Web Design

Creating a captivating about us page

Compelling content on your website is integral to the success of your visitor conversion and ranking on Google. It makes your online presence relevant to your clients and is your best marketing tool.

  1. Show some emotion for your Industry/market

    Stiff, boring and overly corporate speak may be good for proposals but your website needs more than that to truly engage with your visitors. Ask yourselves some questions to help you ‘loosen up’:

  • If your company were a person, who would it be?
  • What are your proudest moments as a Company? Can you capture those in well written copy?
  • What words relating to your business keep popping up with clients, suppliers and/or sales people?

2. Who are you really?

Like Humans, every brand is unique and has its own special traits and quirks – tell these in a differentiating manner that helps visitors decide to go with your brand as opposed to your competitors. Information from demographic surveys will help you speak in the language of your clientele.

  1. Your brand must tell a story

Have stories about your brand that humanize your brand and make it easier for people to relate to. Identify your key unique strengths and collect stories about your brand that bring out those strengths. Providing context and meaning to your Brand story improves your visitor’s ability to connect with it and share it with others in their networks.

Helpful tip:
Conduct the following exercise: Discuss “15 Interesting Things About Our Company.” Circulate an online questionnaire for everyone to fill and incentivize it with something interesting.

Use the interesting feedback you receive and insert them into your about us page. Or use the entire list as a link or tab from your about us page.

5 design terms everyone needs to know

Learning the design lingo is important for everyone because it helps everyone appreciate the design process. It is crucial to know what you are dealing with same way it’s important to know what you are buying when in a supermarket. Knowing the rules of the shop also helps make the design process smoother and you are able to appreciate each step during the progression of the design process. In the same way we carry our visa cards to the supermarket and don’t expect discounts for purchases, it is crucial to understand the perimeters within which design operates.

  1. Design brief

A creative brief is the core of the client service process and may lead to the success or failure of the creative output. The creative brief is a descriptive document that containing information about the client, what they do, how they do it and explains their requirements for the project. Our briefing process is aimed at collecting comprehensive information from the client in order to eliminate any ambiguities in the design process. We always urge our clients to take this step very seriously and not address it hurriedly in a bid to ‘get to the fun part’ because it is the basis of the entire project. It tells the story of the project – why it is to be undertaken and provides a strategic foundation on how it is to be undertaken and for whom it is intended.

It is this strategic input that enables us to provide an effective design solution to the clients business and not merely a decorative art piece.

  1. Design scope

The scope outlines the general aims and goals of the project design and lists the major deliverables and milestones.  Project scope management plan is a planning tool that documents how the project team will go about defining project scope, how the work breakdown structure will be developed, how changes to scope will be controlled, and how the work of the project will be verified and accepted. This document is important because it keeps everyone on their proverbial ‘side of the fence’. It contains the following crucial elements:

  • The project scope statement contains a detailed description of the project deliverables.
  • A process for creating the work breakdown structure (WBS). The WBS further defines the work of the project (as defined in the scope statement) by breaking down the deliverables into smaller pieces of work.
  • A definition of how the deliverables will be verified for accuracy and the process used for accepting deliverables.
  • A description of the process for controlling scope change requests, including the procedure for requesting changes and how to obtain a change request form.

 

  1. Logo vs. Brand

According to creative bloq, a great logo works as a reminder of a company or product, for designers they represent the challenge of encapsulating a client’s essence into a single graphic.

What a logo design isn’t, though, is branding. While the logo is usually the stand-out part of a brand, there’s much more to branding than a logo. A good brand identity is carefully built out of a number of elements, and the logo will reflect these elements and work within the brand system.

But creating or refreshing a brand can be a massive undertaking, involving a deep understanding of the brand’s personality, how it’s perceived, its history and function and much more.

  1. Resolution: DPI vs. PPI

Resolution is a measure of dots per inch (DPI) for printed works and pixels per inch (PPI) for digital work. If the resolution of an image is too low, your final product will come out looking grainy or pixelated. Even if you’re smart phone shoots 41 megapixels, trust your designer if he or she says the image won’t work (Rebecca Swift).

  1. Typography

This is the art of using typefaces to communicate. This skill encompasses both the typefaces and the negative space surrounding them. Typeface research is a process that takes up a lot of time during the design especially of logos and brands because the font selected sets the ‘mood’ and ‘feel’ for your brand.

You will want to know something about fonts because the two convey different feelings. Serif fonts have a line crossing the ending of a stroke and are sometimes described as having “wings” and “tips.” Serif fonts like Times New Roman make printed materials easier to read but can be difficult to read in online body copy.

 

How to website design

At AKSENT, we believe that every item of collateral must have a purpose and in order to achieve this purpose, we have developed processes that enable a client to come up with a plan for the web design process from start to finish.

Because of its structured nature, our process is not always received well by clients despite the fact that it is designed to ensure the client gets the website they require within the specified time frame. Some find it tedious and unlike the off-the-cuff nature they expect of design projects.

  • Client contacts us mainly asking for a costing
  • AKSENT responds with a request for a list of requirements or a general brief, we go over this and if it is clear, we prepare a draft costing. If it is not clear we ask for specific clarifications or for the client to come in for a meeting. Based on the meeting we send the client an initial estimate. Here, we are very clear that it’s subject to change.
  • The client pays a commitment fee and we initiate the process by sending them our brief structure to fill in. Once they send it back, we review it and conduct a needs analysis with the client to narrow down the specifics of what they need and why.
  • We then draw up a scope and deliverables document and the client’s signs off on it.
  • We are now ready to commence. Finalize on the website structure phase and move onto the design phase.
  • All these various phases developed for the design and development of the website are crucial in establishing grounds for the project, planning for the undertaking, implementation and maintenance of the project. Without them, there is no project, it is reduced to a whimsical activity bound to waste resources of the client and the developer.

Enaai Website

We developed a parallax website for Enaai Lolldaiga, Nanyuki’s first 18-hole championship golf course and gated community.

The website was built with three key aims, the first was to showcase the plans of the developers and where they want to take the Enaai real estate development.

The second objective was to show visitors where the development has reached at any given point when they visit the website. The site has a twitter integration to Enaai’s twitter account and progress bars that can be added as and when needed to highlight progress of the development quickly showing visitors what they need to see when they are looking for updates on Enaai’s progress.

The third function of the site was to make the offering very clear to visitors, we achieved this by designing a custom master plan in javascript that allows visitors to get a bird’s eye view of the development and visualise their new home and maybe even where their friends will be living on the project’s completion.

Enaai---Masterplan

enaai-site