Nottingham Conferences shiny new website design has just been made live. The previous design for website was over three years old and had developed in an ad-hoc style with various elements of functionality being added over the period. We put forward a redesign proposal to the marketing team, which centered mainly on the home page and sub-page templates, with the aim of refreshing the look and feel without altering the structure of the site, or the CMS that managed it.

Another issue which we highlighted and were keen to address was that the previous site was using Flash to animate the homepage header graphic. Although Flash can be used to produce eye-catching, dynamic online animations, its content cannot be read by Google or viewed by mobile devices such as iPhones and iPads, which currently account for around 5% of the site’s users. The Flash content was replaced with a JQUERY slider, which has the added benefit of enabling us to display a homepage tailored to the individuals search term.

Until relatively recently, using specific fonts such a brand fonts or character fonts online effectively has been really difficult to achieve. Within this new site, we’ve incorporated a font substitution feature for its main titles; this means that Google can index the text for SEO purposes, but the user sees a replication of the brand font. This really enhances the design of the site and means a greater adherence to brand guidelines. Previously, websites either needed to use ‘resident fonts’, which always limited the look and feel, or graphics to replace text, which couldn’t be indexed by Google.

The real bonus to the marketing team, though, is that they can continue to use the CMS they are familiar with, and simply change the style sheets; all the back-end data remains unchanged resulting in a minimal amount of disruption. Looking ahead, because they’re utilizing Absolute CMS 4.0, it also means that a mobile-optimised version of the website can be created easily by creating additional style sheets -  something we are planning to implement once the number of mobile users reaches 10%.