Turning the art of web design into a science

Case study: Macro-Dev web redesign and CMS

Macro Developments Ltd is based in London and its website serves as both an electronic business card and a way to organise its "market strategy and economic analysis" data, news and views. The regularly updated website (www.macro-dev.com) includes free access to summary economic forecasts and market projections, whilst access to more specialist papers and briefing services is made available to subscribers only.

Macro-Dev required an improved version of its existing website which would:

• Be consistently designed, easier to maintain, and faster to download
• Appear the same on all browsers

Surfability completed the redesign project within two weeks in October 2002.

Surfability solution

There were three phases to the project: research, design and implementation:

The research phase involved:

• Meeting to discuss customer requirements
• Analysing the websites of Macro-Dev competitors and producing a summary report
• Studying the customer's existing methods of automatic web page generation, which used Microsoft Excel as a basic content management system
• Submitting a design proposal for feedback and fine-tuning

The design phase involved:

• Enhancing the existing design with new pages, W3C-compliant HTML and JavaScript navigation bars
• Providing tools for automatic generation of HTML (Excel + VBA scripting)
• Converting existing web pages to use PHP and 'include' files to separate data from content
• Testing the new website with browsers from different vendors and on different operating systems

The implementation phase involved:

• Installing the redesigned website on the customer's web server
• Password-protecting subscription-only content
• Installing link checking software and a PHP server on customer's PC
• Optimising meta tags and page titles for search engines
• Submitting site to multiple search engines

Finally, every step in our solution for Macro-Dev was documented on the Surfability extranet website.