Very happy to smash a jeroboam of champagne over the gleaming hull of a new website which has been launched off the Jojet shipyard (ok, I’ll bring that nautical metaphor to a watery grave now).

The client is the largest independent accountancy firm in Wales and their website was letting them down*

(*I don’t say that to be mean to the previous developers; the website was old and needed updating. Simple as that.)

The old one…

The old Broomfield & Alexander website

Obviously the design was pretty jaded. It looked a little nasty and certainly wasn’t representative of the calibre of the brand. Rather than just re-skin the existing content we wanted to try and solve deeper problems.

…and the new

The new Broomfield website (click to visit)

Target Audience

The client had a pretty solid idea of their target audiences but, on this occasion we decided to bring Russell Britton on board to do some of his audience research magic. We did this to gain deeper insight into how customers perceived the BA brand. The aim was to learn lessons which could help inform the website experience so that it better fits potential customers; like a glove to a hand.

Content, content, content…

Content has quite rightly come to the fore front of late (here is Relly speaking about Content Strategy at this year’s Port80 event) and I knew it wouldn’t do if we simply poured old content in to the new site. If we just did that then yes the website would look better but are we improving the experience for the end user? No.

So we started a content audit on the website; working together on a shared Google Doc spreadsheet (which ended up having many tabs!). The first stage was a quantitive audit; helping us get a handle on what content was there and then performing a qualitative audit to work out how good that actual content was – what needed working on and by whom etc?

Some content wasn’t going to be needed on the new site and, indeed, many new areas cropped up requiring fresh content. We had to be aware of all of this so that, for example, old links/URLS could be redirected ones we switched over (totally new sitemap).

The client was in charge of the website copy and was quickly busy in the administration section of the new WordPress site.

The Design

We went for a cleaner, more structured design (and one more focussed on the existing brand colours) which hopefully better guides the user through – the client suggested the “How can we help?‘ dropdown question/answer facility which we thought was a great idea.

Research showed that customers really valued the team and the care & knowledge they exhibited. To help bring this out we decided to use some professional team photography on the homepage – thanks to James Davies for this (sorry, don’t have a link for him yet).

Tech Stuff

The website is built on heavily customised install of WordPress (with a bespoke theme) which helped as Liz was already familiar with using the software. WordPress is the preferred platform of choice at Jojet towers especially when the client needs a content management system.

The design is responsive (as we’re keen on) but WordPress does have a habit of increasing page size if you don’t watch it. We’ll be putting certain aspects under the microscope in the coming weeks to optimise as much as possible. I, for one, would rather see a lot less javascript getting shipped onto mobile devices and, in general, getting back to the habit of watching your page size! Oh, and I’ve got a small fix to go in to make the drop down device on the homepage work even without javascript enabled.

Note: there is also a mini glitch with Google embedded fonts which raises it’s head on Google Chrome on Windows. That’ll get sorted.

The End

Well, it’s never the end for websites (at least it shouldn’t be as they should be ongoing, malleable manifestations of the current business model…you can quote me on that ) but this does draw the line under the first phase.

I’d like to thank Broomfield for being a fantastic client – open to ideas, enthusiastic and ready to try things. Liz Owen, in particular was a joy to work with. More clients like Broomfield please

Take a new look at the website here and please let me know what you think.

Joel