

Working with the clients
It was a pleasure to work with these clients, who provided us clear feedback. This enabled the fairly swift completion of the site.

Client testimonial
We desperately needed a complete overhaul of our website, which was over four years old, not very pleasing to the eye and expensive to update. However, we had to make sure that any new site would be user friendly both for us and our clients, easy to make changes to ourselves as we constantly update the site, but above all within a strict budget. We also wanted it rolled out and live as soon as possible as the image we were giving out with the current site wasn’t something we were happy with.

I approached Richard and told him what we needed, he came back very quickly with two options for us, a static site written in Dreamweaver or a Wordpress based site. Not being convinced that a blogging site such as Wordpress would be suitable, Richard talked me through the benefits and this is the route we decided to take.

We gave Richard a few examples of sites we liked the look of, but obviously wanted ours to be unique and not a copy of these. He then went away for a few days while he worked on the template. The whole process was simplified by the fact the site was hosted on their servers, so we could keep an eye on any updates as and when we wanted, rather than waiting for Richard to get back to us. This enabled us to let Richard know what we were/weren’t happy with without wasting valuable time. Once we were happy with this, Richard went to work on the design.

We knew what sort of forms we wanted for customers to complete and I provided Richard of these in the form of rough html forms I had created in Dreamweaver. Richard then tidied these up and amended them to our specifications. Once the content started to go in, things started to move forward quite swiftly.

Once again, we kept going back to Richard with amendments. These were mainly amendments that we’d requested but later changed our mind on, and sometimes even changed our mind again. No matter how many amendments we requested, they were all done very quickly and efficiently.

The transition from our old site to the new one was painless, Richard put a temporary page on the site to advise people we were changing over, and the new site was live in less than a day. All in all, from giving Richard the go ahead to build our site to it going live was just over three weeks.

Throughout the whole process Richard kept us informed of developments and made changes as and when without any fuss. Even after our site had gone live, we decided on more changes and Richard happily did these for us even though it was late on a Saturday night. He then spent time with us going through the back end of the site and the server, showing us how it all worked and how to make amendments, as well as guiding us on the SEO side of things, which is very important to us.

We are completely satisfied with the final website, and even more satisfied with the help and guidance we have received prior to and after the site going live. We would highly recommend Place of Design to anyone in a similar position to ourselves. As we can now develop the site ourselves, this alone will save us hundreds of pounds, let alone the time savings as well now that we don’t have to rely on others to do the updates for us. A thoroughly excellent service all round.

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