It’s been a good twelve months since the MWP website had a make-over; and although it’s still wearing the same WordPress undies (rinsed out in the sink though – what do you take us for?) there’s an all new look and feel to celebrate my first successful year as a freelancer.

Things have been gone well this year even if I do say so myself, I’ve worked on over twenty projects. Websites for the pharmaceutical, healthcare, media and tourism industries as well as a number of touch-screen multimedia installations at various Museums and Visitor Centres up and down the country.

I suppose it’s been an odd year to start a business, what with t’old credit crunch and all that malarkey. Not that it’s seemed to effect us too much to be honest – it seems like our backgrounds, portfolios and contacts have stood us in good stead. Our clients have been reporting being pleasantly surprised when receiving our costs, certainly when compared to quotes received from other agencies. The fact that we’re small, agile and have little or no overheads except a world-class web host so that we can pass these savings on to our clients seems to be a concept that’s worked very well indeed. We’ve delivered some big projects, at a cost most agencies wouldn’t get out of bed for. Not only that, but we’ve done very nicely for ourselves and enjoyed the summer sun too. Result!

So what’s with the big long page dude?

Experimentation really; browsing the traffic stats for madewithpixels has always caused some worry, Seemingly suffering from an exceptionally high bounce rate, I wanted to do something to make the content more focussed, accessible and inviting to read.

Admittedly; there was an awful lot of content on the old site. Lots of words and explanations that clearly no-one was reading. So the design rationale slowly became; why make people navigate at all? There’s not that much to see other than a few pics and a bit of blurb about our approach -Spreading the site out over tens of pages simply makes the user expend so much more effort: Click > Read > Decide > Click > Read etc.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see to find out whether it was a good decision or not – I’m mindful about the effect on SEO as the page is now well over 1500 lines of HTML when rendered and with 50 or so embedded images it does take a little while to load. Suffice to say I’ll be keeping my eyes on those stats especially as Google has announced that page load times are to affect page ranks results in its ‘quality score algorithm’.

So I hope you enjoy the new garb. And I’m pleased to report that for once, I’m actually one hundred percent happy with the result! Never an easy thing to achieve when designing your own site somewhat strangely.

It’s all about the grid baby

The eagle eyed designers among you may spot how lovely and tight the grid and vertical rhythm of the typography is.

I hope, at some point in the not too distant future to publish a post I’ve been working on for a while. There are LOTS of great articles out there on grid based layout, but very few with any real practical examples or design rationale from the designers responsible – I’m lucky to have been taught the skill at college in the late eighties but it’s a skill that seems to have slipped past most educators radars since then so I thought I’d dissect a few of my designs and post the results. Watch this space!

And I’d just like to thank…

As always, the most excellent Jon Ward (dude, get that site built… I know you’re busy but I’m sick of not linking to you) for the totally bodacious custom lightbox and smooth as a babies bum javascript page-scrolling sorcery. Without his continued help and downright genius; my designs would remain somewhat static.

Mednet Consult are a Healthcare communications agency based in Leeds. Working closely with pharmaceutical giant Janssen Cilag, Mednet organises and project manages meetings, events and integrated training packages for NHS Mental Health Professionals. They asked us to help take them online.

In January 2009, we designed and built a website that would provide a platform from which Mednet could publish and promote details of its product offerings and communicate its core values to the marketplace. Our bespoke content management system delivers Event Management; Assessed and Certified Case Study E-learning tests and Online Questionnaires; all wrapped up in a contemporary ‘light on dark’ design that was surprisingly well received by what might potentially be perceived as a stuffy industry.

Stuffy? Not likely; that banner…

At the beginning of each project; I, like most other designers tend to get somewhat carried away with all manner of ideas and suggestions for a proposed look and feel. I’m a fan of the old-skool mood board approach; and often send clients sketched ideas for imagery and animation etc.

So taking on board a conversation during an early meeting about the website needing to communicate Mednet’s ability to get the bottom of a problem and solve it, and considering the mental-health focus of the companies market. After the obligatory stock photo/video search I came up with the idea (among other – slightly more sensible ideas) of using animated neurons over-layed with strap-lines as the main site banner. I didn’t expect for a second they’d go for it!

Suffice to say this was one of those ‘what have I done?’ moments; I’ll admit that for a second the fact that this really could end up being VERY cheesy indeed and wondered whether I should re-approach the client, suggesting a different route. In hindsight – and after a few tense hours of pixel pushing; the animation looked spot-on. Different? Sure; but spot-on nonetheless. In fact; ‘that banner’ has caused quite a stir. It’s consistently been the one element of the design that has garnered fantastic feedback; it seems to be universally loved by the client and their audience alike. Result!

An impressively large back-end (Event Management tools – silly)

To compliment the shiny new front-end website; Mednet needed a way to keep things up to date without running back to us every two minutes. They organise events and meetings for NHS health care professionals. So we built a bespoke event management system that creates and publishes online forms, keeps track of event affiliate and attendee details; keeping everyone informed via Google-maps integration, automatic emails and client generated reporting.

We built this system so cost effectively; that employing a third party was out of the question. Our system would comparatively pay for itself within the cost of administrating 2-3 events using the worlds leading event management tools; and would be tailored specifically to the clients needs. A ‘no-brainer’ – I believe; is the correct phrase.

Online test and Questionnaires

Oh, It’s probably worth mentioning; that in addition to the Event Management side of things. We also built a small but perfectly formed e-learning package too! Mednet offer training around changes to the Mental Health Act, so we built a system that based on case study questions and answers tests written by a leading consultant psychiatrist would allow NHS doctors and psychiatric care nurse to be assessed on their level of understanding with important changes in legislation.

The system, tracks, scores and certifies users progress through the case studies. JavaScript enhancements provide important user feedback and aid the users experience; so we employed the same tricks when wrapping up the website and content management package with simple to use, great to look at; health care industry focused questionnaires.

It’s nice to start with a project that changes lives.

Since launch; things have gone brilliantly, hundreds of affiliates, attendees and test users have passed through the system with few incidents bar an early problem with dodgy server technology – cue Rackspace to the rescue; and the site now merrily generates important data, helps Mednet to organise and administrate important meetings for the health care industry and supports NHS staff members all over the UK.