The ‘wicked’ website we’ve weaved!

The importance of a high quality website is something that is often overlooked by even some of the biggest firms. But designing and constructing a site that is going to look great, be easy to navigate, informative and successfully serve its purpose isn’t as easy as it sounds – as Sue Davenport, Marketing Director at Liniar, explains…

These days every man and his dog has a website – and any company worth its salt has one that’s at the very least practical and fully functional.
The Liniar website was performing its duties very satisfactorily – but that wasn’t good enough for us.

As a company we are known for being innovative and forward thinking and we strongly felt that our website should reflect that philosophy.

So in early April myself, along with the rest of the marketing team, sat down together and had a brainstorming session to pinpoint what we wanted from our new website – how we wanted it to look, what we wanted it to say, and what functionality we wanted it to provide.

We mapped out a detailed spec of how we, in an ideal world, would like it to operate and set about narrowing down the list of potential development companies we wanted to work with us on this project.

One company shone above all others in their comprehension of how we like to work, understanding our ideas and envisaging our concept of the finished article.

ICAAL (Internet Consultants and Associates Ltd), a group of internet experts based in Southampton specialising in web design and search engine optimisation, not only impressed us with their vision of what they could provide, but they also have ample experience in the industry.

Once they were on-board that’s when the real hard work began. We knew it was going to be a major task to put the new site together exactly how we wanted it, but I don’t think any of us realised just what a mammoth undertaking we had signed up for!

37 templates

The starting point for the entire project, after mapping out our requirements, was to achieve the look and feel of the site. In order to do this, our designers set about creating an attractive appearance. We wanted a fresh and clean style and this was achieved thanks to our talented team.
Every aspect was pondered over and tinkered with, from which fonts to use to the kind of sliders we wanted. In the end, 37 templates were created and supplied to ICAAL to be coded and converted into usable web pages.

1,432 images

We’ve got a comprehensive image library at Liniar. We are constantly updating it and sourcing new, quality photographs to illustrate our vast range of products.

Rifling through this vast database to select the most appropriate image for each requirement was no small feat. It took hours to locate and upload them to fill every slot to provide the stunning visual effect that we were aiming for – mission accomplished.

79,000 words

The new website has been structured so there is specific content relevant to each visitor. Each sector that a user might represent is catered for to give everyone a rewarding and educational experience.

But in order to do this it meant writing an extraordinary amount of copy. Each and every product in our range had to be described in detail, along with hub pages, sector pages, brand history – the list goes on!

102 product renders

One of the aspects that make our website unique is the product renders that we have on there – 102 in total – to attractively and accurately illustrate the many products in our range. These have to be created by our Design & Development department using specialised software and it was a long and time consuming task to generate such a large amount.

625 emails

Throughout the whole process there was constant communication between ourselves and ICAAL, from the major decisions to the tiniest detail. Many meetings took place during the development and these varied from face-to-face, Skype conversations and conference calls.

A total of 625 emails were also sent from our office to ICAAL during this time, but the interaction between our two companies was crucial to getting the finished product that we were all aiming for.

142 days later…

As with all projects, of any size, a deadline had to be set for completion. We agreed to aim to go live in early August and got stuck in to the initial challenges. One day a week was set aside to be solely dedicated to working on the site and ‘Website Wednesdays’ were born.

As the deadline grew ever closer though, ‘Website Wednesdays’ eventually escalated into ‘Website Weeks’ in the later stages as all of our attentions had to be focused on compiling, designing and writing content and populating the site.
In the end, from start to finish, the project took 142 days to bring together – and the finished article was worth every minute of graft.