Local independent financial advisers Matthew Douglas Ltd asked WDL to take their existing site and refresh the design in line with their print and branding media to create greater consistency throughout their different media.

We did this by including a cleaner layout, using fresher colours that allowed the main blue and orange from their branding to be used as accent colours, whilst not overpowering or dating the overall effect to achieve a modern design, which offers cleaner navigation.

Up and coming composer, musician and songwriter Mitchell Gibbs needed a brand and a website when he came to us at the end of last year. He was effectively starting from scratch and needed our help to create a platform to showcase his work and bring him to the attention of the industry and potential clients.

This project allowed us to be very creative in its approach, and after consulting with Mitchell we had a clear idea of what would work for him as the main content was his music. We felt an elegant one page site layout was the best route to take.

Taking his inspiration from beautifully simple one page sites WDL designer Richard Wilde complemented this approach by focusing on creating a design that wouldn’t get in the way of the content. Richard states, “We used a clean layout taking inspiration from sheet music, which is where the black and white colour palette came from, accented by a limited use of colour to provide subtle details and rollover states. This was teamed with a logotype designed to capture the aesthetic and style from well known music brands to give Mitchell a recognizable marque within his field.”

When the design was signed off Senior Front End Developer at WDL, Matt Beales, was keen to go to town with the one page site format. He says, “The page utilises a fixed header, keeping the branding and navigation within reach as you scroll down. Speaking of scrolling down, give it a go! The header is slightly opaque at the bottom and a slight shadow creeps in as you move away from the top of the page. It’s an extra layer of detail that not only makes this site great to look at, but a pleasure to use.”

Take a look at the site and while you’re there have a listen to Mitchell’s tracks too. www.mitchell-gibbs.com

Specialist contractors Greycurve approached WDL to design and build a website for them following their appearance on Channel 4’s Grand Designs programme. The episode which featured a basement ‘nightclub’ saw Greycurve carry out the interior wall and ceiling installations for the London Mews House.

Greycurve knew that they wanted the London Mews House to be featured quite heavily on the site, but it was also important to them that they could add new case studies as and when they wanted. With this in mind the site was built in a CMS (content management system) allowing them access to add and change any elements of the site when applicable, whilst retaining the styling of the design elements.

The simple design of the site echoes their brief, which was to create something to compliment their services and company image.

You can visit the site here – http://www.greycurve.co.uk/

WDL have recently completed a design and build project for a new website for Ecocultures, which included creating a logo and brand. You can view the results here – ecocultures.org

The Ecocultures programme aims to bring together “the best current understanding of what it means to be a ‘sustainable community’, how sustainable communities maintain social-ecological resilience, and how we can transfer lessons from these communities to improve ‘mainstream’ policy practice.”

The programme was founded from the University of Essex Global Challenges fund in late 2009. Read more about the programme here – ecocultures.org/about

WDL have thoroughly enjoyed working with Ecocultures team from the University of Essex and wish them every success for the future.

Working with Holy Cow! and Blue Cube Studios, WDL have completed work on the new Landex Property website, which is now live!

This project saw WDL liaising with the client, the third party designers and 3D animators to pull the site together. There are some nice features of the site which allowed everyone involved to be creative and add some interesting functionality. The individual development areas were fun to build and we think they work really well, whilst still enabling the client to add and remove developments as and when they need to.

We thoroughly enjoyed working with Landex and wish them every success in the future.

About Saffron Tax Partners

“Saffron Tax Partners is a specialist tax business, providing a dedicated and proactive personal service to private clients.  Based in The Gherkin building in the City of London, we provide a wide range of tax services, helping clients steer a path through increasingly complex tax legislation.”

Expertise

“Areas of expertise include compliance with the rigours of the Self Assessment regime, through the completion of annual Tax Returns for individuals, partnerships and trusts, and dealing with all correspondence with HM Revenue & Customs on our clients’ behalf.  We are particularly experienced in dealing with the specific, and especially complex, tax issues for individuals not domiciled in the UK.”

“We also address any appropriate tax planning issues with a view to the mitigation of liabilities, covering capital gains tax, inheritance tax matters and at the same time raising awareness to any other relevant commercial considerations.  Most importantly, the Saffron team of vastly experienced tax professionals all take real pride in understanding our clients’ differing needs, and building long-term business relationships.”

Working With WDL

“We have worked with WDL since our inception, and they have proved invaluable in establishing the Saffron brand.  We have received several compliments on the quality of both our website and corporate identity, a testament to the fine work undertaken by WDL. We have been especially grateful for the highly responsive way Elliot Smith and his team have dealt with our business.”

apple.com 1997

apple.com 2012

Looks aren’t everything I hear you cry, but having a website that is modern and professional in design can help maintain user attention for longer which, will help push your site up the search engine highway.

Ask yourself this when you next visit a website that you may be making a purchase from. Do you trust that company with your credit card details? What worked 10 years ago may not be working for your site today. Modern browsers are smarter and include features which are waiting to be used. Below is a list of some of the latest trends which will be making a big impact in 2012.

Bright and Colourful is Key:

Neutral colours are great for subtle design elements but bright hues of color can really grab a user attention and make a call to action stand out on your site. It can be difficult when selecting the right colours for a website but the general rule of thumb is to keep with no more than three main colours. It is also important that the colours on your website match your current branding otherwise it can make a logo stick out like a sore thumb.

Typography:

Font style is a vital ingredient with any design. They can help to change the meaning and tone of a sentence. It can be a struggle for any web designer when selecting fonts to use on a new design. Generally we are limited to web safe fonts which can be very generic and lacking in character (pardon the pun!). Luckily there are some ways to get around this. There are many free font archives available which offer a wide range of free font styles. Google offers its own version of web fonts which you can download and use in your new design http://www.google.com/webfonts.

Bigger text is better and if you want to get a message across it is always good to increase the font size. There are many good reasons why increasing your font size can make a big impact on the usability of your website. For example at the age of 40, only half the light gets through to the retina as it did at the age of 20.  The following article has put forward a good argument for increasing the size of the body text on a website which I hope will have a big impact in the New Year http://tiny.cc/4f4kh

CSS3 + HTML5

These two have been around for a couple of years now but with the legacy that is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 still on its death rattle it’s been hard for these new features to be used during the building stage of a website. It is said that CSS3 and HTML5 will be big this year and there is plenty of reason why it will be great move in the right direction.

There are many options available including box shadows, animated buttons, multiple backgrounds, rounded corners and transparent images. All these can help to create amazing new website layouts.

Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design refers to the development of a website which changes the contents layout depending upon the size of the screen the user is viewing the site on. Why would this be important to me you may ask yourself. Have you recently viewed a website on a mobile device or tablet? Some sites which are not designed for mobile devices can offer a poor user experience and in some cases will not work at all.  Mobile devices currently hold around a 7 percent share of web traffic, which is set to increase by 17 percent in 2012. This, in turn, will only further increase as we enter faster mobile broadband territory. These are potential users which may not be getting the experience you wish them to have from your current site.

For more information:

http://inspirationfeed.com/articles/design-articles/web-graphic-design-trends-in-2012/

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

http://designmodo.com/responsive-design-examples/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-20118380-94/mobile-devices-driving-nearly-7-percent-of-web-traffic/

WDL was asked by Mosaic Publicity to design and build a content managed micro site for the Holiday Inn Express Birmingham South. The client was looking for a sophisticated and professional design which matched the wider Holiday Inn brand and shared the design and structure elements of other Holiday Inn Express micro sites.

The deadline – before Christmas – was met so they could catch customers looking to stay in Birmingham over the Christmas period. The booking form is key to the design as the client wanted this to be featured throughout the site to enable the user to gain access at any stage when browsing the website.

Other features of the site include, a newsletter sign up, a virtual tour and special offers areas.

We will be running a skeleton staff between Christmas and New Year, but it’s business as usual from Tuesday 3rd January 2012. See you in the New Year.

For the design, we created a fresh, modern layout, which allowed the text content to be easily-read and invites the user into the page. We complemented the layout with subtle details and textures to bring the layout together and added traditional elements, such as the effects on the main navigation. This was all complemented further with effective typography, designed to combine the traditional and modern, as outlined in the brief.

Another part of this project involved taking on-site photography for the website and maybe for other media forms further down the line. This provided a challenge – with so many different offices, lighting proved to be a major factor on the outcome of our imagery. But, with some well positioned lighting, we prevailed and the nature of the rooms combined with the lighting helped to create imagery which captured the history and heritage of the company.

Now, we wish all the best for John Fowlers and hope the site helps in bringing significant success to their business.