Curve is one of the world’s best product and industrial design magazines. Published four times a year, Curve has a worldwide reputation in its field, thanks to quality editorial content and lavish production values.
Curve wanted a website that would be a worthy companion to the magazine. There were two main priorities for the site:
- To cement Curve as an authoritative voice in product and industrial design.
- To give something of value to Curve subscribers.
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Just because you don’t have a big website, that doesn’t mean you don’t need content strategy.
Content strategy has been around for years, but it seems to have hit critical mass recently. People who build and maintain websites have started to realise that, for all our progress in making websites more usable and awesome, most of the written content on those websites is still really, really bad. Content strategy is a discipline that tries to fix this. It’s important because, after all, content is the main reason why people visit websites.
(You can find out more about content strategy here.)
When you start reading about content strategy, you quickly realise that the discipline has mostly been developed by people who work on big websites – government sites, university sites, and large multinational corporate sites. After all, that’s where the content problems tend to be most severe.
But that doesn’t mean content strategy isn’t relevant to small and medium-sized websites too. I like to think of content strategy as a toolkit – a series of tools for solving particular problems to do with content. Not every tool is relevant for every website. Read more
It’s been a busy start to 2011 for Weave Web! Our latest site to launch is an e-commerce site for an Australian-owned sock company. ActiveSocks make very special, technically advanced socks for sport and outdoor activities.
One thing we had to keep in mind when designing the website was that ActiveSocks sells products under three distinct brands (with more to come!): ThinSkins for football and athletic socks, Trekka for hiking and work socks, and MySchool for custom-made school uniform socks. The site we built featured a distinct identity for each brand, while maintaining a consistent overall look and feel.
Another challenge was presenting the huge range of colour combinations available for ThinSkins’ signature football socks – more than 50 in all! We wanted to make it easy for people to identify the combination they were looking for, so text descriptions weren’t going to do the trick. In the end we opted for a grid of thumbnail images, with a larger image displayed on mouse click. Not just functional but pretty! (In a very tough, football-player way of course.)
CS Solar install solar electricity systems for homes and businesses in Victoria, Australia. Unlike many others in the industry, when you call CS Solar they will take the time to look at your energy consumption, so they can design a system that totally wipes out your electricity bills.
That’s a great message, and the business has already had a lot of success through word of mouth. They needed a website that would help them get that message across to a wider audience. It didn’t need to be a complex site, but it needed to genuinely communicate what the business has to offer.
So as well as designing the site, Weave wrote all the content. We knew that people looking at the site would already be interested in solar electricity, so our content doesn’t waste time selling visitors on the benefits of solar. Instead, the message is totally geared around the amazing promise that CS Solar makes – the thing that really sets them apart from their competitors.
While we were at it, we gave CS Solar a cool, unpretentious update to their logo.
Visit the CS Solar website.
Weave Web have just launched a new website for Queen Victoria Market icon Coffea Coffee.
Coffea is a family-run café and coffee roaster, with fiercely loyal customers who appreciate their lovingly hand-roasted coffee and their ever-changing menu based on the freshest market produce.
One of the things regulars like best about Coffea is the genuinely personal approach. When you buy your beans at Coffea, staff will take the time to learn how you like your coffee. Over time they’ll “tweak” your blend of beans until it’s exactly what you want.
Naturally, we wanted to replicate that personal experience online. We’ve built a nifty feature into the website that allows users to develop their own personal blends, just as they would if they were regular customers of the store.
Visit the website, have a look around, and if you love your coffee, do yourself a favour and place an order! We’d love to know what you think.
