Our Strategic Approach & Technical Standards

AUTHOR: JONATHAN PORTER

01/10/2010

NEW BRAND MEDIA OWNS THE COPYRIGHT FOR THIS DOCUMENT AND ALL ITS CONTENTS. THIS PROPOSAL SHOULD BE CONSIDERED PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL AND MAY NOT BE SHARED WITH ANY THIRD PARTY WITHOUT THE PRIOR WRITTEN PERMISSION OF NEW BRAND MEDIA LTD.

Contents

•  The New Brand Media Difference •  Our Vision •  A User-Centred Design Approach (UCD)

•  UCD & Our Iterative Prototyping Methodology •  Understanding the Target Audience •  Information Architecture: Design for Usability •  Content is ‘King’ •  Prototyping & Work-flow •  The New Brand Media CMS Framework

•  Our User-Centred Design approach is the result of over a decade of design & development for some of the world’s leading brands.

•  Our technology platform is brand savvy, Social Media friendly and Mobile ready.

•  As an independent quality assurance, all our code will be approved by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

•  Our brand building technologies will deliver many strategic advantages from Search Engine Optimisation to reduced marketing costs for the business.

The New Brand Media Difference

We are uniquely placed to leverage synergies and economies of scale in the deployment of multiple brands and their online presence.

Our vision is to deliver an easy to use, digital marketing platform for maximising brand reach through multi-channel capabilities:

Our standards based coding practices will ensure the web database becomes an effective, single content repository or 'digital hub' for real-time distribution to these channels. This will eliminate duplication effort and will allow the Hogarth to grow their web/brand presence in-house, potentially pushing data to mobile applications and social media, simultaneously.

Our Vision

Mobile Web Social

A User-Centred Design Approach (UCD)

Placing ‘the user’ at the centre of the design process makes a web application easy to navigate and pleasure to use. Our approach to achieving high standards of usability through iterative prototyping will ensure your site delivers on the business objectives.

User-Centred Design is about understanding your target audience and designing around their needs and goals.

UCD & Our Iterative Prototyping Methodology

•  Our methodology is an iterative approach, lean on documentation and rich in action – ‘prototyping’.

•  Each deliverable will run through iterative cycles of research, prototyping and evaluation against the business objectives.

•  Measurement is an integral part of our approach: Our technologies provide our clients with granular detail on their return on investment.

Rapid Prototyping, Understand, Create & Evaluate

The User-Centred Design Process

Understanding the Target Audience

The following analysis will be conducted at the very outset of the project:

1.  Define User Profiles User Profiling seeks to understand target users and identify their needs and characteristics.

2.  Establish User Goals A process of grouping, prioritising and optimising the activities of users.

3.  Plan User Journeys User-flow diagrams are developed and optimised around the established user goals.

These ‘user journeys’ are extrapolated to form the primary information architecture of the site. 

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Information Architecture: Design for Usability

Usable web sites come from a focus on the ‘people‘ who will use the application, over the technology or corporate structure that produces it. An experienced Information Architect will direct your site content so that it is:

•  Categorised in a way your target audience understands.

•  Designed to make to the target users goals easy to achieve.

•  Consistent and intuitive.

•  Optimised for Search Engine ranking.

Sitemaps will be produced as a framework for the site content, ready for prototyping…

On the Internet, ‘content is king’. Yet too often, content is not considered early enough in the web development process in the rush to the visual ‘design.’

Our approach is to engage the content management solution at the earliest stage in order to ‘Prototype’ the information architecture in a ‘real’ web site driven by the database. This means we will be perfecting the content throughout the entire project build cycle.

A prototyping approach therefore enables:

•  A web-based content repository that is visible and editable by all project stakeholders regardless of location (Remote client access).

•  A more ‘human-friendly’ method of inputting copy into the database which can be previewed immediately in a ‘real’ website context as opposed to being in isolated and unconnected Word documents.

•  Improved usability. Writing site copy with a sense of connectivity to other pages will improve screen logic and navigation.

•  Iterative content improvements throughout the project timeline. 

Content is ‘King’

Prototyping & Work-flow

•  The Hogarth team will be set up with individual user accounts with varying degrees of authorization to access and edit the content prototype and subsequently, the actual live web site

•  This will establish an approval workflow early on for the Hogarth to manage their site content from administrator to editor going forward

•  Any third party can be given access at the Hogarth’s discretion, be that a PR company, Copywriter or SEO specialist. For example, a PR Agent may be permitted to edit and publish content whereas an SEO specialist may only be permitted to add meta-tags and submit content changes to the main administrator for approval before going live. This will allow the Hogarth to scale up and down outside support as they choose

The New Brand Media CMS Framework

The New Brand Media framework is built on the leading Open Source Content Management System, WordPress. The framework we have developed 'on top' of WordPress adds modular functionality extensions that deliver on a number of typical business needs that we have come across whilst developing content management systems for clients over the last 10 years.

Below is a snapshot of some of the key advantages that make our system infinitely more flexible and powerful than your average CMS 'out of the box':

•  Easy to use Embedding of Rich Media: Video, Flash, Podcasts

•  SEO friendly URL Structure

•  Drag & Drop Page Template building via the CMS (infinite numbers of unique page templates possible)

•  PHP based for rendering keywords from external sources in-page and indexable by Google and others.

•  Conduits for Mobile site versions for iPhone, Blackberry etc.

Our CMS Framework Features

•  Web Standards Compliant: Accessible, Future Proof & Scalable. Forward-thinking development methodologies, constantly avaliable updates. Easily extendable by thousands of available plugins

•  ‘Word’ style content editor: The task of editing the web site content will require no specialist technical skills. Once an editor has logged into the site they can manipulate content through a simple visual editor as shown. This provides ‘Word like’ formatting controls such as Bold, Italic, link creation, bullet points, alignment and image/media upload.

•  Full Multimedia Support: File storage, video and audio embedding in page.

•  SEO Friendly: Full management of URL’s, Tags & Keywords.

•  Built-in Form Creation: Add multimple forms & manage send email addresses.

•  Flexible Drag & Drop Template Builder: Allows the administrator to combine of page elements

•  into page templates and manage their use. Including, Custom ‘headers’ and sidebar managment for any individual page on the website.

•  “Quote” Management System: The requirement to display revolving quotes has been successfully implement on the Hogarth wireframe prototype; In the design phase will be specifying the type of transition and styling required but this, as with all content on the site will be easily managed in the backend by simply pasting the desired quote and author into an input field and publishing.