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Friendship between First Commonwealth Bank and Elliance goes back a long way. In 1998, Elliance designed the bank’s second website. Since then, Elliance has redesigned the bank’s website three times – most recently three years ago before responsive design movement took off. Last fall, First Commonwealth Bank reached out to Elliance and posed an interesting challenge: make the current website responsive without redesigning it. The bank’s customers still loved their branch-architecture-inspired website design but wished it was mobile/tablet friendly. Elliance welcomed the challenge. In short three months, we delivered well-documented responsive templates to their Web/IT team, and walked them through the template architecture. Then we supported them for another three months while the wonderful Web/IT team incorporated the new templates into their Content Management System. The entire process worked very smoothly. Two happy teams! Most importantly, the site visitors are now enjoying the perfect website experience whether they are visiting the bank website from their desktops, tablets or smartphones. Now, … Continue reading
Posted in: community bank marketing, responsive web design
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Today was a great day for Elliance, and Aerotech. We accomplished an engineering feat which is a rare occurrence in any company’s history. A little over a year after launching their English website, we launched the German version of the website for Aerotech. The intriguing part of the story is that the German website wasn’t built as a standalone website; instead, a common code base, data model and content management engine powers both their English and German websites. This translates into nominal costs for creating each additional international website and fixing a problem in all international versions in case a problem is discovered. Doing this for a marketing website is an accomplishment in itself, but doing this for a marketing website with complex add-ons such as site search, facet search, international dealer locator, a complete product catalog and SEO hooks is an accomplishment on a different scale. It’s as if we were climbing uphill with extra weights added to our … Continue reading
Every preschool has a point of view. All point of views are good, for some group of kids out there. But the only point of view that appeals to us as a company is the one that meets the child wherever the child is developmentally and nurtures the child’s spirit from there. Shady Lane is that special school. How would I know? Well, all my three children went there and grew in leaps and bounds during their years there. Surprisingly, the teachers challenged us as parents and we too grew in leaps and bounds as well. We were proud to design their website a few years back and now ever more proud to relaunch it by making it responsive i.e. you can now enjoy a graceful site experience on desktops, tablets and smartphones. Then And now Visit their website at http://www.shadylane.org and learn more about our website design and development services.
Posted in: responsive web design
About a year ago, I took the plunge in to grid-based web layouts. For a long time, I felt that grids were too restricting for creative design and limited your choices and direction for development. Oh how wrong I was. The use of the grids is quickly becoming a standard for rapid template generation. Designers are going back to their print shop roots and finding that the same paradigms can be incredibly useful in the responsive web design world. Before you drink the Kool-Aid, let’s go over a few pros and cons of using grids and how we can overcome them. “Grids are great!” Grids are great for a large websites with tons of content, much like an .edu site. It allows developers and designers to setup a series or rules for where content should go, and leave little to no surprises when building out new pages. Grids and responsive design go hand in hand, allowing the developers to write … Continue reading
In a perpetual state of evolution, healthy organizations, like healthy people, completely reinvent themselves every seven years. In the digital era, the burden of telling the world about our current essence falls increasingly on our web presence. To treat website redesign projects as just another ordinary project is pure folly. A website redesign project is a tremendous opportunity to: 1. Imagine a greater future. A website is an important part of an organization’s stretch goal. It reflects a healthy mix of an organization’s current reality and as-yet unrealized potential. 2. Modernize your story. Constant self-reflection leads to new ways of re-imagining one’s stories and the metaphors we live by. A website must speak in one’s honest voice. 3. Enhance your unique selling proposition. Times change. Society changes. Values change. What people value changes. What organizations emphasize in their sales arguments changes too. A website should articulate the unique selling proposition in a language that resonates with contemporary values. 4. Build … Continue reading
Posted in: Website Redesign
Tom Friedman, op-ed columnist for New York Times, recently concluded an article with this wonderful line: “when outstanding becomes so easily available, average is over.” This applies perfectly to our most recent client, Manchester Business School, which offers a truly Global hybrid MBA, where students can take classes in any of their global centers located in 7 cities/countries across the globe: Miami, Sao Paulo, Dubai, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Manchester. We have been challenged to drive enrollment for them in North America, attracting Economist reading, country hopping, global nomads. Here is some of the work we are doing for them, which I thought you might enjoy: Their upgraded homepage, which we enhanced within the framework of their template and CMS, and positioned them as a Miami business school: Their upgraded global mba page: Their upgraded Miami page, again positioning them as a business school in Miami: Their upgraded about page: and one of their new global MBA banners: <!– … Continue reading
The litmus test for greatness of a web design agency is how well it can operate in tight spaces. We were recently asked to create miracles in extremely small spaces, within the constraints of pre-existing templates and CMS for Carnegie Mellon’s Masters in Software Engineering program. Yes, we redesigned their logo, rewrote the critical copy, fortified the calls-to-actions and strengthened the information architecture of their website, but we were really proud of the headers we created for them. They are confident, tell stories and invite prospects to explore the programs. Judge for yourself: Now, who wouldn’t want to join the club of these smart software engineers? Even though the jury is still out, it appears that these miracles in tiny spaces have led to an increase in applicants. Wow, indeed. More to come. As our prestigious 2009 Interactive Media Awards show, we are one of the top higher education web design agencies and in the US. We share this limelight … Continue reading
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Here are five big ideas being talked about heavily in the web world that marketers should be considering. Create Once. Publish Everywhere. (COPE). This is the philosophy guiding NPR’s brilliant content/digital strategy which has allowed them to make the most of every story created–serving it up on any device and application. Responsive Web Design Oft understood as a coding and design solution for being able to adapt a site to the ever proliferating number of screen sizes, responsive web design is as much about one content base as it is one code base. Mobile First Mobile First is the concept that if we restrict ourselves to designing for the smallest screen size first, we’ll force ourselves to have to prioritize content and decide what’s really most important. A great way for you to separate the must have vs. nice to have vs. why do we still have? among your thousands of web pages. Storytelling All this device proliferation and talk … Continue reading
In typically self-effacing manner, Ethan Marcotte deflected the gobs of praise and gratitude being offered to him today, on the two-year-anniversary of his seminal A List Apart article in which he first described what’s come to be known as Responsive Web Design. I think this deserves one tiny footnote, and that’s that Ethan didn’t simply write an article. That’s misleadingly humble. Ethan got tenaciously interested in solving a particular problem related to how a proliferating variety of devices and browsers displayed websites. Yes, the author community caught the fever, spreading and advancing the technique, but before Ethan’s article delivered Responsive Design to ALA readers, he noticed something, got intensely curious about it, and put in a lot of dedicated effort to satisfy his curiosity. That’s the part I’m thankful for, and it’s why congratulations are most certainly in order.
Posted in: responsive design