BUSINESS WEBSITE
Challenge
Build a responsive website for a small business to bring in more customers, educate visitors on company’s products + services, and make it easy for visitors to contact employers.
Solution
Constructed Sign & Print Machine’s website to be attractive, informative and easy to navigate. Designed graphics and text to be true to the company’s brand and story. Carefully structured the layout so that customer’s could effortlessly navigate between various pages and get in contact with the business.
DESIGN THINKING
Research
What is the customer’s main priority when coming to the website?
In order of importance, they want to know what products + services are offered, see a gallery of work, learn about the business, then contact and place an order.
How can we increase customer engagement?
On every page, there are an average of 6 methods for the customer to contact the business via sending a direct message, heading to the contact page, providing direct phone numbers and emails, and sending them to the social media pages.
The Sign & Print Machine prides themselves on their high quality products and friendly service; what is the best way to convey this to the customer?
The pages are organized in manner that tells the story of the business through various sources – photos of their work, customer testimonials, display of awards won, statistics of projects completed of the years, and direct quotes from the owners.
The business owners receive a lot of business through their social media pages. How can we leads customers to their social pages for a higher rate of interactivity?
On the header, the social media icons are in a high contrast color located directly under the company logo. The social media icons are also enlarged and centered in the footer, located directly above the company’s contact information. As the company receives the most business through their Instagram page, a gallery of their most recent Instagram photos are displayed at the bottom of the Gallery page. Also, when browsing the main Gallery page, each photo is linked to the original post on the company’s Instagram, where they can learn more about the project and view similar work.
Website must be responsive to meet the needs of users on both desktops, tablets and mobile devices.
I thoroughly combed through the pages to ensure that all content is accessible and properly organized on all dimensions of devices.
Brand Identity
To keep consistency with the company’s brand, their logo of a Japanese dragon was used as the background on their webpages. The Sign & Print Machine also follows Japanese tradition in their brand colors – red for protection, blue for health and yellow for security. Too keep with their brand identity, red, blue and yellow was used throughout their webpages to highlight important text and buttons.
Front desk at the Sign & Print Machine office with dragon logo displayed on the back wall.
Company dragon logo used on business cards and social media pages.
Company branding of dragon logo used as the website background with a screen overlay.
Tools Used
Website is built and maintained on WordPress with additional CSS added. Website + domain are hosted on BlueHost. Sketches and notes are created and saved on Google Docs.
Next Steps
I am currently working on creating an additional section of their website for blogging. The blog will enhance the company’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO), bringing in more traffic to their website. The blog will also be a great way to interact with customers. A few ideas of blog posts are to teach customers how to properly install and take care of their products, to inform in detail of the company’s many services offered, answer frequently asked questions, highlight the company’s philanthropy, etc.