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As part of the development program do1 were tasked with rebranding Winchester’s shopping centre. The Brooks Shopping Centre is located in the heart of the historic city and is owned by the London & Henley Property Group. The mall offers shoppers an enclosed environment with a range of high street names as well as independents.

The rebrand enabled us to work with a blank canvas. We began with developing several fresh and crisp logo concepts to bring the Brooks branding into a higher class.

do1 began with developing several logo concepts which we presented to the client. The logo the client finally chose was rich in bright, clean colours. This was also the path our designers decided to go down with the website. do1 recognised that the typical visitor to the Brooks website would be looking for information such as opening times and the location of the shopping centre, so it was important that the website was designed in such a way that calls to action were easily accessible.

It was essential that the website tied in well with the rebrand; clean and simple. This was achievable by utilising the primary colours used in the logo and the careful selection of relevant stock photography.

Once the client had agreed a concept do1 set about building the website in XHTML and CSS to the latest W3C standards. One of the big problems with the clients original website was it was built using tables and inline CSS. This was a problem as search engines were unable to index their website properly subsequently making it difficult for the typical user to find the information on The Brooks Shopping Centre they were looking for. Now the website is ’search engine friendly’ it enables potential visitors to the shopping centre to get the information they need fast.

The end result produced a crisp and clean website that tied in well with the clients rebrand and draws new customers to their website and shopping centre.

Visit The Brooks Shopping Centre website

Earlier this year, Apple announced that it would open up the iPhone platform to third party developers so that other programmers could get in on the action and build their own applications.

This was pretty exciting news for us here at do1, given that we are all iPhone junkies! Our developers now have the tools and knowledge behind them to allow us to build iPhone applications for our clients.

If you’ve got a good idea for an iPhone application, or you’ve got an existing web application that you’d like ported across to the iPhone, why not get in touch and have a chat with us about we could do.

It’s really funny, up until about a couple of months ago I always thought our website was fine! People would comment on the good content and nice design on there, even though we made no real effort to keep it updated with our latest work or even just on general company matters (such as moving office!).

It wasn’t until my mate Dave who runs his own boat valeting business said to me “Ed, sort out your website, it’s not ’sale-sy’ enough and it’s not search engine optimised! How can you claim to be the experts in websites when the ones you build for your clients are way better than your own?”

He had a point. When pitching, I’d find myself subconsciously steering away from directing people to our website as it was out of date, the design and content of the Home page was weak, and there was no dedicated Portfolio page. I would instead rely on my people-facing skills and demonstrating recently completed websites when sat with a potential client.

Producing content for your own website can actually be harder than you think, and I’ve found a lot of times when working with a client that needs a new website, the biggest stumbling block is actually deciding what to write in the first place, and then of course actually writing it! It takes a lot of time, thought and effort if you want to get it right, and finding myself in the same situation that my clients are normally in was certainly a case of the boot being on the other foot!

Rather than simply making the Home page pretty and doing an SEO job on the existing content, I decided to rewrite the vast majority of the content on our do1 website. Having taken on many more new clients this year than ever before, including many transatlantic contract wins, I’d found I’d naturally found a sales patter that I was comfortable with after dealing with so many people in a relatively short space of time. Certain key things I would say would come out that I could tell were striking a chord with customers, such as how we get things done, how well organised we are, the fact we offer a very proactive service. So each page in this site started life as a list of key words and phrases which I wanted to cover, and then from there I formed the full prose around those keywords.

Probably the most radical thing on the new do1 website as a result of this is how we pitch our web hosting. When writing about our web hosting offering on the web and in print, I’ve been happy to just state “web hosting” which simply puts us in the same category as everyone else. But in reality, when talking with clients I would explain how we’re the exclusive reseller of Fubra, and then harp on about their amazing websites such as PetrolPrices.com and OurProperty.co.uk, and the advanced infrastructure they’ve built that supports them, and how they can share this unique hosting platform with Fubra through us.

Obviously, when it comes to your own website, everyone’s got their own way of getting across the message you want your company to say. I think our new do1 website is a really good online interpretation of who we are, how we get things done, and what it’s like to work with us, and it’ll be interesting to see what kind of feedback we get.