iMPOWER

Our design work built upon the rebranding ideas Poached were developing, expanding them into a fuller set of typographic and colour combinations that, along with a custom icon set, would form the foundation of the site’s visual design. We have found that this Style Guide driven design approach really helps to ensure a consistent reflection of a brand across a project.

What we arrived at is a clean, edge-less design that combines a confident use of colour and bold typography for instant impact. For a more approachable feel this was softened slightly through the introduction of curved elements such as the header backgrounds, buttons and icons.

Naturally the site benefits from a fully Responsive design for a great user experience across different screen sizes. From desktop down to smartphone the full content and functionality is available, but layouts and presentation tuned as the visitor’s browser width narrows. We do this by testing in mobile emulators but also with the real thing and our device lab includes a broad range of smartphones and tablets. It’s something that we do right through the design and development process from initial wireframes to final testing.

The Responsive approach was also carried through to the design of iMPOWER’s Insights newsletter, which we delivered as a Mailchimp-ready template. Recognising that the majority of email is read in mobile devices, having something that would automatically adapt to suit helps maximise the engagement on every send. By following the same stylistic principals as the website we’ve created an experience that feels consistent for users as they move between the two media.

The website’s content management is courtesy of WordPress and the platform’s rich plug-in ecosystem provides great scope for easily extending functionality in the future. Day to day publishing is quick and where needed there is scope to add real depth to the articles and case studies with a variety of text and layout styles available. A clear win here was in breaking down the technical barriers to publishing new content, giving more members of the iMPOWER team a platform for sharing their insights and demonstrate the organisation’s position as a thought-leader within their industry.

Although a lot of the content was new or re-written as part of the project, iMPOWER were also keen to keep a much of their news archive. The previous site was based on a custom CMS which complicated the migration, but we were able to automate the export and import to WordPress which allowed what was needed to be brought across without any manual effort. A content audit had already established what was of value to retain and we were able to quickly reformat and test those articles before republishing them in the new site.

Performance is an increasingly important aspect of delivering a great online experience, particularly to mobile users. Milliseconds saved in a page load time can make the difference between a site that feels snappy and that users will want to engage with and one where they’ll bounce before the first page loads. Alongside common optimisations such as caching, code minifying and server-side compression, moving the site’s hosting to the UK yielded an extra performance improvement for iMPOWER’s key audience.