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St John’s Innovation Centre have built a reputation on their modern approach to office space, as they approached their 30th birthday, their existing website had seen them good – and it showed.
What was fresh and different then, had soon become dated ten years later. However, Flok wasn’t ready to let their unique brand slip away and so our brief was to retain their identity but bring it band up to date for 2017.
We started by adding more spice to the St John’s Innovation Centre brand by introducing pops of colour and complimentary modern typography – we were able to retain the trust that the company had built up over 30 years of business whilst bringing it up to date.
This approach was extended to the brand assets, we fully embraced their logo, taking simple shapes from it to create beautifully simple icons and illustrations. These sit alongside strong, lifestyle photography of the building and it’s surrondings to inject the company’s formal but approachable personality thoughout their brand. Anyone who visits St John’s Innovation Centre or meets the team will see a harmony between the expectations that the new website sets through the site, presentations, and marketing material and the reality of a face-to-face.
We continue to work with the team in making sure the website is maintained, as we develop an online portal for tenant maintenance.
We position ourselves as a team of designers and developers who are known for delivering brands and websites in style. As a design-led agency, we ensure that every stage of a project involves a level of design that other agencies fo not offer. Whether that’s the design of the site, the way the CMS works, or how the user interacts with the site.
Being focused on beautifully designed, functional sites we rely heavily on Joomla and WordPress to deliver them. Both flexible platforms, we can utilise the CMS to give the client full control of their content from navigation, to images, to pages, and text. This is done via the theme mostly and a few selected, high performing plugins.
The existing site was built on WordPress, and the team were keen to keep it this way, combined with our expertise, we were a perfect fit.
On the frontend side of the HTML and CSS for the St John’s Innovation Centre is written in a BEM (Block-Element-Modifier) style language, completely customised and unique to this site. All icons and graphics on the site are custom made – enhancing the unique online brand.
The existing site was full of great content, but with a complicated structure and page hierarchy, users were getting lost amoungst the sea of information and as the Centre continued to develop, the existing menu and copy was starting to underperform.
We worked with the St John’s team on a top-down approach, they took time considering what pages needed stripping back and combining to minimise content going unnoticed. The large paragraphs of text were broken down into manageable size chunks and signposted with visually appealing illustrations to draw the user’s attention.
Muliple landing pages were replaced in favour of higher performing ones, targeted within areas the Centre wanted to focus on.
Although St John’s Innovation Centre had informative content, the company had seen a huge change in the past several years, and so the personality of the text had to reflect this. Bolder, frsher, and punchier, the site asks questions and makes statements, offering a solution to the problems faced by typical clients.
As with the new site the goal is always to out perform the old. You can have a great looking new site but if it doesn’t perform then that investment has been wasted.
