Each one of these capabilities has a crucial role to play, and AKG’s clients know that they can call on us for any or all of them. Our nature is collaborative, which means that we’re happy to work in partnership with other agencies and internal teams to provide just the expertise you need for your project.
A well thought through strategy will help you to deliver against your vision. It will ensure that you start off on the right road and provide you with a framework against which progress can be measured.
Your team needs to buy into your strategy. More than that, team members feel much happier to help to maintain something that they have helped to shape.
In this way, sound strategy is born. Because we’re communicators, we’ll then work with you to design a communications plan to share the strategy with stakeholders. Because they’ve been involved, they’ll recognise elements of it and feel part of it. They’ll feel responsible for making the strategy a success and will contribute more freely to making things happen.
AKG’s audit team works with clients to ensure that documentation is created to a professional standard. At the most basic level an audit could provide you with detailed Information Architecture, mapping the range and extent of content and functionality and revealing structural relationships. At an advanced level, complex workflow can be laid out in diagrams to provide essential process detail.
We believe that adequate documentation has a crucial role in safeguarding the value of your online communications assets. If you should change internal or external service providers, your new provider can be quickly brought up to speed with access to documentation. If you should need to migrate your website from a legacy platform to a new one, documentation will provide clear detail on what it is that needs to be migrated.
We ask them in focus groups. We ask them in online surveys. We’ll probably ask them on exit, because we’re as interested in the outcome as we are in the intention.
Our expert assessments will help with identifying things that are just plain wrong. Menus that are too long, badly described or confusing. Pages that scroll past the point of no return. Links that don’t work. Processes that break down.
AKG has recently helped Cadbury and Britax with website usability.
We’ve recently helped Cadbury with IA in both corporate website and global intranet.
AKG’s designers subscribe to a User Centred Design philosophy. We think that this is very important. It means that we think of design as serving the nature and needs of the user, rather than being something that users need to learn or adapt to. The result is user experience that is more intuitive; design that needs less learning.
Bridget is Company Secretary of a FTSE100 company. As part of her job, she buys corporate legal services. Bridget is 43. She’s a graduate in a business discipline. She’s very busy and time-poor. Consequently, she values speed and clarity above all other things. When she visits a website she wants to find the services she needs quickly and doesn’t want to dig around for a relevant contact. She would never use a generic email address to make contact. Bridget likes to use site search engines, rather than make use of menus. Bridget reads the Telegraph. Her most frequently visited websites include ft.com and asos.com.
Now that we have a picture of Bridget, our User Experience Designers can get to work designing user journeys that will suit her particularly well. The resulting wireframes may well be used to build a prototype and we may ask Bridget, or possibly a number of Bridgets, to join us for some usability testing. Bridget is the expert in how she herself uses websites. She’ll tell us if we are striking the right balance between navigation, signposting, content presentation and calls to action.
In 2009/10 AKG helped Cadbury to visualise the audiences for its corporate website.
Today, the corporate or brand website (or intranet) is a sophisticated suite of software. With a relational database at its core, the website makes use of stylesheets, templates and often complex scripting to deliver the user experiences we design. It may sell things via secure, encrypted interfaces. It may call content dynamically from your back-office systems. It may even syndicate content to other website owners to extend your market reach.
AKG is pragmatic about content management. If you would like us to use Interwoven, that’s fine. But you may be able to achieve your content management objectives by deploying an open source CMS, such as Umbraco or Drupal. For your intranet, you may choose MOSS. The key tests are … does the product choice provide you with the functionality and usability you need now and for the foreseeable future, is it a stable, mature product and does it have a sufficient developer base to give you the flexibility you need.
We hope that when you meet us, the tone of voice in this copy will make us seem quite familiar. We think that good copywriting should give you a sense of the nature and the style of the business and its people; of the essence of its culture.
So, the copy we’d write for you wouldn’t be like this. It would be like you, and it would be designed to speak to your audiences with clarity and, possibly, with authority. We might be describing your ability to make ships or chocolate bars. We might be helping you to engage with industrialists or teenagers.
For websites, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is crucial of course. Natural search is free, so it would be remiss of us not to optimise against the 100 plus criteria that are known to influence Google ranking. To help keep you on track, our specialist web copywriters will train your copy editors in SEO factors and writing for the web.
Beyond natural search, we should be creative. Basic marketing principles require us to identify where your audiences are. They may well be on Google, in which case we can use sponsored links to complement our natural search efforts. We get excited about helping clients to ‘own’ search terms!
