As we share a building with Azzure IT, it was inevitable that the time would eventually come for us to tackle their website. A new marketing team and a general look at the company’s communications made it the ideal time.
As a Microsoft Gold partner, Azzure IT have a wide range of products and services all of which need to be researched by potential buyers. The site has a lot to do in terms of presenting technical and commercial information to business users, but at the same time, needs to promote Azzure IT’s friendly, trustworthy approach.
We tackled the design of the site in a slightly different way. We set up a style guide – a basic set of rules of what to do (and what not to do) along with a toolbox of fonts colours and different kinds of pre-styled content areas to get different kinds of information across. We then left it up to Azzure IT to add their copy using the tools we had provided, after which we went back and tidied up any loose ends. Along the way we discovered that we needed different ways of presenting and differentiating certain types of information and, because of the modular design, we were easily able to add new elements to fit in with the existing layouts. This organic approach doesn’t work with all clients, but the proximity of the two teams made it easy to keep track of progress on both sides.
The previous site was built in WordPress and we were happy to continue using that – partly to make it easier to move the existing content over – but mainly because of its powerful new Gutenberg block system which allowed us to build the bespoke content areas that the admins could add anywhere on the site. This kind of flexibility had been possible in the past, but it required cumbersome and difficult-to-manage “site builder” plugins to be installed. Because of this approach, the site has an arsenal of video areas, slideshows, animated tabbed panels, comparison tables and layout blocks available.
One of the challenges was that the previous Azzure IT site had been heavily optimised and scored well with search engines. We didn’t want to lose that, so a lot of the content needed to be taken over from the old site. We were able to create export and import routines to speed this process up to save days of manual copying and pasting.
Using another of WordPress’s features, Custom Post Types, we were also able to make Case Studies, Courses and Resources sections much easier to navigate for the site visitors and for the admins to keep up with.
Websites should always grow and evolve and we know this is only stage one – Azzure IT have plans for the future. The praise we have received so far from both Azzure IT and their customers, coupled with the fact the site is so easy to update, means we are already working towards stage two! We’ll keep you posted…
