Case Study: Corporate Technologies

Corporate Technologies

www.cptech.com

Corporate Technologies, a business resource, service, staffing provider and strategic consultancy, had outgrown their previous website to the point where adding to their steadily growing cache of in-depth written content was a painfully cumbersome process. We set out to rebuild and redesign an elegant and simple new site that would be an immediate efficiency gain for them and their users, and one that would last for years to come...

Industry:
Technology

Price Range:
$40k- $65k

The Client

Corporate Technologies has been providing resources, services, staffing consultation and strategic direction to IT departments for over 15 years. Prolific in their content creation, including in-depth research reports, whitepapers, case studies, webinars and blogs, Corporate Technologies had significantly outgrown their previous website. Goal number one for our project was to create an information architecture that would support and scale their vast array of content while also being conducive to a streamlined lead-generation process.

Information Architecture

Every Newfangled project begins with a dedicated planning and prototyping phase. Steve and Jillian, our project management team working with CPTech, needed to spend some time first getting to know the client's business and then sorting out how the large amount of already existing written content corresponded to their services across several verticals. Untangling the content structure was the first step in taking an older site that had been steadily accruing content for years and recreating it with long-term scalability in mind.

Additionally, simplifying asset management was a top priority for the prototyping phase. To facilitate this, we settled upon a centralized Knowledge Center to manage all the various kinds of content, including case studies, data sheets, demos, research reports, videos, webinars and videos, allowing them to be sorted by type and category.

Design

While Steve and Jillian led the client through planning and prototyping, Justin began guiding the team through the design process. We start most design projects with mood boards, which we use to establish the aesthetic direction of the site up-front without negatively impacting the flow or structure of the site. Rather than depicting functional layout attributes like content areas and navigation menu, the mood boards focus on the branding, design components, typography, imagery, and color palettes that will be incorporated in the final design to come.

Because this process deals with look and feel more than specific layouts, it can run concurrently with prototyping and enables the entire team to benefit from maintaining steady forward momentum. After the CPTech team selected from the proposed concepts, Justin was able to work from the prototype to create individual layouts for the final design. The entire team was pleased with the way the design integrated striking photography that thematically affirms CPTech's focus on skill building and strategic business intelligence programs.

Website Management Technology

George developed CPTech's new site around our Newfangled CMS, allowing him to create unique content types and corresponding templates manageable through a simple and intuitive web-based interface. What had been a cumbersome process of adding content to an already overloaded site has become a streamlined procedure using a system that can handle years of steady growth to come. Even the javascript-driven homepage slideshow can be fully edited and managed by the client, down to controls for the speed of slide rotation and duration of each individual slide. George configured the site to accept untreated rectangular images, over which it positions the arcing imagery that persists from slide to slide, freeing the client from having to do any special graphics work.