Aspira

Aspira wanted to continue to improve the performance of their existing website, in order to continue to project Aspira’s brand values, win new clients and updating key audiences.

The site as it stood, was created in 2008 and introduced fairly detailed factual content for corporate and individual clients. A refresh was in order.

They had found the existing Drupal content management system invaluable, however they felt it could be more user-friendly. There were also a number of things about the current website they were dissatisfied with, including:

• Look and feel - bland, dull and outdated.
• Navigation - left hand, drop-down menu too complex and outdated.
• Text - serif fonts appear messy and old fashioned.
• Imagery - cartoons are getting old, too much focus on Aspira and what we do.
• Inform section is now very full - content needs archiving
• Emphasis is on 'what we do' - rather than on the benefit to the customer
• Homepage is cluttered - content for different audiences is jumbled

Aspira also emphasised that the website was the crux of their presentation to the outside world, and the importance of it having a professional, high-quality feel in order to acquire new corporate clients.

The Proctors response
To ensure we met each and every one of Aspira’s requirements for the website refresh, we systematically took each one into consideration, during the designing and building process.

New look and feel – The new and improved Aspira site was a lot fresher, cleaner and uncluttered, with lots of white space, striking colours and easily navigable.

New navigation – We created an easily navigable, visually appealing horizontal menu that was consistent across all pages, and a suite of bold menu panels on the home page. This simple approach to menus and navigation, allowed us to route different audiences from the homepage, to the relevant content, quickly.

New font – We remedied the worries of serif fonts looking messy and old-fashioned, with a sans serif font, that still complemented the Apsira logo.

New imagery – Aspira had wanted to use imagery but wanted to avoid the contrived photo typically found in their industry. So we replaced the site’s cartoon imagery, with a fresh and colourful library of photography, centred around the Aspira headquarters itself.

Inform section – We lightened this section up, and created a simple archive of Articles and downloadable Fact sheets.

Through the entire design and build process, our creative objective remained resolute. To create a site that was clean, and uncluttered, with content, imagery and navigation that focused more on the benefits to Aspira customers, rather than what Aspira do.