Our finished Cavendish Scott website redesign

Cavendish Scott is a Denver-based company that specializes in ISO management system consulting, auditing and training.  They have a large client base and offer a wide range of business services, and needed a correspondingly large website overhaul to match the scope of their business activities.  Their previous website had become very dated both visually and technologically, and years of hodgepodge maintenance by many different people had left it in need of a comprehensive restart.  When we took on this project, the first thing we did was plan out an overhaul of the site’s information architecture, breaking it down into four categories:

• Our Services
• Our Company
• About ISO
• Contact Us

As we were planning the information architecture, we noticed that most of the current site’s content focused mostly on talking about the company itself, with little written about how they could help the customer.  So we made sure to boost the amount of content in the Our Services section as well, to increase the focus on serving the customers’ needs.  The “Our Services” section was further divided down into three separate categories, based on the company’s three main areas of business: ISO consulting, ISO auditing and ISO Training.

After we had the site’s new information architecture planned out, our redesign process followed our standard web design workflow: Visual design, followed by XHTML/CSS template construction, followed by development and implementation.  We focused heavily on the homepage during the visual design page.  It would be fairly content-heavy: there would be a company introduction, a recent news section, a newsletter signup form, a Featured Services area, and more.  We worked heavily on taking this information and presenting it in a visually effective manner, with a clear hierarchy of information — something that would draw the site visitors in to learn more, rather than overwhelming them and turning them away.  We made an eye-catching introductory paragraph and accompanying graphic at the top of the page, along with a prominent portion of screen real estate dedicated to Cavendish Scott’s current featured services.  We focused heavily on featuring strong calls to action — a large percentage of the page’s prime real estate is dedicated to quick-links to featured areas of the site.

Strong calls to action on the site's homepage

Another key consideration during the visual development phase was the appropriate use of color: we focused on achieving the right balance between using enough color to balance out the site’s text-heavy content, without making it look excessively bright and loud — this was a professional business-to-business site, not the Cartoon Network.

Effective use of color livens up the text-heavy content

The site’s development and implementation was similarly involved, with the site needing a good amount of custom functionality.  The homepage’s newsletter signup form was programmed to plug directly into the client’s iContact.com newsletter software API, with built-in form validation and confirmation emails to the client.  The website’s News section is powered by a WordPress engine, with a custom homepage script to pull and display headlines from the several most recent postings.  In addition, we built custom functionality into the training schedule page, so that users could quick-link from every class listed on the training schedule right to either its accompanying class registration form or to an appropriately auto-completed contact form to request more information.  On the training registration form, we used AJAX functionality in order to dynamically update the available course dates as users changed between the different training courses offered.

Quick-links to the appropriate auto-completed signup and contact forms

AJAX functionality powers dynamically updated input fields

The finished project was a resounding success and a huge upgrade to the company’s website presence.  We were pleased to be able to work with Cavendish Scott on such a seminal project for their company, and look forward to continuing to work with them in the future.

You can see the finished site here:

www.CavendishScott.com

The official logo for InVisM, Inc.

This past six weeks has brought a lot of big changes around here. In addition to some big projects such as the ClearPivot logo and accompanying website design and some other projects we haven’t yet talked about, the biggest recent news is that I (Chris Strom) have accepted a full-time position as Senior Graphic Artist at a company called InVisM.  InVisM (formerly called Intelligence Gaming) is a Denver-based startup company that makes simulation and training products.  Our clientele up to now has been primarily in the government and military, and now we’re beginning to branch out into the commercial sector. The company has very aggressive growth plans, and—despite the state of the economy right now—is actually well on the way to achieving those goals.

So what does my job as Senior Graphic artist consist of? Maybe a better question is: what doesn’t it consist of? Since I’ve started, I’ve covered the gamut of graphic arts and production: web design, print design, logo and identity design, video and animation design, branding, DVD production, Flash, HTML, XML, jQuery, licensing and copyright issues, you name it.  Heck, I even chose the colors for the wall paint (we are a startup, after all).

I’m still doing some side work that I’ll feature on www.cstrom.com; in fact, I’ll be launching two new websites over the next 4–8 weeks.  And I’ll still update this blog when I can—though, of course, the frequency of updates will slower than before.  In the meantime, come visit our newly launched InVisM website, designed by myself, of course.  I’ll have to write about the design and implementation process for the site—there’s a bit of story behind that.  Maybe in the next one or two blog postings…

www.invism.com

Wow, things have been busy around here recently.  Lots of work flying around these days it seems like.  One of our most recent projects was designing the identity, branding and website for ClearPivot, LLC, a Denver-based startup company that specializes in marketing metrics and analysis applications.

CLEAR = transparency in numbers, encouraging other parties to view and interpret the data, not hiding anything; open
PIVOT = swiveling from the data to the business (& back); the data provides information on the programs which in turn should align with the business goals; flexible; versatile
CLEAR + PIVOT= CLEARPIVOT

First part of the project was designing the corporate logo.  Working with ClearPivot’s CEO, Greg Davoll, we worked up many different possible logo drafts and discussed them with him.  During the creative process, we started out with rather complex logo design drafts but gradually began migrating towards more minimal, understated designs that concisely expressed the meaning of ClearPivot.  Finally we arrived at the current logo:

The final ClearPivot logo design

The clean simplicity of the logo illustrates the clear, open and transparent nature of ClearPivot’s product and business philosophy. The stylized “P,” of course, represents swiveling and pivoting, illustrating ClearPivot’s marketing metrics philosophy of aligning marketing data with business goals, which in turn pivots back to more marketing data.

After the logo was finalized, the next step was designing and building the website.  (As the web is increasingly becoming the foundation of companies’ marketing strategies, corporate websites are more and more the first priority when building a marketing campaign, second only to the brand identity itself.)

As with the logo, we increasingly focused on producing a clean, understated, yet still eye-catching site.  We decided on a color combination of predominantly white, gray and blue, (with a few other highlight colors for good measure) and a very organic feel in the visual forms.

The homepage for www.ClearPivot.com

The website is both visually and structurally flexible enough to grow with the company—as ClearPivot expands its range of products and services, so too can the website expand with additional content.  In addition, we paid special attention to the top banner on the homepage: focusing on bold marketing points, an attention-grabbing visual design, and strong calls to action (See It, Try It, Contact Us).

So come check out ClearPivot at www.ClearPivot.com.  As always, we’d love to hear some feedback: you can write to us on our contact form, or just leave a comment below.