Turning the art of web design into a science

Case study: Moorgate Group web redesign

Moorgate Group specialises in the Emerging markets, offering market intelligence and investment support services. They know their market and they know how the various 'instruments' work, and this gives them a unique selling proposition. Unlike other agencies, the company has people with very impressive CVs who can do a lot more besides PR.

However, Robert Kelsey, the company's managing director and founder, wanted to take the Moorgate Group website to the next stage. He wanted it to "look good'', be "conservative", "meaningful" and "aspirational" and serve as a "calling card" that suggests "solidity" and "trust", like the website of a law firm. Key objectives were to make the site look more impressive and to generate more hits through site marketing techniques. The website had to communicate clearly who Moorgate Group are and what they do.

Surfability completed the four-week redesign project in July 2003. The resulting website can be found at www.moorgategroup.com.

Surfability solution

There were five phases to the project:

1. Research Moorgate Group, its customers and competitors, and plan the new website's architecture and page content;
2. Design the look-and-feel through specific features, colour schemes, and graphics;
3. Develop and test website functionality and page templates;
4. Implement and prototype new design with new content and enhanced searchability;
5. Roll out a high profile website after debugging, fine-tuning, and webmaster training.

Problems solved

There were a number of technical problems that had to be overcome during the course of the project:

• Graphics and colours: In order to avoid any wasted development time we produced a graphical mock-up of the website's home page for the client before we began designing the website and its architecture.
• Style: A newspaper-like style for the website was required so we used cascading style sheets (CSS) to ensure consistency in colour and layout, and we created a number of special PHP functions to enable design effects such as navigation bars and photographs to be included without having to know the complicated HTML behind them.
• Document conversion: Most of Moorgate Group's research reports were written in Microsoft Word format which is unsuitable for the web so we automated the conversion of these documents into simple HTML documents.
• World clocks: To recreate the look of clocks on a trading floor we used Macromedia Flash to animate the hands of the clocks and action script to calculate the times in different parts of the world - including daylight saving times.
• Content management system: We wanted to make it as easy as possible for Moorgate Group personnel to update the website from anywhere so we invented a set of administration tools by which authorised users can manage the site from a web browser, upload files and edit web pages on-screen. The administrator can now navigate the website, edit the page he/she is on and preview how it looks before 'publishing' it to the site proper. This means that a web page author can back out of any mistakes he/she may introduce into the HTML.