LabSkills is an e-learning resource tool for schools and universities. It is curriculum focused software that features experiments, videos, tests and exam-style questions, all aimed at enhancing lessons, aiding coursework and revision, giving excellent opportunities for practice and learning.

Deckchair was originally approached to develop the logo and branding for the new LabSkills product, and from then on has supported the product through exhibition design, software case artwork, packaging concepts and most recently a new website.

LabSkills has received huge publicity so it was crucial the design and branding portrayed the product and its nature successfully. There were key factors central to the development of the LabSkills brand – educational, scientific, professional, serious, cutting edge – as well as the inherent considerations; ensuring the logo is memorable, unique, consistent and appropriate.

The exhibition banners, case artwork and packaging that followed continued the LabSkills theme, clearly presenting the information and brand whilst appealing to the target market. The unique icon, movement shapes and strong colours ensure the contemporary, scientific nature of LabSkills stands out.

The latest addition to the LabSkills brand was the website, launched towards the end of 2009. The key aim was to inform users about the product and it’s unique capabilities, acting as an important and sole reference point. Here, we utilised rich media to engage the user and enhance their experience through the website, using video, slideshows and imagery to boldly display the product and how it works. Static pages simply wouldn’t have done it justice. The website focuses on imagery/media, concise information and calls-to-action, ensuring the user is quickly and easily presented with the information they require.

You can visit the LabSkills website here.

The next step is to add further product information to the website, featuring extra video tailored towards the end-user, and from there, we look forward to the next stage of development, whatever that may be!

See the rest of the LabSkills work in our portfolio.

The web is an entirely different ‘beast’ to say 10 years ago, and it is vital to keep up with the flow, assessing the value of current trends, and not get washed away with the tide. The potential for interaction between a user and a website is huge, and very exciting and it’s clear to us that a website should be centered around the user and what they need to obtain from the website, as well as the business the website belongs to, and what the business needs.

We’re really excited about the websites we’ve been producing recently; we’ve really enjoyed the design process and have been able to implement some nice technical features. As part of this, we’ve been refining our processes, working towards achieving the most effective methods of working internally, and externally with our clients.

We’ve adopted Expression Engine as one of our primary content management platforms, owing to its extensive customisation features, ease of use and powerful modules. We’ve also officially elected jQuery as our Javascript library of choice – enabling us to quickly implement some choice usability enhancements as seen in the Money Saints site below. Our developers have been hard at work in the background improving our tool chains, tightening up security features, introducing Object Oriented programming principles into our code base and working on some Enterprise level systems for use in future applications/projects.

Have a look at some of our most recent work…

Money Saints

Yet to reach the masses, this website is ultimately aimed at lead generation but hopes to provide an experience that is useful, easy and helpful for the user. Employing JQuery helped us create a neat tool for the home page – an easy, and slightly fun way of drawing the user in. The overall design seeks to move away from the typical doom and gloom of most debt-related websites and inspire the user to take action.

Wesley Conference Centre

This website gives Wesley Conference Centre a strong online presence. A clean and easily accessible design, useful content and enquiry forms help the user find the information they need. The content management system behind this gives our client full control over the images and text on the website, as well as allowing them to add/remove PDFs, special offers and news stories.

Stuart & Frank Training

A presentation website to showcase Stuart & Frank Training, introducing their services and way of working, through textual information and a video introduction (provided by the client). Typical of the majority of our client relationships, we are currently producing an entire range of work for this client; branding, website, presentations, advertisements and character illustrations. Case study to follow soon!

H Sweet & Sons

The first online presence for H Sweet & Sons, displaying their services, as well as former projects through image lightbox galleries. Similar to Wesley Conference Centre, this website employs Expression Engine and gives the client full control over their website.

Feel free to let us know your thoughts on the above websites.

Ultimately it will benefit you, the user, as we want to offer much more on our new website – a more rich and user-friendly experience, detailed service and process information (how we can help you, what we do and how we work with you), regular design/technical/industry information and more.

We’ll keep you posted!

And also to inform you of our new address… As of 22nd December 2008, Deckchair’s address will be:

Deckchair UK Ltd, 54-56 Park Street, Bristol, BS1 5JN.

All of our other contact details will remain the same, so please continue to call us on 0117 9299150

Have a great couple of weeks.

A term that has been around since 2004 and is being bandied around across the technology, creative and internet based industries to name a few; over a series of blogs we are going to try and pin down what it actually is in simple terms and discuss the overall subject.

Web 2.0 is a term used to describe the current trend in both the usage and design of the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 is a perceived second-generation version of the web, coming after Web 1.0.The web is in constant development, and is now more about delivering services and interactivity tailored to a user’s needs, rather than simply the provision of flat information. Through the web, anyone can now collaborate and share information online in ways that were previously unavailable. Great examples of this are the development of social-networking sites like Facebook, image-sharing sites like Flikr, the abundance of blogs and wikis, and the sharing and downloading of music (legal or pirate).

The web is becoming social and open, it is mixing both the global and the local – creativity, collaboration, communication and information sharing is continually enhancing and becoming the paramount reason for using the web. And this is what defines the shift and evolution into Web 2.0.

We found a great video that helps to explain Web 2.0:

Other reference points:

Google’s Web Definitions for Web 2.0

Wikipedia

What is Web 2.0 (Richard Macmanus)

Becky

As Andrew Shanahan wrote for the Guardian, plants have many proven benefits for the office – first of all they look great and boost our mental well-being and sense of calm. But on top of this they purify the air by exchanging the carbon dioxide we breathe out for oxygen, they filter other volatile compounds, reduce allergens and balance local humidity.

Scientists have discovered that having plants around can boost our level of concentration, help prevent common bugs (such as colds) and reduce stress levels. Dragon plants in particular are known for their abilities to absorb many of the harmful emissions from computers and printers, and cacti are said to reduce the electromagnetic fields and radiation emitted by computer screens.

We just need to remember to water them!

Links to useful articles:

Flower Power (Guardian)

Why Plants are Good for You (Waitrose)

Put a Cactus in Front of Your Computer Screen (Planet Green)

Becky

The Client

The Environment Agency is the leading public body for protecting and improving the environment in England and Wales. It’s their job to make sure that air, land and water are looked after by everyone in today’s society, so that tomorrow’s generations inherit a cleaner, healthier world.
They strive to achieve this goal in many different ways; Influencing and working with Government, industry and local authorities to make the environment a priority. Taking action against those who don’t take their environmental responsibilities seriously is another.

The Challenge

One of the issues faced by the Environment Agency is the illegal dumping of toxic and other waste, also known as fly tipping. Aside from individuals who will quite happily dump a shopping trolley in a river, there are ‘organised’ fly tippers, that is, people or illegal carriers who dump large quantities of waste in order to avoid the charges associated with disposing of it responsibly.

The Environment Agency needed an advertising campaign that would not only raise awareness of the environmental and social issues associated with fly tipping. But also make businesses and communities aware of the fines that are incurred for the illegal dumping of waste.

The advertising campaign needed to be designed to appear on billboards and bus backs in the south Bristol area for a period of 6 months during 2007.

The Solution

The designers at Deckchair quickly came up with a few concepts for the campaign. One of the ideas was to show the reality of the fly tipping situation in South Bristol. A lot of the illegal carriers dump dangerous rubbish, chemicals and white goods in the back lanes of residential areas where young children play and could easily be harmed.
Using a young model (Florence, my daughter) and a renowned fly tipping location Deckchair’s creative team produced a hard hitting image with incredible impact to fulfill the brief.

The billboard:

The bus back:

The Result

The campaign has recently been honored at the National Environment Agency Communications Awards 2007 through Clare Rogers (project manager) with an award for ‘best visual interpretation of our brand’, and was short listed from over 100 entries. We are absolutely thrilled with this great result for our client. This of course is aside from the huge success of the billboard campaign itself.

Press Coverage

We achieved good local press coverage for the campaign with articles in The Bristol Evening Post and The Western Daily Press. Also, national press coverage with articles in the Chamber Link Magazine and Design Week.

Bristol Evening Post, Clare Rogers of the Environment Agency and Florence pose in front of one of the billboards in South Bristol.

Western Daily Press use the poster for their article.

Testimonial

Clare Rogers, Campaign Manager, Environment Agency said:
“Faced with the challenge of communicating a message to a hard-to-reach audience, we needed considerable creative input and some fresh ideas, stepping right away from our traditional corporate style. Deckchair gave us a range of great concepts to test on our audience, then delivered the complete package, based on our market research.
It’s rare to find a company so responsive to what you are trying to achieve. The results are stunning and our design has won a communications award for ‘best visual interpretation of our brand’.”

Leaflets

To back up the billboard campaign, the Environment Agency asked Deckchair to produce a duty of care leaflet to be distributed throughout Bristol, Bath, North East Somerset and South Gloucestershire Council boroughs. The leaflet is designed to make people check the waste carrier’s licence of any waste removal services that they employ. Using a model we recreated the typical scene of a ‘man with a van’ collecting unwanted items from a household. The message comes across loud and clear in this neat and informative leaflet:

Promotional

Deckchair also produced a fun and eye catching fridge magnet as a promotional item to be handed out at events to help to drive the message home:

Final Report

Clare Rogers at the Environment Agency asked Deckchair to produce a 40 page final report for internal use to compile the strategies and information for the BREW (Business Resource and Efficiency Waste programme) ‘Cleaning up Bristol’ Campaign. The report has been beautifully put together in a perfect bound book printed on recycled paper.

Do you need creative design for a campaign? Give us a call 0117 9299150 or pop by and meet the team.

Toni 

What better way to illustrate to you what we can do for your business than to show you a case study of an ecommerce website that we designed and built for a client recently:

The Client

Chew Valley Trees are a long established nursery who specialise in hardy, native and ornamental trees, shrubs, hedging and fruit trees. They are situated at the bottom of the Mendip hills and their 18 acre nursery continues to grow both in size and product range. Their plants have featured at major national venues such as the Chelsea Flower Show, Hampton Court Palace and Westonbirt International Festival of Gardens. Professional and amateur gardeners alike have benefited from their helpful service and knowledgeable advice.

The Challenge

Chew Valley trees needed to reach a wider UK audience in order to expand their selling power. Their existing website was only a single page that wasn’t able to give any idea of the range and variety of plants and trees that they sell. It was also not optimised for the search engines and therefore not being found by a wide enough audience.

The solution

Deckchair quickly produced some initial designs for a full ecommerce website and after discussions with the Chew Valley team, started to build the website. The overall design and layout is appealing to the market sector with plenty of pictures, descriptions and tips. The navigation is intuitive and allows the customer to browse the product categories to easily find what they need, before proceeding to a secure payment system to buy the products.

The Chew Valley team has the ability to update the products, pictures and descriptions easily through a simple admin system. This enables them to add new products themselves and keep the website fresh and up to date. A news section allows them to add interesting and topical information making the website a valuable resource in the gardening and landscaping sector. It encourages their customers to return to the website on a regular basis.

Of course the website was built from the ground up to be search engine friendly and is optimized for niche key phrases such as:
Ornamental trees
Native tree shop
Trees online

They are averaging 150 hits a day and 78% of those are coming through google. The conversion rates from these visitors are very good and improving month on month.

The Result

As a direct result of their new website and it’s search engine positions, Chew Valley Trees is now a flourishing online business and their sales figures have soared. Not only are they reaching a UK wide audience through the website but the company profile has been raised and has increased the number of people visiting the nursery too.

Testimonial

“We could not have been happier with the level of service received. The genuinely friendly approach and sympathetic understanding of what we were trying to achieve were professionally translated into a website that we are delighted with. Nothing was too much trouble.”
Julia Scarth, Owner, Chew Valley Trees.

Are you a business owner who wants to take your business online with an ecommerce website? Give us a call we are happy to talk to you about your options and we can give our expert impartial advice on the best strategy for your company

Toni

SPA Fine Champagne Ltd, Bath, is a new and dynamic family run company headed by Andy Russell and his two sons Stephen and Phillip.  Andy Russell says: “Our objective is to offer champagne and sparkling wines, fine wines and spirits at competitive prices without compromising the service to our customers.”

Andy approached the web design team at Deckchair to design and produce an ecommerce website that would give his exclusive customers an easy way to order online.

The website has been designed using SPA Fine Champagne’s existing branding, it has an intuative navigation and search feature making the products easy to browse, view and order. The website also features a full content management system which means that the products, catagories and text can all be updated by the SPA team.

Andy gave Deckchair this testimonial: “Deckchair was recommended to me by a personal friend and right from the start of our relationship with Ollie and his team I found them easy and a pleasure to work with. I am a technophobe but Ollie managed to build us a fantastic and usable website, on time and on budget, that even I can use. I will without doubt recommend him to you and will be using him again to build other websites in the near future“.

If you are thinking of setting up an ecommerce business and you would like some advice or guidance give us a call or pop by for a cup of tea!

Toni

Once you have designed and optimised your website, you need to check your stats regularly to see how well it is working for you. You can then make educated adjustments to your web design or page content.

Sign up to Google Analytics (It’s free) and you will be able to track visitors in intricate detail from where they enter the site to where they are exiting, which pages they are viewing, how long they are on the website. Also, where your traffic is coming from ie referred websites or search engines.

You can set up ‘goals’ on your website so that you can track conversions. For example if you want to know how many visitors make it to a certain page but drop out before they actually buy the product, this is very easy to do. All this and much more, so give it a try!

That’s all the tips for this week folks, have a good weekend!

Toni