What a wonderful time of year for fatBuzz and our clients

      

It has been a fantastic year here at fatBuzz, and it could get a whole lot better tomorrow evening - as we are nominated in the High Growth Company category of WeDO’s annual awards ceremony.

We are absolutely thrilled to have been nominated for this award, and it is testament to the hard work and effort that our talented team have put in throughout the past year or so.

We are home to a creative and innovative team with a diverse range of backgrounds, including design, marketing, journalism, and PR, and without them, we wouldn’t be half as successful as we are.

As proud as we are to be nominated, we have been slightly overshadowed by our fantastic clients, who have been successful in various awards ceremonies across a range of industry sectors.

Last night, two of our clients scooped awards at The Herald Society Awards 2013; New College Lanarkshire won the Education Initiative of the Year, while The Scottish Guardianship Service, run by Aberlour Child Care Trust in partnership with the Scottish Refugee Council, won ‘Young People’s Project of the Year’.

The ‘Young People’s Project of the Year’ is one of many awards that Aberlour has won this year. The Scottish Guardianship Service won the highly prestigious Partnership of the Year at the SCVO Charity Awards 2013, Aberlour Options - Borders won an award at the Scottish Business Diversity Awards 2013, Aberlour Youthpoint Glasgow was presented with the Young Award at the Evening Times Community Champion Awards, and Aberlour Family Outreach - Dumfries & Galloway won the School and Learning Community Award at Nithsdale Community Achievement Awards 2013.

Just last week, two of our clients, Spectrum Service Solutions and Phoenix Car, were nominated for ‘Family Business of the Year’ at the Renfrewshire Chamber of Commerce Awards 2013. Unfortunately, they couldn’t share the award, and Spectrum were the deserving victors on the night. The success doesn’t stop there for Spectrum, as they have also been shortlisted for ‘Scottish Family Business of the Year (Large)’ at the Herald Scottish Family Business Awards 2013!

Our clients in the health and beauty industry have been particularly successful this year. Edinburgh-based beauty salon and spa, Zen Lifestyle, has been shortlisted in four categories in the prestigious Professional Beauty Awards 2014, while Glasgow barber, Rebel Rebel, was nominated for Men's Stylist of the Year at The Scottish Hair and Beauty Awards 2013, and Best Barber and Best Website at The INAA Scottish Hair & Beauty Awards.

The innovative Lustre Pure Light acne treatment technology has been selected as a shortlisted finalist for three awards at the Aesthetic Awards 2013-14, coming on the back of winning a prestigious Gold in the 'Best Product Innovation' category last year. Lustre has also been selected as a finalist for the prestigious award 15th Annual Medical Design Excellence Awards competition.

Saks Hair & Beauty is another client who has had a tremendously successful year. Among many other awards, Claire Denyer at Saks Kings Hill scooped the coveted title of Franchisee of the Year at the British Hairdressing Business Awards, and Saks Doncaster scooped the coveted Men’s Image Award at the L’Oréal Colour Trophy Grand Final.

Away from the health and beauty industry, Excel Vending was Highly Commended for Best Local Operating Company and Vending Supervisor of the Year at The Vending Industry Awards, and Greenvale Farm Fresh all rounder potatoes won the Meal Accompaniment Category at The Grocer New Products Awards.

Moving northwards, Dean's Shortbread, whose website we recently designed and developed, were recently shortlisted for Exporter of the Year at the annual Food & Drink Federation Awards, and picked up a hat-trick of awards at the Grampian Food Forum Innovation Awards, including the Investing in Skills Development Award, bronze award for Best New Retail Product, and gold award for Best Packaging for their premium Mary Steele gift brand. 

Earlier in the summer, Mary Steele also won the best Bakery & Cereals product at the Scottish Food & Drink Excellence Awards. Mitchells Dairy, who are slightly closer to home in Inverurie, won Local Independent Retailer of the Year at the Grampian Food Forum Innovation Awards, and the Healthy Option Retailer of the Year at the first ever Scottish Grocers Federation Retail Excellence awards!

The Royal Yacht Britannia had a glorious year of celebrations in its 60th anniversary year, winning the TripAdvisor Travellers' Choice® 2013 award and TripAdvisor Excellence Award, and being nominated for Most Stylish Entertainment Venue at the Scottish Style Awards.

Britannia also achieved the highest mark ever awarded to a visitor attraction in VisitScotland’s quality assurance five star grading (95.85%), and the Green Tourism Gold Award which awards the most environmentally friendly businesses for good sustainable practices.

Last but not least, Club 29 won Scotland’s Nightclub of the Year at The Scottish Entertainment Awards, while 29 Managing Director, Lynn Mortimer, received the Bighearted Scot 2013 title at the Bighearted Scotland Awards 2013.

As we're sure you'll agree, 2013 has been a hugely successful year for fatBuzz and our clients, and we are incredibly proud of each and every one of them. Here’s to 2014...

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Dean's: A Short and Sweet Process

    

  

As you may have noticed in various media outlets including The Drum and The Scotsman earlier this year, fatBuzz was enlisted to design and develop a brand-new website and online store for global shortbread brand, Dean's.

Last week, after less than three months of hard work and dedication, we were delighted to launch a site that is not only modern and visually appealing, but one which also maintains Dean's traditional heritage and identity.

One of our main aims when building the new Dean's site was to simplify the process for the admin staff and remove confusion for the customer.

Prior to launch, the site was split into three elements: content about the company, the shop, and the blog. The main issue was that each of these parts were completely different in look and feel, not to mention they each had separate domain names.

The old Dean's website: leading to inconsistent pages and sections

We wanted users to be able to land on any part of the site and navigate seamlessly from the main content to the online shop to the latest news section, all while having a consistent navigation.

It was also very important that Dean's personnel could log in to one central location that would give them control over all elements of the site; something that we've managed to achieve with great success.

Stand out from the competition

Before beginning our design process, we looked at the analytics on the previous site and noticed a considerable amount of traffic from mobile devices and from older desktop machines.

So, in order to cater for the right markets, we had to make it responsive and ensure cross-browser compatibility as much as possible.

Not only that, we had to ensure that the site was scalable; whether we had 1 product or 1000 products, the site should feel just as approachable and manageable.

Design - Meetings, moodboards and meticulous planning

The brand-new Dean's homepage

With all these ideas in mind, the design process began by having a meeting amongst ourselves and meticulously examining the good and bad parts of the existing site, which gave us an idea of what to keep and what to improve on.

From there, we created wireframes of the site, so that we had an idea as to what the customer journey would look like. Having created some moodboards to help express our ideas and vision for the site, we presented a considerable number of different designs, which varied in colour, element size and position - once this was approved, work commenced on building the site.

Development, details and devices

Looking at the site, there are subtle details such as using different graphics for mobile devices compared to the desktop equivalent, but regardless of which device you're using, you won't miss any of the key content.

Once the core site was complete, we integrated the ecommerce side of the business, and started to build the responsive element.

Online store: Full range launching on 20th November

Testing the site then involved dummy purchases, awkwardly sized images, extra-long blog titles, poor networking conditions, and most importantly, feedback from Dean's.

Finally, we moved the test site onto the live server, which involved some more testing to ensure that all elements were still working as expected.

From an SEO perspective, we made sure that old links were being permanently redirected to their new site equivalent, which ensures that all the work put into Dean's SEO to date won't be diminished.

Now that the site was completed, it was time to let people know about it. As we're sure most of you will already know, we have worked with Dean's on their social media management for the past two years - so we of course utilised social media.

Facebook graphic for Dean's competition

However, rather than physically running the competition on Facebook or Twitter, we decided instead to run it on the website to drive traffic - thus far, we have received almost 3000 entries!

Thankfully, all the hours of hard work from both sides has thoroughly paid off, and we're sure you'll agree that the new website looks absolutely fantastic.

Please feel free to have a look around the site, and give us your feedback by either commenting on this blog post, or by getting in touch on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

And don't forget to enter the competition to win a delicious Dean's hamper - just in time for Christmas!

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Flat design, your target market and making your site more accessible

It has become something of a taboo subject in design recently: everyone is talking about it, Apple have designed their latest mobile operating system around it, and new websites are popping up every day utilising it (some doing it very well, others not so much). The subject, of course, is flat design.

At this point, we should probably give you a rough overview of what flat design is. No longer do we have thick gradients, heavy shadows and the idea of objects jumping off the screen, and gone are the faux leather books, mock notepads and glossy bubbles. All of this falls under the category of skeuomorphism, which in simplistic terms, is the anti-flat design.

With flat design, we’re treated to block colours, subtle to-the-point-of-being-almost-unnoticeable gradients, no shadows anywhere to be seen (unless necessary to give text a faint definition) and an emphasis on text and imagery to convey the user message.

So, what is our opinion on flat design? We asked fatBuzz web developer and former Apple employee, Jon Mills, the self-confessed loather of skeuomorphism for his (slightly biased) opinion.

Personally, when done well, I love flat design. I think it’s cleaner, easier to navigate and far more appealing to the eye. Equally, a lot of people find it too vibrant, and with the removal of indicators as to what an icon or section denotes, users are finding it difficult to get used to. Ultimately, like any change though, it will take time to adapt.

For me though, there are some understated benefits to flat design, and this was particularly highlighted by one particular client’s requirements.

At fatBuzz, we are managing a site for Superior Homes, a property developer in Kenya (where the infrastructure is still in its infancy regarding internet connections) so we’ve had to ensure that we can deliver certain content at a relatively low file size, so that it can be viewed on a Kenyan connection in reasonable time.

The same can also be said for mobile sites, which will sometimes be accessed on a mobile network that won’t always have the rapid speeds we’re used to here in the UK.

Flat design can help complement both these scenarios, by ridding itself of the code and images required to create a skeuomorphic environment.

For example, a flat designed pink block may only take 3 lines of code, whereas the same block with shadows and gradients could take upwards of 20 lines by the time you’re finished covering all browsers (read my blog on browser compatibility).

Extrapolate that into a full site and you could end up adding several hundreds of lines of code, which will of course take that bit longer to load.

When we’re in an industry where everyone wants information yesterday in the palm of their hand, you need to consider ways to achieve this - and improved loading times of 2-3 seconds could make all the difference to the user experience.

Of course, this does pose a few questions to consider about your existing website, and whether it caters for your target audience.

Do you look at the figures to see where in the world people are viewing your site, and do you consider the devices they view them on? Optimising your site is every bit as important as having a presence on the web, and making sure it’s suitable for your clients isn’t something that should be overlooked.

This is a topic that I could write 30 pages about though, so rather than overwhelm you with countless facts and figures, I would invite anyone with questions regarding flat design, their target audience and/or site optimisation, to get in touch with either myself, David or Stuart on 0141 427 0727.

I’ll leave you with a link to the very best of flat design http://fltdsgn.com/ - please let us know which site is your favourite and why by commenting on the blog or on Twitter or Facebook.

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