Get a feel for our approach to projects and how we solve our clients' problems with these selected case studies
Lucas FoxWeb design, CMS, CRM, property database
MilotricotWeb design, CMS, e-commerce, email marketing
Nicky HaydenWeb design and CMS build and implementation
VitalimedOffline print design, branding and marketing
Lucas Fox case study Web design and development, content management, CRM
Client background info
Lucas fox is an international real estate agency with its main office in Barcelona but with a service offer that covers all of Spain, Portugal and Andorra. They are a well established company and specialise in properties to buy, sell and also both long-term and short-term rentals.
In their own words, they aim "to offer the best quality properties to buy and rent in Spain, a professional approach, and an exceptional level of service."
Website: http://www.lucasfox.com
Challenge
We've worked with Lucas Fox for a number of years and have developed their web site as they have grown as a company. The current site is a reworked version of an earlier site that we designed and built and represents a major change from the earlier version.
We needed to give the site a modern, more approachable feel, and to make the user experience as straightforward and logical as possible. Lucas Fox operate in a very competitive business area, and so any competitive edge that we can provide through the web site can make a real difference to their overall operational ability.
While the site's design is clearly important to meeting the company's business objectives, it's the functionality and ongoing web development that drives the site forwards and really allows the site to respond to the user's and site owner's needs.
The overall functionality has been developed over a number of years and we continue to work and develop the site further as part of an ongoing project.
Solution
In terms of design, we took the existing branding and site design as a starting point, and listened to what Lucas Fox wanted to achieve with the new site. We needed to allow the site visitor to easily and immediately begin their property search, and to be able to refine or redefine this at any time during their visit to the site.
To achieve this we redesigned the site's global property search facility and came up with a new design schema for the major call to action buttons throughout the site. The new left-hand menu contains the essential property search, plus we also included a quick search for the major physical locations where Lucas Fox operate. This provides the user with a thorough and logical set of options without presenting them with an overload of choice, and it also works well for the site's SEO objectives.
We looked at the two key property display page types - property listings and property detail view - and reworked these with clear calls to action that signal to the user how to proceed through the site and achieve their key tasks of obtaining relevant property information.
We included a 'My Favourites' feature that allows users to add properties to a favourites folder for later retrieval - a nice means of managing properties that they are interested in. Users can also view and print a PDF of each property that is automatically generated from the property database - again, another nice feature that is popular among the site's user base and appropriate for this business area.
The site as a whole uses our in-house content management system (CMS) as its engine, plus the implementation of a custom property database.
As part of our ongoing web development work with this client, we have also developed a large number of other features for this site. These include a Customer Relations Management (CRM) system, automatic image watermarking to protect property images used on the site, an integrated mailing system to allow the site owners to match properties to users and vice versa, full SEO control over keyword descriptions and titles for each individual property and location.
Result
The Lucas Fox web site is a great example of a well-designed site that really works for its owners. It is an integral part of their business model and responds to their clients' needs and uses a fully-featured backend to meet their internal business requirements. We're involved in continual development of the site and are always looking to refine the site in order to maximise its performance, user experience and all important SEO visibility.
If you're in the market for a handsome property in Spain or Portugal, have a look at www.lucasfox.com and see if anything takes your fancy!
Lucas Fox redesigned home page
Lucas Fox property listing page
Lucas Fox property detail page
Milotrocot Case Study Web design, CMS and e-commerce solution, Email campaign management and design
Client background info
Miló is a Brooklyn-based New York design brand created by Mireia López, a Barcelona born fashion designer. The brand produces quality sweaters and knits for girls and women and all the designs are highly exclusive and unique.
In Mireia's own words. "I love the idea of dressing girls of all ages with an easy and modern approach. While fashions can come and go, I hope Miló will be the piece you can always count on to feel special."
Website: http://www.milotricot.com
Challenge
When Miló first approached digitalHappy with their web design project, there was no existing site to consider as a starting point, but the branding and identity was already marked out and established.
The brief was to create a web site that could present to the site user all the products from the Collections available at any given time, plus those products also available in the Oultet shop.
The site also of course needed to allow users to buy the products online and so a reliable e-commerce platform was required. Other core required functionality was that the site be editable and content managed.
Very importantly, the site needed to fundamentally reflect the ethos and exclusivity of the brand, and to demonstrate and reinforce Milotricot's lifestyle appeal.
Solution
We needed to decide early on how to approach the key functionality requirements of the project; namely the content management system (CMS) and the e-commerce platform. For many of our client sites, we use an implementation of our in-house CMS but in this case we decided to look for a one-stop solution that could meet the twin requirements of a CMS and and an e-commerce platform.
We looked at a few options and finally decided to use Shopify, a hosted e-commerce solution, which also gave us the possibilites of a CMS and a built-in blogging engine. Shopify provides all the features you'd expect from an e-commerce solution and importantly for us allows the design and development of custom themes and layouts.
Having identified the basic platform to be used for the project, we worked with the client to establish the essential structure and navigation of the site, and were able to settle on a key hierarchy that we felt would create a logical and positive user experience.
The client had a clear vision of the brand and the direction that the design should take, and we worked to accommodate this and to use our skills and experience to produce a site design that would work well on the web.
The final design has a minimal look and feel, making good use of whitespace to allow the products to be the main focus on the site. It is clutter-free, reinforcing the brand identity of simplicity and elegance.
In a further step we also added to the project a mailing list and email campaign management facility. Many of our clients use email newsletters and targeted campaigns to keep themselves in front of their client base, and we regularly use Campaign Monitor to help us achieve this.
This is a great third party email campaign management tool, and it met the needs of the Milotricot site perfectly, allowing users to easily sign up to the newsletter. We were then able to design and build a re-usable and content-managed editable email template for the client to use every time they wish to make a send.
Result
Both Milotricot and ourselves are very happy with the final site, and it has already started to generate sales. Subscriptions to the mailing list are coming in and initial feedback has been very positive.
Overall we feel that the site has succeeded in meeting the brief and the client's business objectives.
On the development side, we found working with Shopify to be a good experience and would certainly use this system again if appropriate for our client needs.
Please feel free to head on over to www.milotricot.com to view the site and if you need some great quality, designer knits, you know where to go!
Project Snapshots
Milotricot collections page
Milotricot product listing pages
Milotricot product detail pages
Nicky Hayden case study web design and development, content management
Client background info
Nicky Hayden is a former motoGP world champion and is currently riding for Ducati in the 2009 season (with team mate Casey Stoner) having previously ridden for Honda alongside Dani Pedrosa. He has a loyal fan base worldwide and has become a recognised global brand.
Website: http://www.nickyhayden.com
The new Nicky Hayden homepage, redesigned to meet with new branding requirements
Challenge
Nicky Hayden changed teams for the 2009 season, moving form Honda Repsol to Ducati. This was a high profile, big-name move and the web site needed to adapt accordingly. We had previously designed and built the existing site and so had a good idea of what was working well on the site and more importantly what areas needed a fresh approach.
The first issues, and the most pressing in terms of client facing problems, was the overall look and feel of the site. Ducati and Honda have very different corporate identities and the site needed to reflect the branding of the new team, while still retaining elements of the old site so that regular users wouldn't feel alienated or confused.
There were also issues involving existing content and how best to handle the content migration. We needed to avoid removing a lot of content that had proved to be popular with the site visitors and naturally wanted to avoid leaving a number of 404 Page not found errors.
We were told that we should also try to direct more users to the online merchandising store, to take advantage of the high profile Ducati switch to boost revenue as far as possible.
Other key content areas on the site to be given special emphasis as a result of user behavior analysis were the news sections and media gallery updates.
Solution
We looked very carefully at the existing site and decided that we would be able to retain much of the original coding and focus mostly on revamping the look and feel of the site through modifications to the site's CSS files. This meant that we would not have to dedicate too much time and resources to a second full implementation of the Content Management System (CMS) that drives the site as a whole.
After investigating with the client how closely the overall site needed to reflect the team's branding and identity, we cam up with an overall colour scheme and layout format that was accepted by all parties involved in the process. The new homepage makes clear use of the distinctive Ducati red, but also incorporates the Nicky branding that we used and developed on his previous site.
We migrated the existing content with great care, and where applicable decided to archive areas of content that could be deemed to be no longer current, but which still traffic statistics showed were still popular with site visitors. In this way we were able to ensure that the transition between the two sites was carried out as smoothly as possible.
To direct more focus to the online store, we added to a large teaser block in a crucial content area on the home page, and also made it very easy or users to sing up for the newsletter from the homepage, again in an effort to bolster the fan base and build brand loyalty. To reinforce this, we also designed and included throughout the major interior pages of the site special promotional blocks acting as visual calls to action for the store and newsletter sign up.
News items and updates were also featured on the home page, ensuring that the latest headlines are readily available to users and also to the search engines - making sure that the new site's page rank will benefit from the advantage provided by regular updates and fresh content. We also built into the CMS a RSS flag, allowing the site administrator's to flag any content item as newsworthy, and therefore include it in the site's RSS feed.
Result
The new Nicky Hayden site fits both the client's personal brand image and the Ducati team's branding. The content structure has been maintained to keep orphaned links to a minimum and we have increased the focus on certain key areas of the site, based on user feedback and visitor behaviour analysis and statistics. The new site, is tighter, more focused and offers users exactly the content that they look for from a Nicky Hayden site.
Vitalimed case study print design and branding
Background Information
Vitalimed arrived in Spain as a franchise of an existing company operating in Holland. Offering a new methodology and approach to weight loss and diet management, Vitalimed needed the full design and development of their offline print materials, for distribution to patients and doctors involved in the programme.
Challenge
Vitalimed had previously developed the company logo to be sued across all communication materials but there was no overall branding guideline in place. The challenge was to produce a cohesive set of materials that were targeted to the different end users involved - the patients undergoing treatment and the doctors administering and promoting the treatment. The materials for each end user would need to speak with a different voice, but the overall messaging would need to be cohesive. The deliverables to be designed and developed were an A4 patient triptych, a 16 page A5 patient booklet, a doctors' 16 page A5 booklet and a doctors' patient file cover page.
Solution
We looked at the typical patients' profile to get an idea for their feelings about approaching this treatment, and to gauge their expectations, hopes and reservations. It was important get a full understanding of how Vitalimed differed from other treatment providers already established on the market and how they wanted to distance and differentiate themselves from existing competitors. Also of crucial importance was to gain a full understanding of how the doctors must be sure that the Vitalimed product would be of benefit to the end patient and that the doctors felt confident in recommending the treatment to their own patients. Having investigated the needs of these two end user groups, we were able to define the concerns and possible objections for each group, and this helped us to understand the tone and feeling that needed to be communicated by the offline support materials in question.
Working closely with the client, we then set about putting together some initial ideas and getting client feedback on them. Basing the designs on the information gained from the initial investigation stage, we were able to develop a tone, style, look and feel for each of the two end user areas, and maintain this across each of the key deliverables.
Vitalimed 16 page A5 patient booklet
Vitalimed 16 page A5 patient booklet inner page
Vitalimed 16 page A5 doctor booklet
Vitalimed A4 patient triptych
Result
The end result was a set of great-looking documents that met with client satisfaction and which were used throughout the product's lifecycle by the client. The two sets of designs spoke to the user with a suitable tone and addressed the needs correctly, providing with client with a great starting point for their business development in Spain.