Screen shot of the 1st step for a quote

One of the first company’s to incorporate our quote system was Bedford Insurance, who now have  quote comparison engines for car, home, motorcycle, van and property insurance. Since their implementation Bedford Insurance have seen a dramatic increase in insurance policy’s bought online.

Step 1 on the Home Quote Direct comparison form

The white label allows people requiring a quote to fill in an easy to use step by step quote process. This process very efficient and very popular with customers as it other insurance sites often have long and complicated forms to fill in!

Often when companies build site they will put all the thinking into the look and usability for the front end of the site and then rush through the look and usability of the back end bit. Usually the back end system is the most important part of a site, that is why Gravytrain spent a lot of time making it was efficient and usable and that’s why it is such a successful white label!

Guardian Chalk Board

There is no question that this program will attract a lot of attention and  links. This neatly designed  flash application allows you to select any game in the last three seasons and view statistics of that game  in the form of a ‘chalk board style’ diagram. You can view statistics as a team or select individual players you even have an option that allows you to compare that game with another game.

What a great example of considered web design. The web application will not only generate a lot of links, visits and ‘buzz’  but will inevitably acquire a considerable number of email addresses too, as you are required to provide an email address to save and publish you chalk boards. As illustrated below the form required to save your chalk board is very no nonsense quick and easy to fill in.  This really is good online marketing design!

At Gravytrain Limited we have always seen the importance of providing forms that encourage the user to complete. There are many examples where we have increased conversions by improving the efficiency of forms. A good example is insurance comparison site www.quotesearcher.co.uk . This website created by Garvytrain offers a simple and fast way of obtaining insurance quotes. Using usability evaluations and research were able to create a quote form with a click to quote ration that insurance website company’s would give their right arm for. More on this in my next post…

Yes there has been a lot of work done to improve the usability, search rankings and tracking of Flash built websites but it has always seemed to me to cause more hassle than it is worth. One of these advancements is that google are now able to search written text in the Flash file. Since this implementation has allowed for some more amusing search results as demonstrated in the image below that another member of  Gravytrain Limited demonstrated to me:

lo loa load loadi

As you can see Google has started  to pick animated loading text and showing it as l lo loa load load loadi loadin and finally loading on flash websites and displaying them as search results which (albeit geekily so) we at Gravytrain found rather amusing. Try it yourself type  lo loa load loadi into a google search box.

The look and imagery of any site should always carefully considered. Though the temptation is always to rush ahead and start bunging images and styles in; it is prudent to explore themes and reasons behind the site and brand before any cosmestic implementation.

After discussing the thoughts of how to move forward with imagery it was decided to implement an original illustration for the banner of the site. This decision was reached through a number of factors. You only need to browse a few sites to see that a lot of sites often (unintentionally) use the same images as other sites. As a designer I go through a lot of images on image libraries and regulary notice images that have already been used on several sites.  This is fair enough if you don’t want to spend too much time and/or money on imagery. However if you want your site to appear original, fresh and individual it is really important that you consider your imagery carefully.

The 1st step in creating an illustration for the Gravytrain banner is to put a mood board together. This will reflect inspirational styles and looks and open up dicussion on the direction the illustration needs to go. I used many resources  in putting the mood board. One good source was the coca-cola art gallery on flikr another good source I found was http://www.graphic-design-blog.com/ where there is a lot of good resources and inspiration one could spend hours on there.

moodboard

Gravytrain redesign

Phase two will look at bringing in the use of imagery and using more specific content design into the template images and will be looked at again a week today.

Image: rich bunce

This year Gravytrain are looking to revise the entire site: www.gravytrain.co.uk . This is an exciting development for the design team at Gravytrain who have been wanting to sink their teeth into redesigning the site for some time now.

This week there will be a meeting to discuss moving forward with the plan for the new site. A site structure has been mapped out and several template ideas have been mocked up in photoshop and will be unveiled and discussed at the meeting. Having been involved in the development of the proposals I am looking forward to presenting them.

The new site will be much indepth and user friendly than the exsisting Graytrain site. There will be a detailed breakdown of all services  that we offer (seo, paid search, web design etc) making it easier for users / potential customers to extract the information they are looking for. There will also be a number of white papers and rescources that people can use to gain further information and tutorials for specific items. All in all the website will be much bigger better and I am looking forward to forwarding the details after the meeting. So watch this space!

This blog will be used to demonstrate all things web design related that I come across in my day to day experience working at Gravytrain Limited. I aim to provide tutorials, advice, news and general information using this blog so make sure you come back regularly to see whats going on.