Bloomsbury Associates

Bloomsbury Associates

Link: bloomsbury.co.nz

Size: 4 templates for a 16-page website

My professional status: independent web designer/developer

Website client: Bloomsbury Associates

Dates: October - December 2010, with ongoing support after delivery

Brief: Bloomsbury Associates is an independent financial advisory practice established to provide investment services to clients in New Zealand. They wanted a website that would provide general information about their services and their philosophy, together with case studies and testimonials from existing clients.

My responsibilities included:

  • Writing and negotiating the proposal for the website fixed-price contract
  • Creation and refinement of the information architecture and site schematics, including template wireframes and sitemap
  • Project management and ongoing liaison with the Bloomsbury team in order to achieve all their aims for the site, and to work through a range of technical and implementation issues with them
  • Project management including the development of design/development timelines within a programme of work and ensuring that I achieved all my project milestones in a timely fashion
  • Ongoing project management once I had designed, built and integrated the website in response to client requests for new and/or altered content and new functionality
  • Development of a website brand, including graphics and colour palette - as the existing branding consisted of a logo and newsletter in black and white
  • Design of the site - including look & feel, graphics, and navigation - initially by providing two different designs and then by refining and extending the client's preferred design
  • Development of a set of 4 templates in CSS and HTML 4.01 Transitional, from which I built and content-coded the completed website
  • Hand-coding in HTML 4.01 Transitional to a reasonable level of accessibility
  • Incorporating dynamic graphical effects using jQuery (Shadowbox plugin)
  • Ensuring that the jQuery provided progressive enhancement while still allowing complete accessibility for those users with JavaScript disabled
  • Extensive testing of the site at all stages of the development process, ensuring complete consistency across the following browsers and platforms:
    • PC Windows7: IE8; Firefox 3.5, Chrome
    • PC WindowsXP: Internet Explorer IE6, IE7, IE8; Firefox 3.0, 3.5, Chrome
    • Mac OSX 10.6: Firefox 3.5, Opera, Safari
  • The creation of a sitewide CSS print stylesheet - tested in IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox, Opera and Safari
  • Ensuring that every template had been validated using the W3C Markup Validation Service and that it conformed to HTML 4.01 Transitional requirements
  • Ongoing liaison with the client to ensure that the site was working as expected, and to provide additional HTML, CSS and content graphics as required
  • A final QA check of the website before go-live, ensuring that it was absolutely perfect, and then putting the site online and re-testing.

The main aim of the Bloomsbury Associates website is to provide a first point of information for potential clients who have been recommended by third parties - and as such it needed to be easy to navigate, simple, to-the-point and with a clear message. This was an enjoyable project - particularly developing the design - which needed to invoke a feeling of sensible, trustworthy, careful and professional financial advice through the use of colours and graphical elements throughout the site.

I will be updating the website on an ongoing basis for the client, as and when required.