Public Affairs Agency Web Design for Crestview Strategy

Public Affairs Agency Web Design

Crestview Strategy

Launch website

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Web Design Services

  • Brand Refresh
  • UX (User Experience) Design
  • Information Architecture
  • Responsive Website Design
  • Art Direction & Consulting

Platform

  • Responsive Web Development
  • Custom WordPress Development
  • Custom Animation
  • Accessibility Compliance
  • Search Engine Optimization

Project Overview

A global public affairs agency that develops and delivers integrated public affairs plans to influence public opinion, shape government policy, and effectively represent client interests with in-depth research, compelling policy proposals, and authentic grassroots campaigns.

Custom WordPress web design for agencies that communicate around the world.

You don’t often come upon a brand that operates in many different countries around the world to communicate with audiences big and small about some of the most influential topics our society revolves around day in and day out. Crestview Strategy does just that – working with governments, agencies and various other public organizations with a global position to shape their messaging and build strategic campaigns to communicate to the masses and drive our global community.

Our web design team was tasked with helping the agency rebrand and launch a new custom website design that would serve as a digital hub for their expansive global team and provide a platform for their analysts to showcase the depth of their experience through publications, case studies and thought leadership articles.

Website Design Goals

Custom WordPress Design for Agencies – Crestview Strategy

The Web Design Process

Website Strategy

Many website designers can whip up an eye-catching interface design that, on the surface, makes an impression and demands a second look. The difference between an attractive design and the best website design is hidden in post-launch analytics. Understanding how the audience finds the website and engages with the interface design is key to delivering long-term success online. The data doesn’t lie, and it becomes evident in a short period of time if a design is working or not.

The first step in our custom website design process is created to tackle this challenge head-on and develop a strategic foundation from which we build a tailored project plan for every website we design. Our Discovery phase allows our team to immerse themselves in the analytics, explore use cases, analyze and compare search engine performance between our client and their competition and speak with project stakeholders to understand why we’re redesigning the website and who it’s intended for.

Understanding who our web designers are crafting the new website for is crucial to the overall project’s success. Many designers and clients, for that matter, get lost in this process and design the website for themselves. As self-gratifying as this is, it’s a critical mistake and often leaves the website owner scratching their head, wondering why their digital marketing isn’t working as well as expected, and conversions are low.

It’s important to understand the audience and craft a user interface and navigational strategy by solving the challenges the analytics data shows us. Once we understand who is using the website and what they may be struggling with when interacting or navigating the current site, we can develop a project plan and strategy to solve those challenges and create a frictionless experience for the end user.

Having struggled on the Squarespace platform for years, the Crestview team was ready and willing to work through our Discovery and Strategy process to create a shared project plan that would guide us through the creative process and serve as a road map for their content development.

Crestview Strategy – Web Design for Agencies

UX Design Strategy

We believe it’s important that our clients understand the purpose behind our web design methodology, and we take pride in guiding stakeholders through a thorough site mapping workshop to craft intuitive navigation followed by an interactive wireframing exercise. In this phase of the creative process, our UX designers carefully lay out the information architecture and user experience within each unique type of page and content type planned for the new website. The UX design process is the most important ground-floor phase of the website design process that solves most of the existing experiential issues in the existing website. It allows all team members to review, troubleshoot, and ultimately solve many engagement and conversion issues within the website, all while avoiding the distraction of visual design – the creative design phase comes later.

Wireframes are created and presented using a prototyping tool that allows our team to collaborate and work directly with project stakeholders. This process offers an invaluable opportunity to interact with the page layouts and leave markups, comments and questions directly on the wireframes for our team to discuss and iterate on in real time.

The UX design process ensures that everyone is on the same page from the beginning and collectively working towards the same goals.

Responsive UI Design

Flexibility is paramount.

Creative UI Design

Once the Strategy Phase is completed, our next task on our creative journey was immersing our design team in the newly developed brand guidelines to understand and hand-craft an end-to-end design system worthy of such a vibrant brand identity.

Using our early discovery work, comparing competitor sites we learned that the majority focused on the services and flashy effects without offering much context or substance. Competing sites were also overly simplified and clearly templated, offering a very repetitive and uninspired experience that didn’t help any single agency rise above the others.

Responsive Web Design for Crestview Strategy
Responsive Website Design for Crestview Strategy Mobile Website Design for Crestview Strategy

Custom WordPress Development

WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS platform because it is incredibly flexible and powerful enough to provide a trusted digital marketing engine for startups and enterprise-level organizations alike. When hand-crafted by WordPress experts, the new site can support the company’s evolving needs for years to come and build strong organic search engine rankings. In this case, we seized the opportunity to re-invent the CMS and reorganize the website’s backend making the unique day-to-day needs of the Crestview Strategy marketing team simpler, faster and much more intuitive than the previous Squarespace website. By providing the digital marketing team with the new, tailored content management tools to control every pixel on the website and optimize for search, we solved the issues they struggled with in the previous website.

Our approach with the new Crestview Strategy website took shape behind a meaningful brand extension through all aspects of the website and offering focussed imagery from key regions around the globe along with custom illustration and animation to present concepts and information in a new and exciting format. To humanize the brand and bring the analysts to the forefront a variety an interactive carousels were created throughout the website and cross-linked with thought leadership and insights authored by each individual.

The user interface design quickly took shape as we wove the global imagery with graphical elements and high-impact colour palette to leave a lasting impression on the audience.

Charlie Crabb, Communications Strategist

We selected Parachute from a number of reputable web design agencies and immediately knew we had made the right choice. They patiently guided us through the creative process, making sure we understood each phase and the importance of the decisions we were making. We’ve received rewarding feedback on our new website and continue to rely on Parachute to help us achieve our digital communication goals.

Crestview Strategy
Charlie Crabb,

Communications Strategist, Crestview Strategy

With the high-fidelity website concept fully approved, our web developers joined the mix transforming the new concept designs into pixel-perfect website code. Before handoff to our backend WordPress developers, our quality assurance advisor ran the new HTML page templates through a round of beta testing to ensure they would behave and function as expected across modern browsers and devices.

Once satisfied with the page layouts, our expert WordPress developers took over to integrate the custom page designs with a hand-crafted WordPress platform designed specifically to meet the needs of all stakeholders and their goals.

Post-launch Website Support

After completing the development phase, the new site was populated with content and regionalized for audiences across Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. Again, the website was thoroughly tested to ensure all content was in the correct place, it responded to mobile devices efficiently, and the new site passed GDPR Compliance. Before the official launch, we took the Crestview marketing team through a WordPress CMS demo to test drive all aspects of the new platform and CMS tools. This opportunity also grants us time to share our experience and best practices for ongoing search engine optimization and website management before handing over the keys.

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