“Do we have full control over this?”
Design concepts, and thinking about flexibility
After the wireframes were signed off, it was over to Jadu Creative to produce a design concept for the new site. Everyone was excited to see what came back, and we weren’t disappointed.
Within a couple of weeks, we had two potential designs for the desktop homepage, landing pages and document pages. Mobile designs followed shortly after.
We liked both designs and therefore had the advantage of being able to pick and choose the elements we liked best from each, such as:
- The yellow colour scheme that we felt better reflected our bold ambitions and because it is so heavily associated with Watford.
- Sharp edges over rounded for the image / text boxes.
We were also able to add a few design features of our own, including…
- …that the lovely little white accents go around the featurettes (rather than just the text boxes).
- …that the buttons not be red, as we felt red could denote danger or urgency when there were none.
- …that the option for imagery be added to events on the homepage (which was originally text-led).
- …that search to be hidden behind a magnifying glass icon on mobile devices (to help navigation on smaller screens).
- …that the ‘In this section’ on content pages to be boxed, while keeping the little chevron pointing down to expand the content (which we thought was a really nice, neat touch).
Do we have control?
Throughout all of these stages, we’ve kept asking Jadu “have we got control over this?”
For each of the website templates we’d ask “can we remove this row?”, “can we add another one of these rows?”, “can we take away the council services boxes if we feel that the council services button is doing its job?”
We’d not had such control over our website styling before and found ourselves limited as to what we could change. Now, as we’re constantly thinking about the future, it’s great to know we have the flexibility in the Jadu platform, and within our template, so that we will have complete control going forward.
Waving goodbye to an important stage
Because we’re merging the best bits of two designs, we haven’t needed any more design iterations than had been planned for, and so have been able to meet every deadline.
To the relief of the web team, the concepts were signed off and we wave goodbye to an important stage in the process. We’re now getting excited to see the working prototypes because that will enable us to see how things react and behave when navigating the site.
We’re looking forward to that — and will provide a full update in the next post!
